It really depends on how sophisticated such projects as RepRap become. That many companies are working on electronics printing is also going to become quite a factor. Since printed electronics can be printed onto a wide set of substrates, it’s going to begin spreading electronics into areas which have never previously been permeable to electronics designers. I would not be surprised to see a form of video wallpaper in less than two years.

Should be interesting to watch how the market develops.

Look at Smartphones. They just released new models six months ago, then Droid a month ago, and now Google is releasing yet another new generation. Same with Computers, with Manufactures outsourcing actual construction to companies that make items for a dozen competing brands. We are developing new models with more features in less time, and fewer sales are happening per variant while the number of choices are growing constantly. Generation times are becoming so fast that a million units may not even have time to move off the shelf before the next better thing is out. That seems to indicate that generation times will force the production of fewer units, with a drive to minimize retooling times for assembly lines, which is likely to lead to a need for robust general manufacturing units that can switch production lines with minimal time.

Also as printing of electronics allows moving away from the hard fiberglass circuit board to materials that can be run roll to roll, the time between designs will likely also begin changing even more drastically than it currently is. We may soon arrive at a point where new generations might take weeks or days, demanding manufacturing capabilities which can keep up with the speed. Only general purpose, extremely versatile manufacturing systems would be able to do so.

Speed is becoming far too important to the manufacturing times to allow a continuation of single purpose devices, even though they may be far faster per step in a manufacturing process. They will simply take to long to design for a era in which the technology can change before the assembly line could be built.

The big electronics companies seem well on their way to becoming design studios, and the only way the manufacturers will be able to keep up is by embracing general manufacturing devices, and speed, over specialized, and efficiency.

High-Throughput Nanomanufacturing: Small Parts (with videos)

High-Throughput Nanomanufacturing: Assembly (with videos)

An entertaining sample, with music:

By the time we can routinely use nanoscale construction techniques to create a general purpose assembler, I suspect we will already have a robust macroscale version of the desktop manufacturing plant in many peoples homes, with a thriving open source community of devices it can make. From there it should be just a matter of a few years until those macroscale devices will be replaced by nanoscale versions, and just a few years after that before we begin seeing sophisticated nanoscale “modules” which can be used to design almost any product.

We should all keep an eye on progress towards molecular nanotechnology. It is a field that will first blossom when biotechnology is mature and in full swing, and the merging of the two will most likely lead to impressive technologies for medicine and h…