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3-D Printing Pen Can Draw In the Air
Several readers sent word of a new addition to the 3-D printing industry. Most 3-D printers are roughly the size of regular printers, and require design files on the computer to guide the extruder. Now there's a much smaller and much simpler alternative: the 3Doodler pen, which lets you draw 3-D objects by hand. The people making the pen set up a Kickstarter project yesterday with a $30,000 goal. They reached that within hours, and now have pledges exceeding $800,000. "The 3Doodler pen is 180mm by 24mm. The pen weighs less than 200 grams or 7 ounces (the weight of a typical apple), although the exact weight will depend on the final shell specifications once in production. And we are using a universal power supply, so provided you have the correct adapter for your country, 3Doodler will work just fine on 110v or 240v. ... While the plastic extruded from 3Doodler is safe to touch once it has left the pen, the pen itself has a metal tip that can get as hot as 270C." The pen uses the same ABS/PLA plastic as most 3-D printers, and they're planning to host stencil designs on their website so that users have patterns to sketch from.
All that for a hot glue gun?
As useless as it sounds at first, I think most of us will spend more than a couple of minutes or even hours doodling with it.
I hope it becomes a reality!
so it's basically a glue gun that squirts out colored glue.
.... that the very first thing I thought of when I read the headline was spiderman's webshooters.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Can we go a week without some new 3d printing story?
Somebody should take a few of these up to the space station.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
All examples are drawing on a flat surface then upending the design to show it is '3D' and or connect the surface details.
This is achievable with a hot glue gun on a no-stick surface, ABS feed simply has more recognition in the 3D printing community.
Surely this goes totally against the main advantage of 3D printing - create a complex shape in CAD and click print - no crafting knowledge/skill necessary! You get accuracy and get to go do other stuff while your creation is being printed.
This just looks like.... hassle.
Should be "3-D Printing Pen Can Spray Molten Plastic".
*ahem* How do you keep it up?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Just what we need, more plastic Eiffel Towers.
Such negative comments... This is a prettty cool idea, not for replacing a 3d printer, just something using similar technology... Reminds me of the hot wire styrofoam cutters when I was a kid... A toy CNC, nichts? This is a crowd pleaser, just for fun, like a toy. There is a real 3d wire bender too yhat can take a cad file and render it, somewhat, but that is different. Kudos to the inventors! And to the critics, go do something useful instead...
Us old timers used to play with something similar called a spin welder. Not exactly plastic extrusion but not that far off.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IiACyulRE78
Got Code?
Sure it will print "in the air" as long as the object printed is supported by something else. Take a look at the examples. They are all standing on something. To me drawing in the air means having no support. Why is the accurate description of "3D printing sculpture by hand" not good enough?
Tie this pen to a robotic arm to control the movement of the tip very precise. Also control the speed of travel and may be bead size. May be tie three or four such pens oozing different materials. That contraption is the equivalent of rendering images using scalable vector graphics instead of raster scanning!. If we adjust the temperature and material properties, and some kind of active cooling we could create very strong wire frames. May be these wire frames could form the skeleton with some kind of charge to accrete charge particles to acquire thickness, color and other surface properties. The possibilities are endless.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
...and use some sofware to replay it on a conventional 3d printer. In this way you could mass produce your "sketches" as "prints". You could also lay out models by sketching in air, import the "sketch" to your modeling program to refine it, then print a finished piece.
I don't get the hype on this. It's not a 3D printer, it's a plastic extruder. We've had them for as long as we've had plastic.
AC because moderated above
We got a 3D printer a little less than three weeks ago (Replicator 2). In that time, we've gone from having to machine parts for our mechanical prototype system (2+ weeks) to being able to print parts in less than 2 hours. This is saving us so much time (which = $), I can't begin to tell you how important it's become. So, yeah, I'm happy to see more 3D stories on /.
I am taking credit for the coining the phrase "freestyle 3D printing" of which this is the official implement. Congratulations 3Doodler for reading my mind/
'Maybe' is ONE WORD...
Seriously couldn't we just draw some of these here? With factory automation and all why isn't it feasible to make these at home? I always look for made in Canada/USA labels.
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