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.
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.
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.
http://www.channel4.com/programmes/grand-designs/episode-gui...
> Revisit: Walton, 2008
> 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.
"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."
http://www.theverge.com/2012/12/10/3751786/ted-pseudoscience...
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.
Is easily solvable though by having the robot drop a plank across the gap before printing the lintel, so I don't think that is a showstopper.
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.
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.
EDIT: They also show visual demonstrations of techniques as to HOW this would be accomplished.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
Concrete printing is not new so I wonder what is keeping them from building the printer over a year later.
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.
Interesting if true. I had no idea.
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.
The crazy bit is sending that hive to Mars to build accommodation units for settlers.
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.
The 3D printed houses will be a life-saver on Moon and Mars though.
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.
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.
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.
