Whilst putting together the Hydraraptor eBook I realised that a similar treatment to other RepRap development blogs would be useful, in particular the one from the core developers at blog.reprap.org.  Modifying the scripts and a bit of hacking produced the following 1758 page(!) history of the early days of the project.  Essential reading for any budding RepRap developer!

A History of RepRap Development.pdf  (40MB)

A History of RepRap Development.epub (zip)  (37MB)

A couple of interesting side notes:

  • Several image links in the original posts are dead, particularly the early stuff.  However, a little sleuthing on Google  found some of them, and so this version is technically more complete than the original blogs!
  • With agreement from Forrest Higgs I pulled in the content of his contributions (which were links to his own blogs) into the book, which means a more complete, smoother reading experience.
  • A couple of people suggested that offering the book in ePub format would be a good idea and so both this book and the Hydraraptor book are also available in both PDF and ePub versions.  In producing the ePub version I learnt a bit more about the format (a zip file of html and images) and found, unsurprisingly, that the resulting book has fewer formatting issues as the PDF version. To generate the ePub book I simply told the script to output one huge html file and then converted this using the Calibre eBook management tool.

A note about the formatting: because the blog has many collaborators the html of the posts varies greatly, consequently the layout of some entries may be a little off. I have attempted to correct this with various hacks, and I believe the result is acceptable, but the task can be a real time-sink. If any pages are completely unreadable please let me know, however small layout issues will probably not be fixed.

The books have a dedicated page in the RepRap Wiki.