For a more realistic take on it, think of it as a tenth of a millimeter instead of 100 microns!

Cool. Once these things are self-hosting, it's going to be the beginning of the beginning.

I'm not sure if it's possible, the part that heats up the material can't be made from the material with the same temperature of melting as what it prints.

It would have to be a different technology.

Ceramics or epoxy seem like to candidates. Something that has a curing step of some sort. Do you think you could make a kiln out of the same sort of material it is designed to fire?

Two or more printers that together can be self-hosting seems like a possibility to me. The only limitation would be size and price I think.

It imagine something like electric welding for metal components.

Didn't the old Makerbot print at 100 microns? The notes about the THE FREE UNIVERSAL CONSTRUCTION KIT http://fffff.at/free-universal-construction-kit/ referenced this as a limitation when trying to print LEGOs.

Both the Replicator and Thing-o-Matic could, but you had to get your printer tuned very well. The default was ~300 microns. If these come out of the box tuned that well, that's quite nice.

I don't think (though I'm not sure) the Cupcake was capable of that, at least with the stock Z axis.

Did anyone else feel like they were being trolled by some kind of Steve Jobs joke during the video or lifestream?

This looks really great. Can't wait to see one in person. I'm sure I'll see some at MakerFaire next weekend!

Ultra-Bot on Kickstarter is about to offer an upgraded platform of 8x8x8" or 512 cubic inches. It has a very good resolution and can handle PLA and ABS thank's to the heated build platform. There is also a future option for a dual extruder.

For $1,099 you get an assembled Ultra-Bot with heated build table. Soon they will offer another, larger, Ultra-Bot for $1,249 with the larger 8x8x8" build platform.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wjsteele/ultra-bot-3d-pr...

I am a huge Makerbot fan and they really do a great job improving every year. Bre is also a great pitchman, looking forward to my Replicator 2

Can it still use ABS? Because PLA is not a good plastic for structural materials - the glass transition temperature is too low.

No, it does not. The platform is made out of acrylic and apparently does not heat up. It looks like the Replicator 2X is designed to use both ABS and PLA but the standard Rep2 is PLA only.

Not sure, but I noticed the larger Replicator 2X that's coming at the end of the year can use ABS.

I'm wondering how far of the ability to print out CPU. Certianly would appear that 3D printers will become viable for manufacturing more and more common day objects. I'm sure the ability to have more than one print head(ink/material if you like) and able to switch then things realy start to get very exciting.

> I'm wondering how far of the ability to print out CPU.

None. Current 3D printers can only print in a couple materials as of present (mostly plastics), none of which are semiconductors.

The resolution is nowhere near what you'd need for that, anyway. 100 micron resolution sounds pretty small, but it's still about a tenth the resolution of 70s-era semiconductors (10 µm), and about 4500 times the resolution of current tech (22 nm).

He said how far off. And from the sounds of it: Not all that far.

As you say, 70's era is only a magnitude way. And so they need some new materials - that will come.

I'm sure there are people aching to be able to make, e.g. MOS 6502's at home just for the sake of doing it.

The time it would take me to design a CPU from scratch then I feel it is something that will be viable come that day I'm close to hitting print. But not today or any year soon then, but one day in my lifetime (cancer pending).

If you want to build your own CPU, learn Verilog and get a FPGA development kit. It's totally doable; here's an excellent example of what can result:

http://www.linusakesson.net/scene/parallelogram/index.php

You can get a decent Xilinx board for under $200; the "web edition" of their dev tools are free.