More 3D Printer News

tallackn writes "The New Scientist website has an article that tells of a 3D gadget printer which will allow fully assembled electric and electronic gadgets to be printed in one go. 'The trick is to print layer upon layer of conducting and semiconducting polymers in such a way that the circuitry the device requires is built up as part of the bodywork.' When the technique is perfected, devices such as light bulbs, radios, remote controls, mobile phones and toys will be spat out as individual fully functional systems without expensive and labour-intensive production on an assembly line."

Comments

Re: No, YOU missed the point

[Anonymous Coward]

All I want for Christmas is 1% of slashdotters to read the stories before they post!

The lightbulbs they're referring to are more like LED's, the kind that light up when you press a button on the TV remote you just printed out.

Re:Yeah, we need this for lightbulbs...

[Have Blue]

I'm pretty sure current 3D printing methods take place in a vacuum anyway. And light bulbs don't contain vacuum, but rather inert gases designed to retard the disintegration of the filament.

Re:Yeah, we need this for lightbulbs...

[iamdrscience]

yeah, they have argon in them, but they're also of a lower pressure than the air outside of them, a.k.a. being vaccuous inside.

Re:Logic gates not a computer

[frovingslosh]

You not only need logic gates, you need to connect them together. You need to be able to make them really small, and they need to be really fast, and you need to do it all really cheap, to beat conventional semiconductor logic. As we're still (according to the people who build this stuff) able to squeeze more performance out of conventional semiconductors for another decade or so, there's no real incentive to throw megabucks at the engineering required to do the above.

Connecting them together isn't really much of a problem, you just position the gates so they connect. We're talking about light beams; I think the article pointed out how you could even let the beams cross in the same plane, something you can't do with electrical circuits. Making the gates small enough may well have been the real issue, although the paranoid in me wonders if the technology didn't get developed but is being kept from us.

The incentive would certainly be there tough. The gates ran at the speed of light, and didn't generate heat. In theory an optical compter could run off room light or at worst a small lamp, could provide it's own optical input and output devices, and should be inexpensive to produce. If you want another economic incentive, imagine this: Software could be delivered on an optical medium that included it's own custom processor designed/optimized for that application. It would go in a stack of optical software that communicated with the storage and primary I/O devices over an optical network built into a predefined location on the media. The whole issue of pirating software changes when the software comes with it's own custom processor right on the media. Software designers can be confident that the hardware will support the application and there will not be other applications taking resources because they deliver it with software, they just need an (optical) network to get to a network printer and I/O devices (and for portable use the optical computer might contain it's own display and input device), or simply hook up to a thin tablet like device. I see economic incentive written all over this.