Slashdot Mirror

For that sort of application most of the prosthetic would/should be mass produced. As awesome as 3D printers are they are really for prototyping and customization rather than cheap manufacturing. I would see it more as using a 3D printer to print off some parts for customized fitting to the patient, and using off the shelf parts for the rest.

On the other hand, there are plenty of robotic hand projects which could be adapted to function as prosthetics. So, go take a look and see if you get inspired.

It's nice and all that Lego might be releasing an official design of rover, but models of the curiousity rover for 3d printing have been available for roughly a week now already and are begining to enter 2nd/3rd gen revisions...we just gave one away this morning that we printed last night for a childs birthday party.
Lego these days is about robotics and First Lego League Competitions....for models, we can print or create our own....same for legos pieces themselves.
If you can afford to buy your child the occasional lego model and various sets which are very expensive, then you can probably afford a 3d printer which opens up many more possibilities.

http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:27908

This being slashdot, I feel obliged / compelled to point you towards this instead. :)

Sure I would, but I'm gonna need a bigger printer.

Ultimaker owner here.

I say, depends on what you need, and your batch size. 1000+ items, no contest, use injection molding.
However, need 100 customized items, each different? Or need to be able to modify it on the spot and make a new one?
Yes, producing 100.000.000 HD case holder clips with 3D printers would be silly. But for example artists love these 3D printers, because they can make whatever they imagine. Your mind seems to be limited to "useful" or "technical" use. Try to look beyond that, look at art, (board) games.
The 3D printers also allow for open innovation, you can share physical objects with anyone anywhere in the world. See http://www.thingiverse.com/

So, like this...

http://filabot.com/
http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:24583

Work in progress obviously, but people are working on it.

I put together the MakrerGear kit: http://www.makergear.com/products/3d-printers

It is a bit expensive but a number of parts are upgraded from the cheap options that people say you can source for half the total cost. Brass bushings instead of PLA, linear rod instead of tool rod, Really nice compact extruder with a metal gear box on the stepper, pre-cut jig for checking the frame geometery.... and of course shielded wire for motor hookups.

Its a great kit if you are willing to pay a bit more for the convinence of having it all put together, and the upgrades there (including a tube that can be used for either a bowden extruder or a filiment guide).

A few bits could have been documented better, would have saved me some time. I highly recomend getting some 1/4" or so thick window glass (8"x8") and some binder clips to mount (plenty of pics online) then cover that with Kapton.

The mistake that cost me the most time was not using seperate nuts for tensioning the bed springs and adjusting the bed level. Once I found a video online that showed it done properly, it was an easy fix. first upgrade I recomend is M4 thumbwheels for the bed leveling nuts.

I also just uploaded my own design for a jig to mount a dial gauge indicator on the rods to check the bed level.... I recomend a dial guage and this jig: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:26031

You can see the thing it's self on Thingiverse.

It's a neat idea, kind of fun for first circuits. Some people in the RepRap community have been experimenting with directly printing circuits. It would be very neat to see that come to fruition.

The design is hosted on thingiverse: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:21494

Depends on the kid. Some 11 year olds have PhDs and others have a very narrow, but precise focus that makes them experts in a very small area. Get him something current, concise, and the hardware to work with. StackOverflow is the one of the best resources for programmers and leads to just about every resource you could ever need.

The first question you should ask is what do you want to accomplish? If it's "write a game" expose him to Unity or XNA. The best language to use for that is C++, but there are far more programmers that use C#, Java, or Objective-C. Python isn't a bad suggestion. It runs Eve Online.

Artificial intelligence might win him some science projects. This algorithm for flocking is surprisingly simple and not out of reach for someone new.

If he wants to make physical objects using programs, consider getting a makerbot and writing software that generates mathematical objects or just print cool stuff like quadracopters and robotic hands.

Depends on the kid. Some 11 year olds have PhDs and others have a very narrow, but precise focus that makes them experts in a very small area. Get him something current, concise, and the hardware to work with. StackOverflow is the one of the best resources for programmers and leads to just about every resource you could ever need.

The first question you should ask is what do you want to accomplish? If it's "write a game" expose him to Unity or XNA. The best language to use for that is C++, but there are far more programmers that use C#, Java, or Objective-C. Python isn't a bad suggestion. It runs Eve Online.

Artificial intelligence might win him some science projects. This algorithm for flocking is surprisingly simple and not out of reach for someone new.

If he wants to make physical objects using programs, consider getting a makerbot and writing software that generates mathematical objects or just print cool stuff like quadracopters and robotic hands.

Depends on the kid. Some 11 year olds have PhDs and others have a very narrow, but precise focus that makes them experts in a very small area. Get him something current, concise, and the hardware to work with. StackOverflow is the one of the best resources for programmers and leads to just about every resource you could ever need.

The first question you should ask is what do you want to accomplish? If it's "write a game" expose him to Unity or XNA. The best language to use for that is C++, but there are far more programmers that use C#, Java, or Objective-C. Python isn't a bad suggestion. It runs Eve Online.

Artificial intelligence might win him some science projects. This algorithm for flocking is surprisingly simple and not out of reach for someone new.

If he wants to make physical objects using programs, consider getting a makerbot and writing software that generates mathematical objects or just print cool stuff like quadracopters and robotic hands.

This was a very interesting reply, thanks. It points out a few important issues.

As when people leave conventional schooling for "unschooling" or "homeschooling", it may take some time to decompress. A rule of thumb there is somewhere between one month to one year of decompression for every year of compulsory schooling.

Also, humans naturally are lazy to conserve energy. It's a good thing to be lazy because it prevents wasting resources on things that don't help survival. That is weighed in the mind against the fact that it is also a good thing to do certain things (things that contribute towards survival). The mind is in tension between those two things. Or, in other words, necessity is the mother of invention, but laziness is the father. :-)

Also, in our society, with "supernormal stimuli", it is indeed easy to get caught in "pleasure traps" whether you have to work 9-5 or not:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
http://www.amazon.com/Supernormal-Stimuli-Overran-Evolutionary-Purpose/dp/039306848X
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park

Also, people in industrialized societies have become so vitamin D deficient (from lack of sunlight), so phytonutrient deficient (from lack of vegetables), so omega 3 deficient (from lack of vegetables and fish), and so on from modern processed food, that their brains are affected in a bad way, which makes it harder to be self-directing.

Please get your vitamin D level checked if you are indoors so much... Vitamin D is an occupational hazard of indoors workers like most electrical engineers.

More health tips here:
http://www.changemakers.com/discussions/discussion-493#comment-38823

Anyway, put those all together, and yes, it can be really hard for a mainstream person to suddenly become self-directing and healthy and connected to a health community. It can be a big challenge. Good luck with it. Part of that is to get into the right environment that stimulates us in healthy ways. See for example:
http://www.bluezones.com/

BTW, and to address some of the other points you made too, have you thought about a career in agricultural robotics? :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_robot

As our technology improves (like with better agricultural robotics, 3D printing, mining robotics, LENR cheap energy, etc.), it will only take the 1% who enjoy stuff like that to provide enough of the basics for everyone (whether lurker or shirker), same as with GNU/Linux, Wikipedia, blogging, slashdot, etc. provide lots of information for us all through the efforts of a relatively few percent of the population. So, that is how there can be cell phones and such even if few people work to make them. Already we see a continuing drop in manufacturing employment while still producing just as much, just like agriculture before that. We'll probably increasingly see that in services, too. Here is an example for sharing free 3D designs for stuff you can print in 3D printers:
http://www.thingiverse.com/

Also, Bob Black, in The Abolition of Work (the first article I think you're referring to), talks about making work into play. You are playing "games" at home. What if making stuff or providing services felt pretty much just as much fun, with a sense of flow?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)

Maybe you could even invent yourself a job as a "job designer"? :-)

Anyway, there are no easy answers for individuals, even if collectively the USA could with a stro

My toddler has built a homebew brick castle which I interpret to mean "Citation needed".

Also, our bricks can have (gasp!) 30 degree angles. Shove than in your high pressure compression mold! http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:13531

It's actually a free Universal Construction Kit, if you check out the Things, they are "uck's Things" and the URL us http://www.thingiverse.com/uck/things/

You can make a big deal about the acronym if you want, as they are probably hoping for free press. Or you can ignore that part, silently giggling when you think of all the lawsuits that will likely include the full acronym, capitalizing 'Free' and including it.

Exactly. This adds nothing to VRML (Or any of the other dozen 3D web technologies that went under this same headline in years past.)

Okay, that's not entirely true. Over the past it has the following advantages:

- It's buit into the browser, so no plugins.

- Computers are much faster so performance should be better.

- Bandwidth is higher so files transfer faster.

But none of the gets to the heart of the problem with 3D:
- 3D artists are much more expensive than a production artist running Photoshop and creating attractive 3D content takes much longer than a flat image. This makes the content much more expensive to produce.

- The quality is not there. If you want to show off the highest quality vision of your product you want Photoshoped images. 3D just doesn't have it. Even with high resolution 3D scanners and hours of cleanup by a train artist it will still look sub-par compared to properly prepped 2D images.

- There are very few 3D interface designers worth a damn. And they're all working much higher paid jobs making games. That leaves people who sort of saw a scene in Jonny Mnemonic on late-night TV years ago when they were a little drunk, and thought it would be neat to make an interface like that. This turns away customers. And even if they did hire one of those great designers away from the games industry, 3D is still a horrible interface for a 2D spreadsheet, which is what most web sites are.

- Phones.

With the exception of the last, these problems will always exist, and always doom the 3D web.

The single case I've seen for 3D web in 20+ years of doing 3D are online 3D libraries like Thingiverse where, in this case, you can preview an STL before downloading.

Disclosure: I have worked with web and 3D since 1996 and have been directly involved with a number of doomed 3D web projects in that time. They were all essentially identical with the exception of the name of the 3D plugin/file format.

Yep. Makerbot also sell their Replicator for around $200. I think this is a 2 colour version (dual print heads) and $48 for the spools.
http://www.makerbot.com/
Interesting stuff to make too!
http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:13101
More pics:
http://www.pcauthority.com.au/Gallery/288483,in-pictures-why-the-makerbot-replicator-is-one-of-the-best-toys-ever.aspx/1
from CES

See http://www.thingiverse.com

http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:11831

http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:16350 quality is not really there yet. But people are working on it. Fun fact, it's not a model from the game it's for. It's a WoW model used for a board game. Not really legal I guess, but it seems to work.

You can cut that down to half an hour of possibly messing with the printer by just downloading one [1]. As these printers get more common and "standardized" like with the Makerbot Replicator and the Printrbot, it'll soon be less hassle to print one. Though the cost is still higher on the plastic bits to go in, it is being worked on by the reprap people to get the printers to be efficient and as more of them become available the cost of the spools will go down. There's been some work at directly using injection molding pellets but I don't believe it's printed any fruit yet. That alone will get the cost down by about 50% per object.

[1] http://www.thingiverse.com/search?q=spoon

It's been done.

Here you go:
http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:11560

Here you go:

http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:249

In case anybody's wondering "WTF?", that was a response not to the previous poster's comment, but to the previous posters signature "You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!" - i.e., it's arguably offtopic, but still amusing.

Here you go:

http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:249

Yes and no. It largely depends on the level of detail you want. I've been designing and printing a few props for DnD, which works great. Example: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:11777
(I still need to upload a few others on Thingiverse)

But full miniatures would be hard. Maybe a dragon could be done: http://daid2.mine.nu/~daid/IMG_20110929_235158.small.jpeg (about 7cm in length)
Or if you are in to Warhammer 40k http://daid2.mine.nu/~daid/IMG_20111007_010722.small.jpeg (5cm long)

I'm still tweaking my machine, but I think if you print slow and make a good design, you can make miniatures that work with some sanding and a layer of paint.

The plastic used in other 3D printers is about 20-28 euro's per kg. These are material cost, and I don't think these prices are driven by 3D printer demands, as the reels look industrial.

If you want to see what people are using 3D printers for, take a look on http://www.thingiverse.com/ you'll find everything from toys to replacement parts for washing machines.

Gears are pretty easy, actually, to a point. How small are the teeth? http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3575 is a year or more old, but a good overview of what's possible, http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:10955 is a current design, you can see from the photo how the print quality is. The spiral gear is about 1.5" in diameter, for scale. Are the Sega gears near this size?

Gears are pretty easy, actually, to a point. How small are the teeth? http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3575 is a year or more old, but a good overview of what's possible, http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:10955 is a current design, you can see from the photo how the print quality is. The spiral gear is about 1.5" in diameter, for scale. Are the Sega gears near this size?

Can you use it to replace that one lost Lego block (most likely went up the vacuum cleaner) that you need in order to complete your masterpiece?

Yes, of course. See for example http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:591.

I went to the website, there was a bunch of boring 3D objects that could have been made by a 3 year old... Even the Thingiverse http://www.thingiverse.com/ is way more interesting and useful than that site.

Damn lazy nerds, what is wrong with you?!!!

I predict that, one day, the king of "most downloaded" torrents will be a 3D printer file for a bong.

It's named a "coat hook" but... well, judge for yourself http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:10537

Are Gothic Cathedrals [thingiverse.com] ugly? How about golden chalices [makerbot.com]?

The first picture doesn't show what I am referring to (because the light cream doesn't reflect the light too well). The second picture amply shows it. It's fugly. Here is another pic which shows the typical surface you can expect from your manufactured objects.

There's no doubt it's cool tech but the results are pretty primitive. I'd see it more useful for replacement parts than producing something you'd want gracing your mantelpiece.

Are Gothic Cathedrals ugly? How about golden chalices?

Makerbot prints a makerbot.

nyah nyah!

It exists, but it is just a model. One that makes noise would be nice.
http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3193

They exist, they just don't make chips yet, but that is being worked on. http://www.fabathome.org/ http://www.makerbot.com/ http://www.thingiverse.com/

Teach the kids about 3D printing (see http://reprap.org/ maybe even get one of the cheap printer kits or an UP! Printer if you have budget.

These things let kids unleash a form of creativity and spatial learning that is hard to find anywhere else. No need to actually teach them how to design 3D objects - they'll be scrambling to figure it out for themselves! Keen students will print their own 3D printers. Less enthusiastic ones will download from http://thingiverse.com/ and create "Mash up" objects.

Inevitably one of them will print a penis for shock value, but kids are like that.

You need a set of wobble arrestors.

It's a descendant of reprap; the gen3 electronics were designed for the reprap project. The idea of the Cupcake was to drop the self-replicating constraint and focus on kit manufacturability... which isn't to say the Cupcake can't self-replicate.

Maximum PC did an article on this thing. They managed to print a whistle (with the captive pea inside). One Cathal Garvey, a geneticist, is using it to stave off having to buy a few million worth of lab equipment; see the dremel-powered centrifuge or the microlathe.

So, it's not perfect or self-replicating, but you can do some cool stuff with it. Non-geneticists might appreciate being able to machine replacements for all the brittle plastic shit that can break, or just get their own Master Chief statue.

Maximum PC did an article on this thing. They managed to print a whistle (with the captive pea inside). One Cathal Garvey, a geneticist, is using it to stave off having to buy a few million worth of lab equipment; see the dremel-powered centrifuge or the microlathe.

So, it's not perfect or self-replicating, but you can do some cool stuff with it. Non-geneticists might appreciate being able to machine replacements for all the brittle plastic shit that can break, or just get their own Master Chief statue.

Maximum PC did an article on this thing. They managed to print a whistle (with the captive pea inside). One Cathal Garvey, a geneticist, is using it to stave off having to buy a few million worth of lab equipment; see the dremel-powered centrifuge or the microlathe.

So, it's not perfect or self-replicating, but you can do some cool stuff with it. Non-geneticists might appreciate being able to machine replacements for all the brittle plastic shit that can break, or just get their own Master Chief statue.

Maximum PC did an article on this thing. They managed to print a whistle (with the captive pea inside). One Cathal Garvey, a geneticist, is using it to stave off having to buy a few million worth of lab equipment; see the dremel-powered centrifuge or the microlathe.

So, it's not perfect or self-replicating, but you can do some cool stuff with it. Non-geneticists might appreciate being able to machine replacements for all the brittle plastic shit that can break, or just get their own Master Chief statue.

It's been done.

this video is highly relevant to this discussion, its just a short animation about the future of 3d replication. http://www.vimeo.com/12768578 also, http://www.thingiverse.com/ is the website you need to look at. its all about sharing 3d files for printing. -jd

Thingiverse is a place to freely share 3D object designs: http://www.thingiverse.com/about

RepRap is GPLv2 and later: http://reprap.org/wiki/RepRapGPLLicence

I tried to submit a story about this but it was rejected...

2obvious4u writes "Here on Slashdot we like to discuss copyright, MPAA, RIAA, torrents and all the little details that go along with false scarcity and what that means to the digital economy. Well what happens when that false scarcity starts happening to physical goods? I bring this up for discussion because I've spent the last couple of days looking at getting a MakerBot CNC 3D printer and while looking at it I found the RepRap 3D printer which is almost fully self replicating. You can then go to thingverse and download real world, usable, physical objects including the RepRap 3D printer. So now just like with music and movies we can share physical objects with each other and all we need to print it is the digital design and enough plastic or other materials to create the object. If you haven't seen this tech and how much it has grown in the last two years, you are really missing out. These things even decorate cupcakes!"

Basically we are at the point where we can take a raw material input stream and print whatever objects we want. The next step would be to be able to make things out of exotic materials.