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3D Printing of Custom Personal Electronics Arrives
Zothecula writes "Researchers at the University of Warwick have created a cheap plastic composite that can be used even with low-end 3D printers, to produce custom-made electronic devices. The material, nicknamed 'carbomorph,' is both conductive and piezoresistive, meaning that both electronic tracks and touch-sensitive areas can now be easily embedded in 3D-printed objects without the need for complex procedures or expensive materials."
I just printed out a better phone.
(Or is that still a ways off? Ahem.)
can't wait to print my intel core 6 core 980X !!!
I'm perplexed how much a laser engraver costs, but want to do some custom mold engraving on the cheep (as in bird seed) looks like I need to get cracking on building a 3D printer and skip the costly laser engraver (plus Mach3 software to direct it.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
And just yesterday (and I mean yesterday), a self-proclaimed smart person was telling me that 3D printers would never be able to make anything useful.
You are welcome on my lawn.
For this stuff to practical on a small ( consumer ) scale. Lets hope we get there before the law gets in the way and derails it all.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Just wait until the MegaCorps© figure out that being able to 3D print our own electronics means we don't need them anymore.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
A 3d printer to make my dinner, then years from now I can be one of those old guys yelling at kids about a time when you had to prep and cook your food and fortunate they should feel.
The article seems to be more about embedding electronic sensors in flexible rubber-like plastic. The examples even show them printing out a modern version of the Nintendo PowerGlove(tm). I could see these being used to print out custom-fit full body suits serving the same basic functions.
http://interserver.net/
Patents, obscure designs, hardware DRM, I'm sure they'll figure something out.
I've been reading /. for at least a decade, and this is possibly the biggest news I've ever seen here. 15 comments?
This is a big deal. If I owned a major electronics company, there'd be an emergency meeting with all the lawyers and all the head boffins right now.
Probably easier for them to just have it lumped together as 'thoughtcrime' and prosecuted as such.
doubleplus ungood.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Wires and switches still only qualify as "electric" but not electronics. There is not much they can be used for by themselves.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Still, I wouldn't mind living in an age where you can "pirate" a 60" sony bravia tv and keep it secret by not connecting it to the internet (like some hacks for game consoles nowadays).
Printing of a conductive material into various shapes is so much different than printing of actual embedded electronics that we consider to be electronics--which requires complex silicon-based structures--something that is not something you just print.
Basically this technique is nice, but is not that much different than taking carbon black or some conductive particles, putting into a syringe of silicone rubber and squirting it out into various shapes. Combining with a multiple output 3D printer, you can embed the conductive elements into various parts of the structure--which is the nice part.
3D printers are mostly going to be for things like housings and maybe some simple touch buttons for still quite some time, dont get your hopes up. Inside your phone are things such as integrated circuits made from silicon, SiGe, etc, high density copper interconnects, the display and touchpanel which includes silicon, liquid crystals, resins in the color filter, micro-patterned plastic films for the backlight, ITO and metals in the touchpanel, polyimides for flex circuits and insulator layers, organic coatings all through the phone, LED's made from exotic material, the battery, inductors, capacitors, resistors, each of which are also made from pretty exotic materials.
So the point is, that its much more realistic to think about how something like a 3D printer could be a 3D assembly device. It could print the housing and some various moving parts, maybe even the antenna and some other parts of the device, but it would use a variety of semi-custom components that are sitting in its inventory--such as various generic integrated circuits, resistors, capacitors, inductors, diodes, and LEDs. So you could have something like a "MAKE FACTORY". Where in each city, there would be a factory that can actually make some pretty amazing stuff in less than 1 hour or something like that. It would have all of the major sub-components "in stock", and would be completely built and assembled by robots in a short period of time. This is a pretty achievable goal actually.
Still, I wouldn't mind living in an age where you can "pirate" a 60" sony bravia tv and keep it secret by not connecting it to the internet (like some hacks for game consoles nowadays).
Wouldn't it make more sense to just not print the part that phones home?
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Also - I have a Bravia. Good hardware, but the software for it is pure shite.
Save the headaches and print yourself a Samsung.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
When is my local Kinko's or Staples going to have a 3D printer where I can take my USB stick with an Autocad file?
Insulators/structural support - check
Conductors - check
Inductors - check
Resistors - check
Capacitors - check
Now all we need are two 3D-printable materials that can form a semiconductor and an extruder design that can automatically switch between all of those materials and the 3D printing bonanza will begin.
Someone Canceled Your Print Jobs
Already on its way. It would allow criminals printing guns. Concerned citizens. Moral panic. Legislation. Printers banned by a landslide.
I have the degree in EE, and a PhD to boot, and I must say that you are being incredibly myopic.
Nobody says that we can 3D print semiconductors at home today, and it won't be tomorrow either, but it's coming, or something equivalent is coming. Yes, there are a million things to solve first, and the result will be nothing like today's silicon technology, but there are many ways to skin a cat.
We may end up with something completely different for personal manufacturing than is used in industry today, because our requirements and resources are so different. Research on nanoscale materials and DNA-aided construction of nanoscale parts is progressing well, and 3D printers like today's may end up being assembly and wiring interconnection machines for nano-manufactured home-grown parts. We can't see the future, but the desire for personal manufacturing isn't going away, it's growing and growing as more people get a taste for it. Naysaying its future is very unwise.
They already did, it's called The Cloud.
Not any more than it would be feasible to remove the DRM hardware portion of an xbox360. You can, but then it would instantly stop working, since you're removing mission critical transistors that double as DRM.
Assuming one can 3D print an entire television, it's not a stretch of the imagination to think that they could, in process, redesign said mission critical transistors to function without the DRM component.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese