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A 3D Printer On Every Desktop?
holy_calamity writes "Two Cornell researchers have designed an open source 3D printer that costs just $2,400. The self-assembly kit is part of what they call the Fab@Home project — they hope it will spark development of rapid prototyping for the consumer market in the same way the Altair 8800 did for personal computing in seventies." Here is a video showing a completed machine constructing a silicone bulb (16-MB WMV).
Update: 01/10 04:02 GMT by KD : The developers of this kit are at Cornell, not Carnegie Mellon University as the original post erroneously stated.
Update: 01/10 04:02 GMT by KD : The developers of this kit are at Cornell, not Carnegie Mellon University as the original post erroneously stated.
Digital Rights Management for physical objects?
"they hope it will spark development of rapid prototyping for the consumer market in the same way the Altair 8800 did for personal computing in seventies."
I see them being used this way.
I'm a robotics post grad student, and I often work on robotics hobby projects in my spare time (little of it that there is!). Something affordable like this would rock my world in so many ways. The biggest question I have is how accurate is a self-assembly kit in practice? If you're trying to build prototype mechanisms or moulds for metal with the parts, how tight are your tolerances going to be? That said, for me, if it came down to a new car or a desktop rapid prototyping machine, the rapid prototyping machine will win every single time.
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When I read fab I was so hoping it could print out a working circuitboard from a custom design. Don't get me wrong, this is cool too. But imagine if we could get a circuit one. Computing has already accepted open source for software, there's some effort of open source hardware designs going on. With the equivalent of this for circuits, we'd put the ability to make new electronics designs in the hands of thousands of hobbyists. Just look at all the cool stuff that hobbyists have made with software, imagine what we be invented if they had hardware as well!
Now that I think of it- the combination of that and this would be truely awesome. A talented hacker, or a small team, could design software, hardware, and test out of their own homes without expensive produciton costs. It'd be a huge breakthrough.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Buckminster Fuller wanted to give every other person a lathe, and have the first thing each of them made to be another lathe - so, buy a 3D printer and make another one for a friend :)
In spring of 2004 I toured a UK university nanoscience/optics lab which was working on behalf of a major electronics manufacturer. They were, they said, printing transistors with a bubble/ink-jet type printer on to sheets of some material (they didn't specify what it was) for use in future displays. There was, we were told, no limit to the size of display they could print other than the carriage width.
The technology also allowed them to print extremely efficient light sources - 60% efficiency was the figure we were told, iirc. They were hoping it would replace normal lighting.
I just tried to repair the handle on a steam cleaner (it had broken in half). I don't think I could buy a replacement handle for ANY price (it's an older-model, non-industrial machine), but I could just scan and re-fab one with this machine.
/.ers, I'm continually fixing things and trying to create new tools and bins and toys in my workshop -- with a 3D printer, we can just think something up, model it, then print.
I'm also missing a foot for my laptop (it popped off at some point). Again, I could just print one in a couple of minutes...
Like most
Speaking of which, what's a good open-source CAD tool? I haven't found one yet, and I'd like to get familiar with one before these printers go mainstream.
coding is life
I can see a nice use case for plastic surgeons in particular. Here's a sample by-line for the next issue of "Annals of Plastic Surgery" http://www.annalsplasticsurgery.com/ - this'll in nicely next to the article "Advances in Mammaplasty - Reversing the droop":
"Fancy not having to order "parts" from your local Dow Corning rep anymore? Do you desire to offer your customers truly customised b00bs in a variety of shapes? Now you can do both - and they're ready in minutes!"
Amen. It would be simply awesome if there was a cheap way to print custom parts out of ABS plastic. It may not look the greatest because you'd be able to see the "steps" from the printing process. Because of this I doubt it would be practical to print Lego bricks or such things as that because the layers created during printing are where the part is weakest. When exposed to stress the part would be more likely to break on the layer lines. But even so, for hobbyists it would beat the hell out of having to commission a custom injection mold which usually costs at least $10,000.
Unfortunately, the materials page is absent of things like plastic, but there are some interesting ones: Gypsum (same stuff the Z-Corp 3D printers use), silicone, conductive paste and ink (prototype circuit boards), and even some metals. At this stage, I don't see these machines replacing traditional CNC/forging/casting/injection processes, but cheap desktop prototyping will certainly bring about a revolution in manufacturing.
-R
Anyone who has kids knows how quickly modern toys break. Parents are also well aware of the fact that toys rarely last on the shelf for more than a season and trying to get a manufacturer to send spare parts is damn near impossible. The possibility of open source toys, or at the very least replacement parts for closed source toys, is enticing. If these things can come down to a reasonable price (they also need some advances as far as color output) I think they could become quite popular.
:)
PS A cookie to the first person who can tell me what movie the subject of my post is from.
How does it print something like a mug where the handle doesn't loop completely back onto itself?
In the video it prints "up".. So do you simply have to print the mug and handle separately and then attach the two objects together?
By 'just started' I mean 'earlier this afternoon', so there's really nothing there, but the current address is openmechanics.netcipia.net -- if you know of a free wiki host that doesn't require outside users to register, let me know, I'd like this to be pretty open. The registration is free, btw. At any rate, there's really nothing there but a pseudo-mission statement, but I'm eager to build the thing, so stop on by, drop an email addy and we'll get started!
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Call me a cynic, but this thing hardly looks ready for primetime. In fact it looks to work far worse than 3D prototype printers I saw demonstrated 5-7 years ago did.
"Two Carnegie Mellon researchers..." translation: "Two graduate students' thesis project"
For those that didn't watch the video, it looks like a time-lapse speed up of a caterpillar building a cocoon. Seriously it has an almost creepy organic look. There is no time mark on the video so there is no indication of how long this thing took to build. The shape is brain-dead simple. Can it spin anything more complex than a circle as it builds? What good is a printer that can only make balls, cylinders, and bulbs? Presumably this item is flexible being made of silicone rubber, but that seems to be more a side effect of it being built on the cheap with off the shelf materials. It even had to be "refilled" half way through building this rather small bulb, which is mostly air to start with!
For all the people than mentioned using this device to repair things around the house, I hope the only thing that ever breaks around your house is your turkey baster (assuming this thing can print a bulb that large).
As has been mentioned by other posters, these machines will only become truly useful when they can extrude a variety of materials with a variety of material properties. I would imagine you could get a range of properties in stiffness and heat resistance by varying proportions of two or three basic plastic polymers with perhaps a few additional curing additives. Rather than demand a 100% build from scratch perhaps a few standard sized metal reinforcement parts could be thrown into the mix, though this would require a pause while the machine requested user assistance to add screws, rings, dowels, or thread a wire or two.
Really useful auto manufacturing will require serious breakthroughs in AI and robotics to assembling a variety of fabricated parts into something useful, only then will manufacturing prices plummet. Keep in mind we have had auto-milling machines for decades and they haven't obsoleted most manufacturing processes. They can also mill into custom shapes a much wider range of materials.
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The Modela MDX-15 is only $2995.
It's not only a mill, but a 3d scanner too.
For all of you drooling over the $2400 price tag, is $600 more really so much to ask?
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