Lego printer made from... Lego

I (day)dreamt of this thing a couple of weeks ago-- I guess I'm not the only one. And they make a point about self-replication that I hadn't thought of: a Lego-based 3D-printer, although much less true to the idea of self-replication than a "real" 3D-printer, is much easier to replicate than, say, a RepRap...

From Wired:

Watch out, humans: An invasion of self-replicating Lego robots could be at hand.

Software engineer by day, Lego maniac by night Will Gorman has created the MakerLegoBot, a machine that can take a virtual 3-D model and assemble it using Lego bricks.

The machine is itself built entirely out of the Lego system, which raises the possibility — theoretically at least — that the machine could, with some modifications, build a copy of itself. The 3-D assembler uses three Lego Mindstorms NXT Bricks, along with 9 NXT motors.

“There is a recursiveness to this whole thing,” says Gorman.

“I love the idea of self-assembly and the Star Trek replicator and I love Legos,” he says. “I wanted to bring those two worlds together.

The MakerLegoBot is a tribute to the emerging trend of 3-D printers and self-replicating machines such as MakerBot and RepRap.

(Via Slashdot)