African inventor makes 3D printer from e-waste | Hacker News Reader

African inventor makes 3D printer from e-waste

3ders.org

48 pointsmakos14 comments

There are a lot of smart & under-utilized people in Lagos. People who earned top marks in school but unable to find a job. I'm always happy to hear about any success stories from them. These little steps will hopefully eventually bring change to Nigeria.

SIDENOTE: Tiny correction to that video(Audio @2:09) Lagos is no longer the official capital of Nigeria, the government reassigned that title to Abuja. I think it was because Lagos became overcrowded and Abuja looks a little cleaner. That said, a lot of locals(and my parents) still consider Lagos to be the capital and "happening place". That iPad app teaching local languages. It'd be cool to have a yoruba-teaching iPad app for my daughter. Also, that guy talking about the kids of Lagos Nigeria not knowing their culture. I'm not sure what that's about. I've been there more than 5 times. The most recent time was 5 years ago. Unless a whole lot has changed since 2008, they seemed pretty well soaked in Nigerian culture. Granted there's quite a bit of western-culture(read "hiphop") flowing in, but those kids are very Nigerian compared to African-american kids raised in USA. I'm even considering my daughter to spend her high-school years with my(and my wife's) relatives in Nigeria to pick up the culture & language.

The bit about sending e-waste to Mars was a bit odd. I guess they didn't consider transport costs.

On the other hand, 10 years after we start having considerable numbers of people in space, we'll have a huge amount of obsolete hardware in space too.

It would actually be pretty interesting to see what a Martian colony does with their own old computers. They're probably going to take re-purposing to an entirely new level.

It is very irritating that this article doesn't tell us the actual country this guy is from. "west Africa" is as far as they go.

It says he is in Lomé, which is the capital of Togo.

Very irritating, had to follow the link to another article to find the actual country: http://www.3ders.org/articles/20130513-w-afate-a-3d-printer-...

Another one of those "Republic of Africa" articles.

I wonder if he can now start printing the parts that he had to purchase? For sure, having an operational 3d printer and a pile of e-waste means that extraordinary new things can be built.

3d-printer + e-waste pile = working Drone fleet in a month.

This is great, but not that useful for most - you can't scale and replicate this at a large scale - you need specific parts, and you can't guarantee that you'll find them.

And you can't use it as a blueprint for recreating the printer out of mismatching e-waste, because most people lack that kind of thinking and the engineering ability that this inventor has.

Awesome for one person/village, not awesome for everyone else sadly...

What is far more interesting about this story is what he used the printer for: printing utensils.

It is easy to overlook something like that in the industrialized world. Who would think to print out a fork or a spoon? And so, people here tend to have this big blind spot when it comes to 3D printers: that it is essentially a toy for hobbyists; that it will never replaced mass-produced parts; that it can't print out everything.

What it really is, is breaking apart the power aggregated in centralized, mass-production industrial economy. These are our first-generation microfabs, and while they cannot compete in efficiency with a modern factory, that is not the point.

The "internet of things" won't be gadgets that talk to each other, it will be in the decentrialization and open-sourcing of the global manufacturing base, and it will likely to take root first in the poorest, most impoverish parts of the world.

Glad you pointed out the bit about utensils. Also a very interesting point about the internet of things. However if you look at a basic definition of internet of things (maybe there are more accurate), you can see that those would pretty much be "gadgets that talk to each other". Maybe the decentralization you mentioned would rather be the effect of internet of things rising than the goal of internet of things?

He is from Togo. The narrator mentioned Lome, which is the capital of Togo.

Back in 2008 my friend and I were going to enter an instructables.com contest with a 3D printer made from an all-in-one. It was going to be the Z-corp (powder) style. Total feasible, but we ran out of time and was a lot more focused on his senior design project.

A few weeks later, we did come across this http://web.archive.org/web/20120121054050/http://homemade3dp...

WOOOOW!!! I remember that blog and the project! What happened next?

Not to belittle this guy but I'm getting a bit tired of the whole 3d printer thing. It's not actually very hard to cut wax/plastic/etc with a milling machine and you can get a very accurate manual mill for pretty cheap. Then just pump out plastic molds much faster than the 3d machine can do.

physibles

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