(Story begins here.)
He perused the thread list, trying to look for something that was interesting to print that had not been identified yet. He saw some threads that had been around for about two months with no positive identification---he put them aside as probably being ``impossible''. He saw some that had hundreds of positive identifications and ignored them since there was little fun in figuring out a mystery molecule puzzle that had already been solved six ways before dinner. Some of the threads had interesting mystery molcule puzzles that seemed to require quite a fair bit of precious metals printing gel; he dismissed them out of hand because he only had a limited amount of that.
After some more browsing with frequent intervals to check on the progress of the molecular printer's self-test, Liubo finally shortlisted a couple of mystery molecule puzzles to try, covering the middle and largest sizes that his molecular printer could assemble. They used mostly the organic and base metals gels, and were stated by their original posters to be identified using reagents that were available in the household.
The printer beeped three times in rapid succession and drew Liubo's attention back to it. `Ah, finally,' he thought to himself, `the self-test is done. Time to try the starch molecule.'
Liubo connected his laptop to the printer via the provided USB cable, and both the printer and his laptop chirped a beep to indicate that both devices have detected a new connection each. He quickly tapped on the on-screen menu on the printer to accept the connection and clicked on the dialogue box on his laptop to install additional drivers and software to make use of it. The molecular printer itself came with its own software for uploading the printing instructions to it, and the software was automatically made available on connecting it to a working computer. Liubo waited impatiently for the software to be installed, and when it was done, he started it up on his laptop and entered in the initial set of information that was needed to register the printer and the laptop to each other. This was a security feature to ensure that the molecular printer itself was always under control of only one computer at a time, a hold-over from the days when the molecular printe was only available in industrial settings. Back then a popular sabotage attack was to break-in to the factory, plug in a small form-factor computer to upload some contaminating/denial-of-service printing instruction to occupy/damage the molecular printer, and leave. The physical process was needed then because factories were smart enough to not connect their molecular printer controlling computers into the external facing network thanks to lessons learnt from bad SCADA implementations in the past.
The software loaded itself and showed an empty workspace in its main window. Liubo opened up the printing instructions file for the starch molecule, and activated the menu command to send it to the molecular printer. The program showed a small scrolling status screen while it was checking the syntax of the printing instructions and compiling it, before popping up a dialogue box to ask for the quantity (in grams) of the molecule wanted. The dialogue box also indicated that based on the existing amount of printing gels available for that model of a molecular printer, the maximum amount it could do in this batch was 10 g.
`Eh, I think 1 g should be enough,' Liubo thought to himself as he quickly entered the number before clicking on the ``send'' button next to it. The software acknowledged his input and showed a few more lines of output in its status screen, before showing a new window that indicated the time remaining to print.
It displayed a countdown timer of ten minutes.
Liubo sighed as he waited for it to complete.
The molecular printer was eerily silent as it was doing its work, a completely different experience from the regular filament 3D printer, where the whirr of the stepper motors was always present. It was to be expected though, since there was nothing really mechanically moving within the molecular printer.
The ten minutes passed swiftly and the printer beeped three times in rapid fashion. The on-screen menu showed the message ``attach container to solid output to continue''. Liubo scoured around his room for a test tube, and put it at the nozzle that was labelled ``Solid Output'' before he tapped on the rasterised ``continue'' button. A small huff was heard at the nozzle, and a white powder was deposited into the test tube that was attached to it.
Liubo pulled the test tube away from the nozzle and looked at it in awe. His first molecular printing, in a test tube! He quickly glanced at the on-screen display of the molecular printer. It showed nothing more than a single line of text saying ``job complete''. Ignoring it for the moment, Liubo took his test tube of freshly assembled starch towards the kitchen, where he had a small rack of reagents available. Reaching for the dropper in his bottle of tri-iodine, he dropped a couple of drops of the tri-iodine tincture into his test tube.
The white powder turned into a dark blue one on contact with the tri-iodine tincture.
Liubo grinned in glee: the molecular printer was working!
