Hm. A whole house, except the flooring, walls, wiring, plumbing, windows, roofing, lighting, heck anything but the bare frame and walls. You can already do that, prefab, in a few hours. This is custom, but so is prefab.
The problem is the usual: a single material isn't enough to make anything but the simple constructs. Almost everything is complex these days. Materials Science hasn't been a science for a century for nothing.
You did not watch the accompanying YouTube video where these things are mentioned as being needed and could be accomplished using auxiliary automation techniques.
EDIT: They also show visual demonstrations of techniques as to HOW this would be accomplished.
Sure I watched it. I was not convinced. Handwaving is not the same as research.
It may be true that fixtures could be set into place in an automated way. Its not true that they can be connected. And certainly no existing fixture is ready to be installed this way.
Housing construction depends upon massive efficiencies of scale. All the new fixtures for these imaginary houses would be designed differently (for robotic installation, not hand-installation). They will start out at a price many multiples of existing fixtures. They will go down ONLY if this process becomes very, very common.
So, maybe this could be used to make novelty houses for the rich. That's about it. The video makes grand claims about cheap housing for the masses. That is preposterous. Folks in India are not suffering from expensive housing because construction is a dangerous occupation. Its land and materials that are expensive. Labor is the cheapest part of their equation I think.
I think they may be aiming for something like Katrina homes. Or any other refugee situation. See some more refugees crossing the border, squirt a few extra refugee houses where they fit. Prefab is probably still cheaper.
You just need to build modular parts, as the video shows (polymer blocks with embedded conductors, that slot together, was the example for electronics. There was also a demo (strike that, computer rendering) of plumbing soldering done by a machine.)
In the video, he proposes that the printer would have a second pick and place type arm that would be able to install plumbing and electrical systems. He claims that it could be used to do finishing work too, but there are no animations to suggest how that might work.
So, wave a wand and say "a robot will do it". That doesn't count as "A printer that can print a 2500 sq ft house".
Even imagine the robot exists: how exactly does it just 'plug in' the plumbinb and electrical systems? Currently it takes a person to scramble all over the house, drilling and fitting and connecting.
There is nothing being solved here. Just a blue-sky story about an imaginary printer.
I am glad to see your justified skepticism of 3-d printer mania.
The real breakthroughs will come when people stop fixating on "printing" (extrusion) and realize it's the 3-d (4-d, 5-d, etc.) gantry that's the super-useful part. Fitted with different tools, such as painting, gluing and sanding tools, a 3-d gantry can be extremely useful.
There will however continue to be a "last mile" problem in Computer-Assisted Manufacturing (CAM) applications. These are the details, such as stripping wires, screwing in electrical boxes, etc. where the robot to perform these tasks is prohibitively expensive. The breakthrough is the 3-d gantry form, due largely to the reduction in prices of microcontrollers and power transistors, but it does not extend to all robotics, such as detail work.
For example, I've been watching videos on building guitars. I would love to see a 3-d printer friend explain to me how it's going to build a guitar from scratch. The economy of 3-d printing doesn't extend to the large number of distinct tasks, requiring different tools, techniques, process and forces in most objects that are useful in the real world.
This entropic mixture of difficult processes, I would argue, is the very reason WHY particular artifacts, such as a guitar, television set, couch, etc. are valuable in the first place. It is because no quantity of single, unskilled process (like shoveling coal) can produce them.
"I would love to see a 3-d printer friend explain to me how it's going to build a guitar from scratch."
I don't make guitars but I am guessing you could 3-d print most of a factory to make guitars. All the jigs and fixtures ready for use accurate to a 1/1000th.
What I do know about, and am interested in, is 3-d printing foundry patterns. Its harder to make a foundry pattern than you'd think, not just the obvious stuff like bulk material shrinkage and draft angles, but its really hard to handle differential shrinkage (warping, essentially). Its a complicated fine woodworking skill (assuming you're using wood foundry patterns). So you can't 3-d print a cast iron pan or an engine block, but you can print a pattern to be rammed in a sand mold and then cast some iron in the mold and ta-da a perfectly flat pan or perfectly straight engine block or whatever. This isn't a magic tool that'll make any idiot able to do foundry work, but it does mean that any idiot on the planet would be able to share world class pattern designs.
I would be happy to be able to print some holding fixtures for my metal lathe. You can't make crazy deep hogging cuts with flimsy PLA holding the work to the mill table, but you could do "something" at least.
I think people who expect 3-d printers to be magic star trek replicators are going to be very disappointed, although indirectly via one or two levels of indirection they will probably play a huge role in everything, soon enough.
Its just positive machining. Much as people don't use my negative machining traditional lathe and mill, I don't think joe 6 pack is going to be using a 3d printer on a regular basis, although much like negative machining revolutionized the world behind the scenes, sorta, positive machining will also revolutionize the world, again, behind the scenes sorta.
Very cool! Still, I doubt that plastic violins will win the hearts of musicians. They look different; they play differently. I won't guess if that sounded good or not; I've got a tin ear. But is sounded different. Calling it a 'stradivarius' was disengeneous. Its a plastic box that looks like a violin.
I think that 3D printing will win when it starts making things that couldn't be made before. How about an instrument with complex echo chambers impossible to reproduce with wood and glue?
I can imagine someone saying something similar in the early days of the computer.
Could you watch the video? He already addresses these issues, and they are clearly researching how to do this. This is just a giant pick-and-place machine working with larger components. They already show that some human effort will be required in the assembly process, but hopefully will be much safer than what is done today.
Prefab needs a factory to make the prefab sections.
Also, you can lay down multiple materials by making the head swappable. I would also say plumbing and electrics are nowhere near as complex as they used to be. Everything is available as clip-on fittings these days, which is perfect for automation.
> Prefab needs a factory to make the prefab sections.
Why do you think one or more significantly smaller printers couldn't be used as an on-site prefab factory? That seems like a much more reasonable way to approach this problem.
Form in cable runs in the floor and walls (use modular extension style cables for all the wiring). Let the "customer" run that stuff. Have voids in the ceiling for light pipes that also store solar energy for light at night. There are tons of solutions to these problems. We need some mid-size prototypes (10x10 size) and some playtime.
Pex pipe [1] might be a better choice than PVC because of its high pressure tolerance and the fact that it isn't brittle/prone to cracking. It does require nonstandard tools to work with though (ie. burly pipe cutters, special fittings, etc.)
But your point still stands. A master plumber might not be required for every part of every job today.
Thanks for the correction with regards to material.
I do tech/IT by day, but have a welding certification as well. Its extremely easy to braize copper tubing together for plumbing once you've practiced, but feels like its work that isn't necessary when there are easier ways to do it (ie the pex pipe you suggested).
Coincidently, I'm replacing two toilets in my home tonight. Wish me luck!
Sigh, if this guy had an actual 3D printer he would realize those doors and windows are a no-go :-) More seriously, there are unsolved issues in printing unsupported structures, the current best solution is a second 'support' material that can be dissolved/blown away once the part is completed but that rules out voids which are part of what you hope to make with this sort of thing.
Also as others point out this is just the frame (and if you do the robotic crane thing you can add a roof. You might also be able to use your robotic crane to do joists for overhangs but the finish suffers as your joist material is exposed on the underside.
No doubt solvable problems but they take away from some of the 'magicalness' of fused deposition printing. Stereo lithography where the part is neutrally bouyant in the construction fluid doesn't have those issues but it has other issues associated with strength and material choices that can be laser activated.
For now doing a concrete lay-up would be pretty killer but building the forms on site isn't that hard and in both cases you need to transport the concrete at the last minute.
Bottom line I think the stuff that BluHomes [1] is doing is much more creative than trying to do this with 3D printing.
> Sigh, if this guy had an actual 3D printer he would realize those doors and windows are a no-go :-)
If you notice guy obviously competent and expeirienced in the field presenting something stupid it's more likely than not that you are missing piece of knowlege that is required for understaning why it actually isn't stupid.
Just watch the movie. It shows how to deal with doors and windows.
Just read the info on the "Why Blu" page as the photos look intriguing, but as soon as the page mentioned "pre-fab", it became a non-start for me in the SoCal market.
The problem is that pre-fabricated or pre-manufactured homes are a very specific category of homes and require specific disclosures when selling and financing. It's basically a derogatory term used to describe cheaply built structures that are a step above mobile homes.
Home being one of the most valuable assets a typical family holds. In SoCal and many other places, land makes up the bulk of the value. Place a structure on that land that then detracts from the value doesn't seem very prudent. Not to mention difficult to finance, as banks do not look favorably on that class of building.
So, unfortunately, innovation has to deal with current market and regulatory frameworks. 3D printing as proposed (though my not be valuable), would probably fall under the "custom house" label, which is the most valuable classification. Even if it's just a tract home, it's still a lot better than being considered pre-fab/pre-manufactured.
> Kevin revisits David and Greta Iredale, who replaced their original house which they designed and built themselves with a German built, precision engineered Huf Haus.
> Esher, 2004
> Kevin McCloud follows a couple who have built houses before, but never on this scale. Their new 'Huf Haus' is designed and made in Germany but delivered for assembly in Surrey.
We toured their factory they set up at Mare Island. The 'pre-fab' thing is interesting. They design them so that their components unfold, and they can be shipped by truck. The primary use case seems to be places where there are short building seasons (cabins in the mountains for example) and where on-site work is cost prohibitive. A friend of ours bought one and put it up on land near Johnsville in the Sierras. It neither feels nor looks like a 'mobile home' or 'prefab' home, but of course it was prefabricated. It took less than a week to go from prepped foundation to cosy house. That was pretty neat.
Prefab and preamnufactured homes are different. Premanufactured homes are also known as mobile homes. There are probably a lot of prefab homes around you that you never knew about.
The above definition lumps them together and unfortunately if there isn't something that makes the home not fall under that definition, you are going to have to disclose this at sale and financing will be a PITA...
TEDx, at least. TED itself is usually (but not always) fairly well vetted. TEDx on the other hand is almost anything goes.
"The event featured talks on crystal therapy and Egyptian psychoaromatherapy and, according to the schedule, closed with the chanting of mantras and songs for Gaia."
If you pay attention to the video, the door and window lentil's are prefab picked up and placed where they need to be and then printed over with additional cement.
(Disclaimer: I'm just an amateur 3d printer and just hack with my printer and what I can get my hands on)
The thing that intrigues me about fiberous ceramics for deposition printing is that no printers currently take advantage of the (albeit tiny) tensile strength of the deposited filament.
For plastic printing, this isn't very useful, but potentially for this new construction compound you could effectively (or nearly so) bridge gaps with little droop or sag.
I do think from an engineering perspective that placing blanks underneath is the best bet, but on the order of a 20-hr print, I don't think its unreasonable to have someone walking around with the machine placing single layer "blanks" at each opening at each level.
No doubt, if you are into carpentry however you would call it a "header" rather than a plank :-) The more salient bit though is that the header has to be able to support the weight that the missing wall underneath it would have supported, had that wall been there. Since we're building with concrete (in this hypothetical example) you're looking at a lot of weight. That puts you in the 4 x 12 category of header, maybe two if you are doing a longer space. But that has an issue that concrete doesn't adhere to wood (which is why they make forms out of it) and so now you're looking at a more engineered beam that you can have concrete form around. Except that isn't really very strong unless it is prestressed (which is what they do with the concrete under bridges and roadways, and for that you really want to pull some iron through it which you release after it solidifies (the iron trys to contract and it keeps pressure (aka stress) on the concrete). So now you are 3D printing part of the building, then pausing so that your ironworkers can set up some rebar for the door and window headers, and then you put that concrete in and they come back and trim those. (this looks better than the threaded rod through the concrete with nuts on both sides to add the compression.
My point is not that the problems are not addressable, they are, rather its that "3D Printing" and "Homes" isn't a good fit yet given what we know. This neither invalidates 3D printing as a pretty revolutionary way to manufacture, nor the notion that there might be better ways to build homes, just that this particular thought experiment is a pre-mature at best, and potentially forever impractical.
They do show in the video the robot putting down steel beams for those lintels to be fair, so they have obviously planned for it.
Along the same lines I have been sketching designs for a robot to lay down 2-part foam, wire mesh and shotcrete, though I have been trying to work out if I can get it to climb its own wall, rather than needing a giant crane.
Depends on the build speed. It could "print in" holes into the wall and use a scissor action ... but I don't think that would work. You want the whole concrete/ferro cement to setup at once. An overhead cement pump and a much smaller more precise placement head/nozzle would probably be a better choice. Anything you can reuse from existing construction tech the cheaper.
Interesting, but this still has the classic issue where the "printer has to be larger than the object printed." A few weeks back I got a tour of MIT's media lab, where they have a robot arm they're strapping to a bucket truck, in which case they have a mobile, 3D printer with a 100 foot wingspan.
This arm has an attachment for a polyurethane foam sprayer, a milling device, and a paint sprayer. In which case they can spray out a concrete form, mill it to get more precise (urethane foam is a bit imprecise), and paint it.
Then they want to get a series of these trucks to work together in a "hive" format... crazy kids.
Yes I've seen the video's (a year ago). That's why I wonder why they didn't built a house already. They have the knowledge and tech.
Some speculation: maybe it's very hard to print concrete out in the open with all kinds of weather messing up the print.
Or companies just don't believe in the benefits so investors are hard to find.
Wonder how building's made like this can withstand the cold. In Canada or northern US we do not construct houses and building the same way that southern countries do. For example, exterior walls are 1' wide with an R value of close to 30, most houses have a basement that is below the freezing line, etc.
Foundation work won't change. You'll have to have digging equipment and lay concrete/masonry blocks for the base so this equipment can be used to print the rest of the house. The fun part of course will be how easy it is to position one of these house printers where you have a 7+% grade.
Another thing too. How does one recover if the printer screws up or worse yet the program loaded is the wrong one or somehow corrupted? That could generate a whole house's worth of concrete waste.
There are not so many people mining, and there are ridiculously strict regulations around mining. (I used to build, inspect, test 'chock interface units' which can be thought of as 'active walking pit props'. A cutting head removes a long stretch of coal, which falls onto a conveyor. That new section needs to be pit-propped, so this first line walks forward with the cutting head.)
Farming has many accidents - busy people, lots of opportunity for accident. Also a high rate of suicide. (Again, access to means and methods. Farmers are one of the small number of people allowed to own guns in the UK.)
It would be interesting to see the number of deaths per 1,000 workers for each sector, to try and get a better comparison.
As the owner of a physibles domain name, and hopefully
one day a company; fanciful stories like this are a bit
too soon. Actually, I hope we never have to resort to
living in manufactured houses. The overly strict building
codes and approval processes in the U.S. might bring this
kind of building a reality though. Right now, I think
we need to work on ending homelessness. Yes, build pyramids
in the middle of the country where land is still cheap.
Nothing fancy, but livable. Kinda like kibbutzes, but on
a much larger scale.
now if there were a printer that could print a 5000 sq feet lot for the house, with all the building permits approved, kickbacks/bribes/political donations paid and utilities connected...
The 3D printed houses will be a life-saver on Moon and Mars though.
I wrote a bit about this and it's implications some years back - http://www.ciocookbook.com/philosophy/thecodeisthedesign.htm..., and the Times has reported on a group working on concrete printing - but as is pointed out here, it's very hard - but on e the basics are in, well software eats another industry
So, I realize that the return on investment for VCs in something like this is probably pretty low--the AEC industry is terrible (though real estate is alright).
That said, can we at least be honest that having that much capital locked up in stupid consumer and enterprise gambles is actually a pretty obviously sub-optimal use of that money for the common good?
So, you, as venture-capital-extraordinaire, spend all your money on helping the poor. Maybe you do better in the short term. But what do you do once that money's gone? There's no long-term in that picture and charity for developing nations is not a short-term endeavour.
Meanwhile, trivial enterprise and consumer products may not be going to uplift a country any time soon, but they can be recursed upon, and the technologies involved in those industries - which have a wide range of potential applications, including some charitable potential - continue to advance.
It doesn't make any sense to build a system based on what you would like people to be rather than what they are. And for better or worse people's relatively direct purchasing of utilions for others tends to be both fairly rare and inefficient.
#
I'd be interested to hear how you think CAM and computing technology would have evolved without funding for 'stupid consumer gambles,' and the need to compete with other manufacturers in that regard.
CAM machining advancements were mostly pushed forward by car companies and government spending, right? Almost all of the computing technology we use today began as a .gov or .mil project, or came from some private lab with funding from the .gov or .mil.
I think that that rather neatly undermines your point.
It wasn't the VCs spending lots of money. The big desktop revolution (outside of Apple) was initially driven by IBM, Commodore, Tandy, and Atari...all relatively established businesses partnering with younger firms for software or whatnot.
Sure, we had Sun Microsystems and Silicon Graphics, but at the end of the day it seems like they're all gone and blown away while the more lasting impacts remain attributed to academia (.edu and .gov again), defense (.mil), or consumer software not really driven by venture capital.
No, we can't be "honest" and accept your wild claim about the best use of capital.
The entire economy is based on the market determining the efficient allocation of capital. This is not an absolute truth, but an approximation based on hundreds of years of theoretical and empirical work. In the absence of significant market frictions that would drive capital away from the AEC industry (and low profits are not a market friction) there is no reason to think that the current allocation of capital is inefficient.
Hey, I didn't claim that it was morally repugnant, that the folks should be cast out in streets to live with the other homeless in SF and have their Teslas and iJiggers auctioned off to feed the poor.
I just would appreciate some acknowledgement that, "Yeah, we don't fund things like this that could help the average person because it doesn't give us money."
It's the same thing behind making money off of war, off of cancer, or off of scarcity in general--I don't ask that you admit that you're evil (if that exists in your belief system), but merely that you are profiting off of human misery and suffering.
If nobody is buying into this, the most likely reason is precisely that it doesn't make any money because it doesn't provide enough excess value vs. what we already have to support any profit.
A guy can get up on stage and promise to save the world pretty easily. Investors, however, have to live in the real world where they actually have to manifest the promised tech. If they don't think they can, well, odds are they are correct.
Incidentally, cancer researchers aren't profiting off of human misery... they're profiting off of reducing human misery. Is there a better thing to profit off of? The ones you have to watch out for are the ones who wish to extend your misery for their own gains, but that's not required for profit, and in fact is often against their own long-term interests anyhow.
The companies making money "off of cancer" (http://www.texmed.org/template.aspx?id=16518) have saved and improved the lives of quite a few people. Why do you have a problem with that?
Because those cures are quite expensive, and because they are prescribed by doctors who have no real feeling about what that cost does to a family.
Perhaps most importantly, because the war on cancer has sidetracked the development of utilitarian things like anti-biotics, of which we are about to run out (depending on what you read, we've already run out).
The folks that manufacture Lexus SUVs have saved and improved the lives of quite a few people, but one does wonder just how much good that has done everyone else who can't afford it.
Right, because that cost is a bigger imposition on the family than dying. As my dad has had cancer twice and beat cancer twice so far, I am very thankful for those expensive cancer treatments. Keep them coming please.
Mostly though he's had to delay his retirement significantly due to huge medical expenses he and my mom have been unlucky enough to have to deal with over the years. They have spent more money on healthcare than most people could even imagine. I think their insurance, not counting out of pocket costs, just premiums (now that they both have bad pre-existing conditions) in some years have been over 20k a year.
Yes, some of these treatments are really expensive. You have to also realize that these treatments are really expensive to develop. Why should I expect incredibly smart and highly specialized people to give away their time for free? It takes huge amounts of resources to solve a problem like cancer.
I promise you I understand the problems caused by the cost of healthcare as much as or more than most people. That being said, the option to be poor and alive is still much better than being dead. You can always come back from being poor.
Its interesting to see the world of "just like plastic filament printing but with concrete" collide with the world of highly automated manufactured housing. Bring the jobsite to the printer or the printer to the jobsite, sorta.
Obviously this technology isn't ready for prime-time yet. But there is no compelling reason why it shouldn't be able to compete with prefabbed housing. In any way, this 3D-printer collaborates with prefabbed parts, so you can combine custom or tricky bits with prefabbed parts for the easier portions.
Where I see additional advantages is complicated buildings, for example pig stables where you want hundreds of bays, and maybe special channels for herding pigs etc.
Also for larger settlements once the robot is on-site it can just keep on going while the logistics train is a lot simpler than if they had to coordinate all the different types of parts.
You'll notice a whole lot of hand waving around auxiliary issues like wiring and painting. Solvable yes, but projects in their own right.
Biggest point he makes is around the danger. It's also why autonomous cars might take off incredibly quick. Once the lawsuits start rolling in by people hurt/killed by people driving cars large companies will have to go autonomous pretty quick.
Is there really a shortage of single family homes anywhere? Maybe in some sort of disaster area or 3rd world, but I imagine there are better/easier/cheaper alternatives for those situations.
The problem is the usual: a single material isn't enough to make anything but the simple constructs. Almost everything is complex these days. Materials Science hasn't been a science for a century for nothing.