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

Consider the significance...

[boomgopher]

computers will be able to have babies.

Then when neural nets become fast enough to allow self-learning - wow...

Recursive?

[Tablizer]

Do we have to pay royalties if we print a printer?

Not a "3D printer"

[Animats]

This isn't a "3D printer". This is another "we're going to fab semiconductors really cheap by using a printing process".

If somebody could actually make that work, flat-panel displays would be made with it. Many people have tried. (Remember "e-ink"? Flexible displays? Same concept.) It's not a new idea; it's an old one that's hard to do. It was first suggested decades ago for solar cell manufacturing. It didn't work even for that, and solar cell fab is very forgiving; as long as most of the cells work and the duds don't short out the array, it's fine.

Now, if they'd announced "we have it working", that would be a story.

Re:Not a "3D printer"

[lingqi]

I really don't think that's the point, though.

This is a different way of manufacturing stuff, and in a way closer to the nanotech promise of universal manipulators in its function and operations. (this part is not as important, but i thought i'd point it out - because if the print nozzles get small enough and resolution high enough - what is the difference between this and a univ.manipulator in practical terms?)

besides, non-electronic stuff can already be "printed."

there are a few impacts that I think needs to be considered:

ford completely changed "manufacturing" by inventing the assembly line. Now we are going back the other way of making things one at a time. this is interesting - from a economic perspective if anything:

there are always tradeoffs in the world (let's focus on manufacturing): let's take, for example, if you want to make a silicon chip for some application; you can either get a FPGA (field programmable gate array) from Altera / Xilinx / whoever, or go for a ASIC process with custom plates and stuff. for big runs ASIC is cheaper, for small runs FPGA is cheaper.

same thing with buring CDs. you want a few CDs of your stuff? you can burn them or send them to be stamped. under 1000 copies, don't even think about stamping.

exactly the same in manufacturing - even though assembly line is nice and efficient, there is the infrastructure cost and the start-up cost/delay (especially for big / complex stuff). this is problematic in several ways:

1) designing for an assembly line sucks because making models of what you are trying to make eventually is a completely different process. making models takes a lot of time, and they are not always 100% reprasentative / difficult to change, etc (why do you think so many uses computers to do industrial design / modelling?)
2) making changes to an assembly line (say, to correct error / bug) also suck, if in a rigid configuration (what, you mean my gate masks are wrong and I have to etch another one?).
3) small runs / cheap crap (toys, say) does not warrent a real "assembly line" and a humanized assembly line / having humans make them would be expensive. to solve this problem, many manufacture of cheap stuff offload them to, say, china - where stuff are made by hand in assembly, mostly. This is *still* relatively expensive, prone to humar error, cause bag working conditions, etc.

being able to "print out" a working model / product solves all three and fits neatly in a segment that desperatly needs, or would at least hugely benefit, from sucha technology.

I welcome it. It also may mean that instead of building lego robot command toys, my kids will be able to design his whatever gizmo in a computer and just "print it out."

but when an actual product is as easy to "copy" as a song on a CD - boy we will see some crazy changes in the future! This if anything convinces me of the not-so-distant singularity, and its proximity.

Re:Expensive

[exhilaration]

Give it a few years - once the technology is sufficiently mature, it *will* be cheaper. If you can eliminate just 20 factory workers making $20k each in the United States, that's a yearly saving of $400k-$500k, based on their benefits, etc.

Of course, it'll still be cheaper to move manufacturing out of the U.S. You can't beat paying a Mexican or Chinese worker $1k-$5k/year for assembling electronics. This technology will probably be reserved for "high-end" stuff.

Re:Cool!!!

[Burwood]

Damn and blast! I got here too late to throw out the Diamond Age reference! Seriously, though, anyone have any ideas as to what widespread application and refinement of this technology would mean to the entire labor force? The economic impact of this could be devastating inside a mere 20 years without changing labor's basic place in economics. And if this technology becomes available to people in their homes the way microwave ovens have, we really are looking at creating a Feed system.

Re:Expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

So what? who cares. get a better job. the future of tomorrow is customers ordering from a computer in a fast food restraunt while machines assemble your order. no need for worker slaves anymore. you should be happy that minimum wage jobs will disappear. ACT HAPPY! NOW!

Sometimes, expense doesn't matter

[Bruce Perens]

One great application for this, if it works, is in helping to bootstrap extraterrestrial habitation. The problem is not to get all of the stuff there (Mars, wherever), but to make new stuff once you are there because you can not possibly afford the delta-V to bring everything. Without this sort of technology (or nanotech, about which I am dubious) once there you are limited to fabrication of early 1900's technology.

But it's a while before we see a device like this replicate itself. That is the turning point.

Bruce

Re:A significant drawback

[geekoid]

Perhaps we can build a device that breaks down the broken components back into 3d printer "ink"?

star trek?

[dethl]

hrm, we're coming ever closer to many more star trek gadgets...nice...to be able to "print" a device of my choosing is nice...however...it could be nice to make the parts printed interchangable...print off pieces, put them together, a functioning device...and if something on it fails, replace that certain piece. Note that as with all technology, everything starts out expensive...maybe the machine itself will become dirt cheap like regular printers (except the companies will charge an arm and a leg for the "ink" still)

Re:Cool!!!

[silentbozo]

Another reference that uses replication technology is "Psychohistorical Crisis", which builds on Asimov's psychohistory from the Foundation series. It takes place several centuries after the formation of the Second Empire, and everybody trades patterns for items, instead of items themselves. No point in transporting the mass of an object, if you can just recreate the object (clothes, tools, books, etc) on demand when you get to your destination. The tech is nanoassembler-based (I think) rather than the Star Trek energy-to-matter replicator.

Long yearsaway from being a reality for consumers.

[Anonymous Coward]

If it ever manifests, that is. Regular printers and similar devices like CD and DVD burners have taken 8-20 years to reach the popular consumer market, longer if you're looking back to when the technology itself debuted.

Wonder what the IP laws will look like by the time regular Joes can afford a 3D printer? (Will looking at something and remembering how it's made constitute a DMCA-3 violation?)

Thank Bucky...

[djupedal]

R. Buckminster Fuller would have loved to see his dream mature. Bucky wanted to give a metal lathe to every other person...with the agreement that the first thing they would make would be another lathe for the remaining half of the population.

This one is for you, R.B. Thanks!

Re: Service Economy = Servitude = Slavery

[benzapp]

And as for labor's basic place in economics, it should be noted that in present day US, only 10% of the work force or so have industrial jobs.

And 20% are paper pushers working in the white color bureucratic world office world, 30% are government workers.. umm working, 10% work hard in the healthcare field making sure everyone can eat as much food as they could ever want. 20% work in the educational/social services establishment making sure everyone is as dumb as possible thus ensuring their own future employment. Everyone else works in some franchise service industry.

Oh, and lets not forget the 2% of Americans in PRISON.

The reality is we went from independent farmers in the United States (not in EUROPE however), to factory workers, to jobs.

Jobs today don't actually contribute anything of value to society. What we have is a gigantic make work program in the aftermath of the industrial revolution. Keep your citizens in school for half their productive life, keep 'em busy in some pointless job, and then shove 'em in a retirement apartment complex for however long they live past 65.

The economic impact of efficient production is not devastating; quite the opposite.

This is certainly true. The reality is human ingenuity has made work unnecessary to accomplish anything of real value. The problem we have today is that in a society where we are raised from kindgergarten or earlier to follow orders and be part of a "team", people have to either lead or be led or they cause all sorts of trouble (in the eyes of our rulers). The reality is work is no longer necessary for the vast majority of our citizens and employment/unemployment has little to do with life as it is today.

I absolutely agree with you that the we should not stop innovation. HOWEVER technology and human ingenuity are making traditional life as humans have known for the past few millenia pointless. Just when technology is allowing for people to spend their lives truly living, we are further turning our people into mindless drones to serve a bureucratic system rather then letting them explore the infinite possibilities of existence on their own.

Now is the time to give people their lives back. The educational/social services system must be abolished. The industrial economy at least produced things of value, often questionalable. The service economy is nothing more than modern slavery, which the schools gleefully train us to accept. Servitude is for slaves, it is not the foundation of a society or an economy.