Gartner predicts 3D printers will cost less than a PC by 2016. Network World - Widespread adoption of 3D printing technology may not be that far away, according to a Gartner report predicting that enterprise-class 3D printers will be available for less than $2,000 by 2016. With the technology set to become less expensive than some modern-day PCs, Gartner research director Pete Basiliere says the futuristic capabilities of 3D printers could be available far sooner than many had thought. "From descriptions of exciting current uses in medical, manufacturing and other industries to futuristic ideas — such as using 3D printers on asteroids and the moon to create parts for spacecraft and lunar bases — the hype leads many people to think the technology is some years away when it is available now and is affordable to most enterprises," Basiliere said in a Gartner press release.
[RELATED: Wicked 3D printer creations Would 3D-printed gun really be legal?] 3D printing technology has garnered a lot of attention lately, and not all of it has been positive. Cities Of The Future, Built By Drones, Bacteria, And 3-D Printers. As complex ecosystems, cities are confronting tremendous pressures to seek optimum efficiency with minimal impact in a resource-constrained world. While architecture, urban planning, and sustainability attempt to address the massive resource requirements and outflow of cities, there are signs that a deeper current of biology is working its way into the urban framework. Innovations emerging across the disciplines of additive manufacturing, synthetic biology, swarm robotics, and architecture suggest a future scenario when buildings may be designed using libraries of biological templates and constructed with biosynthetic materials able to sense and adapt to their conditions.
Construction itself may be handled by bacterial printers and swarms of mechanical assemblers. Much of the modern built environment we experience began its life in CAD software. In the Bio/Nano/Programmable Matter lab at Autodesk Research, engineers are developing tools to model the microscopic world. 3D printed guns are going to create big legal precedents | Technology. By now, everyone's heard about the 3D printed gun that Defense Distributed demonstrated last week. The Texas-based group has been steadily working its way up the 3D printed firearms evolutionary ladder, making parts for guns, then guns themselves, then firing a gun, then making the plans for running up your own pistols on a nearby 3D printer. If Defense Distributed had set out to create a moral panic over 3D printing, they could have picked no better project. The prevailing opinions on 3D printed guns fall into two major categories: the apocalyptic and the nonchalant.
The apocalyptics – including grandstanding politicos like New York State senator Steve Israel, who's already introduced legislation aimed at banning 3D printed guns – greet this news with hysterics: the age of the undetectable plastic gun to be upon us, and Something Must Be Done. There's some truth in both points of view, but it's hard to get at the truth when you're talking about an issue as polarising as guns. How to 3-D Print the Skeleton of a Living Animal | Wired Science. The skeleton above was created by taking a CT scan of an anesthetized rat and sending the data to a 3-D printer. Similar life-size models of body parts from other animals or human patients could be used to train veterinary and medical students and to help surgeons prepare for difficult surgeries, the researchers say.
The idea to print skeletons from CT scans came from Evan Doney, an engineering student working in the lab of Matthew Leevy, who runs the biological imaging facility at the University of Notre Dame. ”At first I didn’t really know what the killer app would be, I just knew it would be really cool,” Leevy said. But he began to see new possibilities after striking up a conversation with an ear, nose, and throat specialist during an office visit for a sinus problem. “I actually got out my computer and showed him some slides, and by the end of it we were collaborating.” X-ray CT (top) and stereolithographic (bottom) renderings used to produce the rat skeleton above. How Many People Will Own 3D Printers? Getting to One Million Sold A sign of the growing business interest in 3D Printers is that I had three conversations this week with venture capitalists who are trying to figure out this market.
(Word is that MakerBot is out raising a new round of financing, after having raised $10M in 2011.) How big will 3D printing become? How many will be sold? How long will it take before there are 1M households with 3D printers. I remember asking a large audience how many owned a 3D printer? Today demand is outpacing supply, judging from the long delays in fulfillment on 3D printer sites. Affordability UsabilityReliability Undoubtedly, 3D printers will get cheaper and more functional. The level of usability, as we found in our 3D printer tests last Fall, varies quite a bit. Reliability is another factor. So, how many people own a 3D printer today? What will motivate a million people to buy a 3D printer? How does one million sold compare to other household machines? Coffee makers. Toaster Ovens. Related. 3D-Printed Skull Implant Ready for Operation | 3D Printing Osteofab.
3D printing technology has helped replace 75 percent of a patient's skull with the approval of U.S. regulators. The 3D-printed implant can replace the bone in people's skulls damaged by disease or trauma, according to Oxford Performance Materials. The company announced it had received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for its skull implant on Feb. 18 — a decision that led to the first U.S. surgical operation on March 4. "We see no part of the orthopedic industry being untouched by this," said Scott DeFelice, president of Oxford Performance Materials. DeFelice's company is already selling 3D-printed implants overseas as a contract manufacturer. 3D printing's advantage comes from taking the digitally scanned model of a patient's skull and "printing" out a matching 3D object layer by layer. About 300 to 500 U.S. patients could use skull bone replacements every month, according to DeFelice.
Lessig's Harvard Law lecture: "Aaron's Law" Vortex smoke rings created with 3D printed wings. Dustin Kleckner sez, "Scientists tie vortex rings (smoke rings, basically) into knots using 3D printed wings. Includes high speed video, also in 3D. In addition to being very cool, they are also related to knots and braids that appear in places like the sun's surface. Full disclosure: I'm one of the scientists that did the research. " The duo overcame their experimental difficulties by designing and fabricating various hydrofoils (wings used in water) on a 3-D printer. They tried approximately 30 different shapes before they successfully created the desired vortices.
When accelerated in a water tank at more than 100 g, hydrofoils leave behind bubble-traced vortex loops, whose dynamics the researchers recorded with a high-speed camera. Vortex loops could untie knotty physics problems [U Chicago Press Release] Creation and dynamics of knotted vortices [Nature] How Big Business is Stymying Makers' High-Res, Colorful Innovations | Wired Design. If you're waiting for desktop additive-manufacturing technology to move closer to professional-level results, be prepared to wait for a very long time. The past year was a breakout for desktop 3-D printing. MakerBot released two new models, Formlabs debuted the first prosumer 3-D printer to use high-accuracy stereolithography, and a slew of innovative, printed projects lifted awareness and desirability of additive manufacturing for the general public.
But the year ended with a legal hiccup. Formlabs will be dealing with a patent infringement lawsuit brought against them by 3D Systems, one of the biggest players in the industry. The hobbyist segment of the industry has been built on the back of expired patents, but as the Electronic Frontier Foundation has pointed out, many patents that will be required to advance the state of the art will not expire for years or even a decade.
PBS short documentary about 3D printing. PBS OffBook made this excellent 7-minute introduction to 3D printing. Much attention has been paid to 3D Printing lately, with new companies developing cheaper and more efficient consumer models that have wowed the tech community. They herald 3D Printing as a revolutionary and disruptive technology, but how will these printers truly affect our society? Beyond an initial novelty, 3D Printing could have a game-changing impact on consumer culture, copyright and patent law, and even the very concept of scarcity on which our economy is based. From at-home repairs to new businesses, from medical to ecological developments, 3D Printing has an undeniably wide range of possibilities which could profoundly change our world.
Dreambox 3D Printer Vending Machine Creates and Dispenses Designs Before Your Eyes. UC Berkeley’s new Dreambox is a vending machine like no other – it incorporates a 3D printer that makes and dispenses goodies right before your eyes! By connecting to a cloud-based computing system hosted within the machine, customers can upload their designs and set them in the cue for printing. The designers of Dreambox wanted a place for 3D printing enthusiasts to see their designs being created—a treat they don’t get to see if they place an order online or with a print shop.
The renderings are processed, printed, and then (like any other vending machine) popped into a drawer for the customer to collect. Should the customer not be present, they can rest easy, knowing that their printed design is safe, as the storage drawers are locked until needed. Each customer is then given an unlock code, which frees their newly printed masterpiece. + Dreambox Via PSFK.
Smoothing 3D prints with acetone and without patent violations. Austin Wilson and Neil Underwood from the North Carolina makerspace Fablocker invented a great, simple process for smoothing out 3D prints using evaporated nail-polish remover in a large jar. The process produces a beautiful finish and sidesteps a bunch of dumb patents for polishing 3D printing output.
They're still experimenting with the details, and the fact that the first experiments turned out such great looking pieces is cause for excitement about where this will go when it's fully refined. ABS-based printed parts are placed in the jar with the acetone and heated to 90 degrees Celsius on the hot plate. Acetone has a low evaporation point, but is heavier than air so the process creates a small cloud around the model which melts the surface, slowly smoothing it to a mirror finish. Slick Trick Adds Much-Needed Shine to 3-D Printed Parts [Joseph Flaherty/Wired] Guest Post: Cory Doctorow for Freedom to Read Week | Blog | Raincoast Books. ← Back to Blog by Dan Guest Blogger + YA Fiction / February 24, 2013 Freedom to Read Week is an annual event that encourages Canadians to think about and reaffirm their commitment to intellectual freedom, which is guaranteed them under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
To mark this year's Freedom to Read Week, which starts today, we asked author Cory Doctorow to contribute a guest post on libraries and technology. Libraries, Hackspaces and E-waste: how libraries can be the hub of a young maker revolution Every discussion of libraries in the age of austerity always includes at least one blowhard who opines, "What do we need libraries for? Facepalm. The problem is that Mr. Libraries have also served as community hubs, places where the curious, the scholarly, and the intellectually excitable could gather in the company of one another, surrounded by untold information-wealth, presided over by skilled information professionals who could lend technical assistance where needed.
Cory Doctorow. Pwdr - Open source powder-based rapid prototyping machine. The shape of things to come: A consumer's guide to 3D printers. CES 2013 proved to be something of a coming out party for consumer-facing 3D printers. Sure MakerBot earned a fair amount of attention at last year's show with the announcement of the Replicator, which snagged its share of awards from various press outlets. This year, however, saw a relative deluge in 3D-printing representation, with strong showings from 3D Systems, FormLabs, MakerBot and the cloud-based 3D printer, Sculpteo. Even with so many companies rising to prominence, the dream of truly mainstream 3D printing still feels a ways off -- if that is indeed where we're inevitably heading.
These nascent days are an exciting time, with a diverse array of companies and organizations vying to be the first to bring the technology to our homes. In a sense, many roads lead back to RepRap, the open-source, community-fueled project aimed at creating a self-replicating machine. 3D Systems 3D Systems has been in the 3D-printing game since before the term was coined.
Bits from Bytes Eventorbot Pwdr. What's the Deal with Copyright and 3D Printing? DIY BioPrinter. We started out by messing around with an old inkjet printer that we literally saved from a sidewalk somewhere. There's already plenty of interesting things you can do with an low-end off-the-shelf inkjet printer, but they do have some limitations, which we'll get into in the next Step (or skip straight to Step 3 for how we built our own bioprinter from scratch, that you can see in the first picture above). Undressing the Printer We disassembled an abandoned HP 5150 inkjet printer for use as a bioprinter. Just rip off all the plastic covers you can find, but make sure you can still operate the reset buttons etc. on the front panel. There's a little momentary switch that senses whether the cover is open. There's also a momentary switch inside the paper handling mechanism that senses whether paper has been loaded. Once you've got your printer all undressed, and figured out how to activate the cover-closed switch - print something!
Cartridges Prep Filling the Cartridges.