“Well, this one’s powered by an FPGA that used to be my dad’s old retro gaming system. I repurposed it after he died. I still reprogram it to be an SNES every year on the anniversary of his death and play some Super Metroid and remember the good times with him. And then reprogram it back into a 3D printer main board whenever someone in the community needs a pair of shoes or parts for a Microlab. See these controller ports on the front of the printer casing here? I added those last year just so I don’t have to disassemble and reassemble it every time I want to play Mario Kart. I just plug my controllers into the printer.”
“I’ve got a buddy down south who was able to reclaim a microcontroller from a vending machine to build a 3D printer. I’ve heard there are some folks out in the desert region experimenting with self-growing crystal lattice structures for ‘growing’ chips. But being honest, I think they’re a long way out from producing anything workable with that. We’ll keep our fingers crossed, but until we have a way to make chips, we’ll keep scrounging chips out of old smart phones and DVD players. Occasionally, someone will get lucky and find a broken 3D printer in a landfill that just needs some TLC.”
How would we produce the processors necessary for the 3d printer tho?
“Well, this one’s powered by an FPGA that used to be my dad’s old retro gaming system. I repurposed it after he died. I still reprogram it to be an SNES every year on the anniversary of his death and play some Super Metroid and remember the good times with him. And then reprogram it back into a 3D printer main board whenever someone in the community needs a pair of shoes or parts for a Microlab. See these controller ports on the front of the printer casing here? I added those last year just so I don’t have to disassemble and reassemble it every time I want to play Mario Kart. I just plug my controllers into the printer.”
“I’ve got a buddy down south who was able to reclaim a microcontroller from a vending machine to build a 3D printer. I’ve heard there are some folks out in the desert region experimenting with self-growing crystal lattice structures for ‘growing’ chips. But being honest, I think they’re a long way out from producing anything workable with that. We’ll keep our fingers crossed, but until we have a way to make chips, we’ll keep scrounging chips out of old smart phones and DVD players. Occasionally, someone will get lucky and find a broken 3D printer in a landfill that just needs some TLC.”
Damn, I forgot you could reprogram those