Slashdot Mirror

The ZScanner 700 was available in 2006. I first became interested the following year, when the ZScanner 800 was released. They were not new even then.

Yeah, I know... not a webcam. They were $50,000.

This company is obviously not the only player in the market. In fact, a friend of mine currently works for another company http://www.zcorp.com/ developing the material they use in the printers. Nothing to see here...

Sorry, links are fixed here: If you are really interested in the technology of rapid prototyping and would like to learn more, goto: http://www.prototypemagazine.com/ And Yes it's possible to build a "Klien Bottle" http://emsh.calarts.edu/~mathart/sw/klein/Klein.html Full color parts and moving assemblies, http://www.zcorp.com/Solutions/Rapid-Prototypes---CAD/spage.aspx, Transparent, Opaque, Elastomeric, Rigid, Plastic, Metal, Ceramic, Wax... Allare available as a service from a prototype house somewhere in your area. http://wohlersassociates.com/service-providers.html All you need is a good solid or surface model to work from. I spent 14 years in the RP business, just about anything is possible, it just costs $$$.

If you are really interested in the technology of rapid prototyping and would like to learn more, goto: http://www.prototypemagazine.com/ And Yes it's possible to build a "Klien Bottle" http://emsh.calarts.edu/~mathart/sw/klein/Klein.html/ Full color parts and moving assemblies, http://www.zcorp.com/Solutions/Rapid-Prototypes---CAD/spage.aspx/, Transparent, Opaque, Elastomeric, Rigid, Plastic, Metal, Ceramic, Wax... Allare available as a service from a prototype house somewhere in your area. http://wohlersassociates.com/service-providers.html/ All you need is a good solid or surface model to work from. I spent 14 years in the RP business, just about anything is possible, it just costs $$$.

I'd also have to agree that *most* of the proposals for personal manufacturing don't adequetely cater to the production of miniatures. There is hope however. 3D-Micromac ( http://www.3d-micromac.com/home.html ) is currently marketing a machine capable of producing feature sizes less than 100 nanometers! Of course that's beyond the scope of the overwhelming majority of at-home-manufactureres, but the ability to produce something, anything at that scale and in your home is at least possible if you've got the cash. I'm obviously less optimistic that the price of such a machine will become affordable for the average Joe based on the fact that Joe currently has no need for that capability. I would argue that it's at least reasonable, however, that your desire to produce detailed miniatures is on the horizon. I used to design for Johnson & Johnson where we constantly concepted parts for medical instruments utilizing "lost wax" prototyping techniques for extremely small parts. Utilizing InVision "wax printers" ( http://www.3dsystems.com/products/projet/library.asp - gallery ), we could produce amazing molds which were then used to cast functional parts for validation. The process is not at all dissimilar to the creation of detailed miniatures and figurines. Typically in your application, an artist will carve an original which is cast in urethane (or some other compliant material). From that cast, a mold is made to produce multiple copies. Even if the production is extremely limited, this is the standard method because no other technique is as feasible. Essentially your application is highly specialized but I have no doubt that one day your desire to produce miniatures will be posssible and affordable @ home given the current rate of technological advancement and market demand.

They are certainly using a ZCorp printer. To the best of my knowledge, ZCorp still is the only manufacturer to make a multi-color 3D printer. These would be easy to print ( I run a zcorp machine). It is hard to judge the print volume from the photos, but it appears to be a pretty fair price considering the cost of the machine, materials and post processing time.

Or actually more like this: http://www.zcorp.com/Products/3D-Printers/Spectrum-Z510/spage.aspx

Used these at a previous job and they are pretty cool. Not cheap though...

Z-Corp are producing (printing?) 3D printers and they use a bath of powder instead of deposition. This has the advantage that you don't need to print supports any more. They also have a colour printer (inkjet I think). They have some nice videos of their 3D printers.

Z-Corp are producing (printing?) 3D printers and they use a bath of powder instead of deposition. This has the advantage that you don't need to print supports any more. They also have a colour printer (inkjet I think). They have some nice videos of their 3D printers.

I'd love to see this move to the 3D (Z Corp) printers for a very fast print cycle.

I also like this technology over color laserjet printers for FPO (first page out) speed. Cost will have to be another factor, hopefully it will be much cheaper than laser color toner.

A Zalman TNN 500a Case or a simulat custom built one with all that fits inside without making noise. All x86 CPUs and all memory that fits in, all OSes and most used software ready configured and installed into an extended BIOS ready to run 5 seconds after I booted. No HDDs, all SSDs. The fastest OpenGL card available.

Curiously enough, the Mac Pro Quad Core maxed out with all that fits in (~19 000 €) comes pretty much close to what I'd consider the best possible workstation.

Imagine a maxed out Quad Core Mac Pro with SSDs in all 4 bays and a passive heatpipe cooling. That would be my dream machine. I guess the SSDs (custom built from these guys), the extended BIOS and the manpower to set it all up for me would be the biggest pricepoints for the box itself. 40 000 to 60 000 dollars? Dunno, something like that.

As periferals I'd like a thermal transfer printer (with 20 000 pages worth of ink and spare parts), a high end inkjet with 200 000 pages top quality paper and the ink for printing on them and a Z-Corp 3D rapid prototyping printer plus enough high-performance material, binder and color to print an entire army of Heavy Gear Mech figures and a few Star Wars Spaceships. All drivers preinstalled, tested and working.

Add in all the software goodies available for good measure (The entire Adobe Line, the entire Apple Line, Lightwave 3D 9, all training DVDs and plugins available + any software needed to make best use of the printers and the prototyper). Maybe some programming productivity / software design applications as an extra (Gentleware Enterprise CASE System, The Visual Paradigm Enterprise line)

Last but not least the system should come with all this in a documented base configuration where all of the above is set up and works and a tested desaster recovery to restore it should the need arise.

All this could easyly amount to 200 000 - 300 000 Euros - and still fit in a normal room. Then again, you said money doesn't matter.

I think that setup would keep me busy for a while. :-)

put little busts on your desktop? in full color?
take a look at the ability of
http://zcorp.com/products/printersdetail.asp?ID=2

or this
http://flickr.com/photos/garyfixler/31107069/

3d Printers are an awesome tool for designing... Usually you use them to create models instead of the product. Watching them work is insane. These days they print in color.. Think of the movie 5th element... when the machine sprays the chick together...
Recently i got to work with an architect who designed & built a house in Australia using a industrial laser cutter to produce all the components for the house. This is a very cool looking building that could only be output from a computer. This machine sounds like it can do the same on a mass scale with materials besides wood.. Using hand tools to create this type of architecture is arcane at best. I hope to see some decent product from this technology not just cheap looking pre-fab buildings.
this link is a 3d printer company. Check it out if the technology interests you

Zcorp http://www.zcorp.com/ and other companies have been making and selling these things for years including ones that print in color. I've watched the price of these things fall from $100k+ to (I think) about $40,000 these days. If $40k is too much for you then email your file to one of the dozens of small 3D printing shops that will let you print out your part for a couple bucks.

Look at Z Corporation : http://www.zcorp.com/

There are versions of this that can print in metal even, they fuse a metal powder mixed with some nin-metal binder, then somehow get rid of the binder and fill in with more metal.

Dave

I remember hearing of 3d printers http://www.zcorp.com/products/printersdetail.asp?I D=1 on slashdot and couldn't imagine seeing a prototype in my lifetime. Now they're available off the shelf, just a few years later.

An article about hard disks lining up charges vertically instead of horizontally along the track preceded today's ~1tb hard drives.

I'm sure there are a half-dozen other examples I cant think of.

Why does dreaming make you so uncomfortable? It's what we do.

Ah, but humans have spent the last 100,000+ years of their lives living in "affluence" in terms of lots of free time and an abundance of food. It is only the last few thousands years of agricultural empires and industrialism that have been the anomaly. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_affluent_soc iety
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm
So, I see no reason humans can not adapt to a post-scarcity society brought on by stuff like:
http://reprap.org/
or:
http://www.zcorp.com/products/printersdetail.asp?I D=2

It is the challenge of modern times to have the benefits of the stone age lifestyle without the limitations and bad parts. Home 3D printing seems like a step in the right direction:
    http://www.zcorp.com/products/printersdetail.asp?I D=2
When something like that could print stuff that works like an iPod (and not just pretty mockups) then even more of the rationale for work will disappear.

What about those 3d-object printers. Sure, they're used in labs somewhere, but when will these things become commercially viable and available?

I have a jaw problems, so I went and got a CT scan of my head. The results were given to me on a CD-ROM in a standard format called DICOM. I had the data converted into an STL file format mesh of my skull using software called Mimics (google cache, site seems to be down at the moment). I then had it output on a Z-printer, which is one of those 3D printers your talking about, I presume. So basically, I now have an anatomically correct life-size model of my skull. The data conversion and the printing cost me around $500 US each. At first I thought it was so cool to be able to do this with technology now and that it was a work of art, but then I started to get the creeps after it sunk in that I was holding an actual copy of my skull.

You already can produce a cheap clone of anything!

You could keep your china safely packaged away, and put your nice copies up on the shelf.

I don't think they would be usable in this version (prototypes are like stiff rubber from what I understand), but give it a few more years.

http://www.zcorp.com/products/printersdetail.asp?I D=2

While it is cool that they can do this, I hope it leads to more complicated things like joints being grown to the right shape

You can create joints grown to the right shape. You can create Rapid Prototyping Models of bones from CT scans. You can have CT scans of bones exported to a format called DICOM which you can then have converted to a file format called STL, used in Rapid Prototyping. In your case, you could probably get a CT Scan of your other wrist in DICOM format, and have the STL mesh flipped to be a mirror image.

There are some services that can provide conversion software, or do the file conversions, as well as provide the RP models, although the models are made through stereolythography from what I gather. There are newer methods of creating rapid prototyping models that use the same STL file format, that are probably more precise.

You can obtain some software packages that let you do the conversion yourself, and although there is probably a bit of a learning curve, the biggest problem would be the price. It would be best to just let the services handle the conversion and you choose which Rapid Prototyping method to use.

From this point, you can use the model to construct a titanium mold, which could then be used to produce actual bone. And as for cartilege for the joint, the Carticel cartilege growth and transplant procedure could probably be applied. The FDA has approved Carticel for the knees and hips, but it would be up to a doctor's discretion to apply it in other ways.

3d printer you say?

Done and done.

• 3D haptic input device
• 3D scanner
• 3D printer

Although others have pointed out that the fight isn't over the FAT system - I have noted that no one has even mentioned the mainframes and minis which came long before micros ever appeared.

I've worked on Univac 1108's, 1106's, NAS 9000s, IBM System 3's, Honeywell systems, and the original Vax's as well as some PDP systems. These all used the 8.3 filename convention and is where (I believe) the usage of 8.3 filenames under DOS came about. (Remember original DOS used EBCDIC which is an IBM standard and the PC was to originally be a "very small" mainframe.) All of these mainframes had a FAT system in place for the usage of the disk drives. So there are decades of prior FAT usage and setup. So FAT and the 8.3 filenaming convention is a done deal.

The usage of long/short names and the mapping of long/short names one to the other was done under Unix years before Microsoft even came along. This was called linking. Further, Digital Equipment Corporation, under VMS, came out with a method to do the same thing prior to Microsoft ever having done this. It is such an obvious misuse of the patent system that, as another poster put it, this is just another example of how broken our government is in this respect.

The truth, as I see it, is that we are in a war over whether or not our original systems of Patenting and Copyrighting things, as created by the people who put pen to paper, will survive. When the rules were written; it was another time. A time when it took months or years to do even one thing. (Like filing for a patent.) In today's world things are vastly different and, with the push of a button, you can submit a patent on anything to the PTO. This reduction of time means that, at some point, it becomes an exercise in logic programming to generate new patents. The basic idea behind the Patent system was to guarantee time to an individual - because it took so long to recoup your investment - so they could make a profit. Today, some inventions are overnight successes. Granted - not all, but even the creation-to-market time span is shortening. Especially when there are devices out there that can create 3D objects. So the question becomes - is the Patent and Copyright system broken because of misuse - or because they are an outmoded methodology? I think the latter.

Maybe it's time we re-invented the Patent and Copyright systems so they work in the modern world. For instance, centralize where all payments on Patents and Copyrights go. Standardize on how much has to be paid per P&C. (Like 1% of a company's gross has to be set aside to pay P&Cs. Or maybe a default amount per unit sold could be come up with. <Whatever is come up with - it should be fair - as in "Atom smashers are a lot more rare than bubble gum."> This would eliminate some P&Cs being sold at some high amount versus others which are paid only minimal amounts. And yes - there are some really stupid P&Cs out there. This is just a general methodology that I am writing.) Standardize how much is to be paid on Patents and Copyrights. Standardize how often payments are to be made to the holders of Patents and Copyrights. Standardize on how long Patents and Copyrights can exist. (I personally am in favor of the life of the author plus twenty years and no more. I am also in favor of making it illegal to change this in any way, shape, or form because of what we just went through via the DMCA. Or at least make it illegal to change it without the consent of the people. Not Congress and/or the Senate as both have been shown to be untrustworthy in this area.) Standardize top level categories. Create a standardized entry number system. Entry numbers into the system could be assigned based upon the importance/weight of an entry. (In other words - truly unique ideas are at the top. Those t

In light of the exceptional (and continued) success of the Open-Source Software model as well as the proliferation of peer-to-peer networks, I would like to get Slashdot readers' opinions on how a similar fledgling model is being applied to ideas, inventions, and patents. Particularly, I am interested in how advances in 3D and circuit board printers could lead to the 'Napsterization' of commercial products.

We have all had our own version of the Jump to Conclusions mat which never saw the light of day due to our own time and resource commitments. What if implementing that idea were as easy as contributing to an open source project. Ok, what if it were almost that easy?

My reasoning is this: I have noticed a recent rise in "open idea" sites such as Half Bakery, SlipHead, and Should Exist. These sites all have one common theme: put your idea out in a public discussion forum for others to enjoy, contemplate, and critique. My thoughts are that this methodology, coupled with the growing ease of desktop manufacturing, has a potential to revolutionize the way new concepts are created and developed. It also has potentially profound effects on procuring patents, business practices, and intellectual property in general. The question then is: How can these open ideologies and development processes excel within a predominately capitalistic society?

What are your thoughts?

Hmm, Z Corp Maybe?

3D printers / rapid prototyping systems are even cooler than that. Make anything you like (within the size limits of the printer). Check out Z Corp's printers (or a BBC news article).

I have one at work. Check out Z Corp. Very geeky and _EXTREMELY_ expensive. In many places this costs the same as a house.

Is the internet, which can be used for almost anything besides transferring actual physical objects (wouldn't that be cool!)

• Z-Corp makes color 3-D printers that make plastic objects. These'll generally run you under $10k.
• Strata Sys makes stereolithography printers. More expensive, and not in color, but stronger. They're about $30k.
• EOS GmbH makes printers that make metal parts. You can print out replacement parts for your car, rocket ship, etc. (Warning - web site uses Flash, Mozilla-squashed popups, annoying no-copy PDFs) No mention of price on the site :-/

Yes, it only takes one person to design a "mod chip", but what about when each instance of the DRM-enabled hardware requires its own custom chip?
Hopefully by then, he'll be able to e-mail me the circuit diagram and I'll be able toprint my own chip. It will happen!

and instead there are going to have to focus on promoting concerts, t-shirts, and other things that can't be ripped from the web.

Yeah, until 3D Printing comes to the desktop... Then we can print whatever we want!

The point is, you can't hide from technology. It WILL find you. The RIAA is the embodiment of the ancient rich corporation who refuses to believe that the world has changed around them.

does anyone know of someplace which is offering access to these printers to paying customers? I would be perfectly happy to email CAD plans to a fabricator if I could get a quick, cheap kit of parts back in the mail.

See the 'z corp' who are running a program for free - as a marketing ploy: send them a *.stl here

I don't understand why this is news. At Siggraph they have had the 3D printers for years. You can get 3D printers that plug into networks via regular Ethernet and you can feed it CAD files. They have shown full working models of things like engines. Check out Z Corp and a whole list of resources here.

This is far from a "replicator." The items take quite a bit of time to built up. Even small items take over a day. Not an instant solution by far...

Not only has this technology been around a while with plastics, it is now quite mature. Here is a site from Z Corp, demonstrating their technology that uses polymer powder and ink-jet technology to build 3D models at a lower cost and greater coonvenience than laser-sintered or liquid-resin technologies. Although being able to make things out of ice without a chainsaw or a mold is cool.

Z Corporation actually sells 3D-printers that use powder-gluing process to create [optionally colorful] 3D-models of pretty much anything (small enough). Models take several hours to produce, though they have decent volumetric resolution (about 0.1 mm) and can be created of wide range of materials (metals included, imho). Material has to be glueable and powderable. The powder then is put as a thin layer on a piston, an ink-jet head is used to put [colored] glue on it, forming a section. Then the piston is moved a little downwards, and a new thin layer of powder is put above; then the process continues. It allows to create models with 'dangling' parts. Models can de imported from CADs and even VRML.

The sad part of the story is that the device costs about $67k %-)

Some time before, as one can remember, another technology was proposed. It employed liquid polymer that can be made solid by laser light. But it was impossible to create dangling parts with it (something like several connected chain rings), because some parts of such things have to 'float' during layer-by-layer creation process. In liquid, they sank. In powder, they're firm.

Z Corporation actually sells 3D-printers that use powder-gluing process to create [optionally colorful] 3D-models of pretty much anything (small enough). Models take several hours to produce, though they have decent volumetric resolution (about 0.1 mm) and can be created of wide range of materials (metals included, imho). Material has to be glueable and powderable. The powder then is put as a thin layer on a piston, an ink-jet head is used to put [colored] glue on it, forming a section. Then the piston is moved a little downwards, and a new thin layer of powder is put above; then the process continues. It allows to create models with 'dangling' parts. Models can de imported from CADs and even VRML.

The sad part of the story is that the device costs about $67k %-)

Some time before, as one can remember, another technology was proposed. It employed liquid polymer that can be made solid by laser light. But it was impossible to create dangling parts with it (something like several connected chain rings), because some parts of such things have to 'float' during layer-by-layer creation process. In liquid, they sank. In powder, they're firm.

To go along with the ice printer, Z corp has a corn starch based 3D printer that uses a standard inkjet nozzle that squirts water onto a layer of "dough". For each pass, a new layer of dough is rolled out over the top of the previous.

Oh, and this unit can also print in color, so say goodbye to handmaking those christmas sugar cookies.

To go along with the ice printer, Z corp has a corn starch based 3D printer that uses a standard inkjet nozzle that squirts water onto a layer of "dough". For each pass, a new layer of dough is rolled out over the top of the previous.

Oh, and this unit can also print in color, so say goodbye to handmaking those christmas sugar cookies.

Here's a better one: Z Corporations Z402 3D printer. It's been available for a few years and costs about $50,000. At 1-2 inches per hour (vertical) it's quick for a 3D printer. Does color printing and the model is a bit easier to handle than a block of ice. Looks like they're offering to print a free sample at the moment, too.

A couple of years ago at the Radiological Society of North America convention, I ran into a company called Z Corp that was marketing a 3D printer that squirted an epoxy-type liquid onto a layer of resin powder in ink-jet fashion. The printer was fed data from a 3D model generated by their software, which could take input from a series of 2D images (such as what you'd get from a CT or MRI scan). At the time they were looking at expanding their market to reconstructive surgery and other fields where they could use medical images. The printing process was kind of slow though. A full-sized head model took about 4-6 hours to "print".

Pretty nifty stuff.

imabug