From the Nanorex online gallery:
This worm drive assembly designed by K. Eric Drexler, Josh Hall, Ninad Sathaye and Mark Sims includes 11 components totalling 25,374 atoms. The animations below have been created from simulation results using NanoEngineer-1 Alpha 7, taking just over 370 hours to complete on a Dell laptop running WindowsXP. It is the largest model ever simulated with NanoEngineer-1. More information about this model is coming soon.
Tags: nanotechnology nanotech nano science technology ethics weblog blog
i so interested in nanotechnology, i like to work magnetite in nanotechnology
Posted by: Hemakumar | August 21, 2006 at 06:06 PM
This is truly an amazing piece of work. It took two weeks for the computer to simulate this!
I keep asking when the software itself will come up, but get no definitive answers. It could do a lot for public awareness of nanotechnology if this program were made available for free and hackers started to piece together thousand of designs and post them all over the internet.
Posted by: Michael Anissimov | August 22, 2006 at 05:27 AM
These designs are interesting and certainly worth doing - but they only begin to scratch the surface.
Are they buildable? With what capabilities in the nanofactory? I.e. can all these moving parts be built in place, as a unit - if so, how? Or must they be built separately and then assembled? (The more complex the parts that must be assembled, the more complex the assembly device must be to position and attach them.) What sort of instructions must the nanofactory have to build them?
It might be more useful to focus on "early" designs - say stuff that can be assembled by building nearly 2D components on a planar surface, and sliding parts into place to assemble them, without needing to deal with movements and rotations in more than 2D space. Ramps might be used to elevate and stack parts, flat parts made in the plane could be rotated around an axis in the plane so they stick up out of the surface, etc.
Look at what MEMS has done, for an analogy. Though hopefully MNT will be able to make parts that are a bit more 3 dimensional even early on, it looks like constraining designs to 'nearly' 2D would ease the higher level assembly of parts.
For example, most of the above parts might be built up as solid or hollow cylinders, then laid down on the plane and slid together to assemble them.
Posted by: Tom Craver | August 22, 2006 at 10:20 AM
What's the temperature, Kenneth?
Posted by: Hal | August 22, 2006 at 04:25 PM
The main question I have remaining - when'll the software be publicly available?
Posted by: | August 25, 2006 at 11:00 AM