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"Although the video shows a printer that uses plastic media, there are others that can use various metals to enable the production of parts that have all the necessary strength to go straight from the printer table to installation in in-service equipment."

" Think what a military supply chain could do with the capability to print parts in 6061-T6 aluminum, or titanium, or 316 stainless steel. A support depot might need just one large-capacity print unit and a few hundred pounds of metal dust to keep dozens of helicopters, trucks or other vehicles operational."

"The possibilities are endless."

Precisely.

I got the germ of the idea from a series of short stories in Analog, which featured a house that could assemble and disassemble devices on a nanometric scale.

But we don't have nano-assemblers quite yet.

I thought something of a small-enough scale, yet large enough to encompass a variety of capabilities in each microscopic piece (such as a micro-miniature USB functionality), that could be assembled and disassembled by an advanced concept layering machine, would simulate some of the capabilities expressed in those stories.

One is only limited by the inherent circuitry designed in, and the needs that can be addressed by them.

It's noteworthy that to build a camera, for example, you would need at least one overly-large component, the lens, around which all the other fabrication could evolve.

Even something like a clock radio should be buildable from the component level, if the components have the right level of simplified sophistication.