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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?
Webshooters would be more interesting than a glorified hotglue gun.
But if you can get one of these at Michaels in the future for $10 I'd probably buy one.
-- Senior Software Engineer, Attorney appearance services, locallawyerapp.com.
so it's basically a glue gun that squirts out colored glue.
Uh, wouldn't that mean that 3D printers are basically just CNC mills with glue guns mounted where the mandrel should be?
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
There are different forms of 3D printers, but that is a pretty accurate assessment of some of them. Others shoot a laser into a pool of material that hardens it in place or do other things.
I read the internet for the articles.
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.
I agree. Every week Slashdot should randomly pick one topic for which all stories are ignored. No exceptions. This way, everyone who dislikes a particular topic can be satisfied knowing that at some point, for some week, those stories will be ignored because they don't like them.
It won't do a damn bit of good, but what the hey!
Just what we need, more plastic Eiffel Towers.
The benefit of this ober a glue gun, other than the accuracy as noted, is that it can be used as a spot welder for ABS (so you can repair/join/tweak current 3D printed objects). They need to make tip attachments for smoothing/beveling etc....
credit? like
last year
http://makibox.com/blogpost/items/makibox_smooth_print_public_demo_and_scribble
3 years ago
http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4156
but hey, 3doodler is patent pending!
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
If you don't already know this: you should consider the resolution you need pretty carefully. If you're printing stuff for 1:48 or larger models, an extrusion-based 3d printer will probably do okay for you and they're not too expensive: some exist under $500. But if you're working with smaller scales than that, you're likely to need some sort of photolithography setup and those are expensive to buy and surprisingly expensive to run because of the raw materials cost; it's hard to justify buying one for yourself compared to making the models and having shapeways.com actually print them.
But if you're working larger-scale stuff, it's amazing how much use you can get from a cheap extrusion printer; once you have one, you start using it for scads of other things you never thought about doing previously.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
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
In their Kickstarter video, they show several models built up from the table's surface. This material also appears to harden much faster than a hot glue gun, and have a faster feed rate, given that vertical features formed just about as fast as ones on the table. One thing they do seem to need to work out is how to end a line; the operator in the video spins a tight circle and pulls away like a hot glass worker. It only sort of works here, since there's no flame to burnish the burr away with.
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
...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.
Yeah, boo to the devs for not inventing anti-gravity.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.