Self assembly

Important (and maybe non-obvious) fact:
Not all kinds of self assembly need diffusion driven by thermal motion to work.

There is:

• Thermally driven assembly (aka "brownian self assembly")
• Self assembly without thermal motion instead driven by longer range attraction forces.
  E.g. like how magnets at the macroscale layed out in a row can do completely predictable self assembly with just one controlled nudge.

Self-assembly can be mixed with in various ways with positional assembly. Including:

• Site activating semi positional assembly
• Tether aided thermally driven assembly

Different kinds of self assembly in the foldamer printer concept

The foldamer printer concept where:

• Thermally driven assembly may be used to make the base vitamin parts that constitute that most basic building-blocks.
• The foldamer printer then performs some semi positional assembly of these basic building-blocks to larger composite blocks that
  form hinge interlinked chains of blocks.
• Non-thermal selfassembly may then finally self assemble the even bigger products block chains (that would diffuse only very slowly) to even bigger structures in a non thermally driven diffusionless way.

Related

• Spectrum of means of assembly
• Up: Method of assembly
• Bottom-up manufacturing