A common variant of a George Santayana quote is:

Those who do not know history's mistakes are doomed to repeat them.

Sometimes it is worthwhile repeating mistakes in order to really learn more about the problem, but most of the time we are happy to learn from the work of others, and build onwards with this knowledge in mind.

I mention all this because I recently spent a weekend reading the entirety of Nophead's Hydraraptor blog. Since starting on the RepRap project I have read many of his posts, but for some reason never actually sat down to consume the whole thing. This was a mistake because reading through the posts in chronological order gives an excellent insight into the thought processes, trials, pitfalls and successes that one comes across whilst developing a 3D printer. One also develops a greater appreciation of how the current state of the project came to be.

While online access is today mostly ubiquitous I found that reading the entire site through a browser was sub-optimal, and so I decided to create an offline version that I could have on my eBook reader or tablet, or read whilst having no internet connection. As I did this I realised that such a document would be useful for others, and so, with Nophead's permission, I am making the pdf available to all.

HydraRaptor - The story so far.pdf (30MB)

HydraRaptor – The story so far.epub (zip) (27MB)

A few notes:

  • The copyright of the posts belongs to Nophead and so any further reuse of the material requires permission from him.
  • Comments are not included. Whilst several did in fact add to the original discussion, the majority did not, and so they can be found online should the reader wish to dig through them.
  • Several images are missing and are highlighted as such. This draws attention to the preservation benefit of the pdf!
  • The document was generated from a script which parsed archive pages of the blog, formatted as necessary, and then generated the pdf. This process may have introduced inconsistencies and errors.