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Nanoscale 3D Printer Now Commercially Available
kkleiner writes "Now the field of 3D printing has advanced so far that a company called Nanoscribe is offering one of the first commercially available 3D printers for the nanoscale. Nanoscribe's machine can produce tiny 3D printed objects that are only the width of a single human hair. Amazingly this includes 3D printed objects such as spaceships, micro needles, or even the empire state building."
n/t
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Nano Trinkets
Save space on your shelf for more useless plastic models, combine two buzzwords at once, join the future today with nanomakerbot 2.0!
It's perfect for those moments, when somebody starts complaining about stuff that you may not care about at all, because you can print the world's smallest violin and you can print the worlds smallest hands to play the smallest violin as well!
You can't handle the truth.
Oh we are getting closer to being able to cheaply print vinyl records!
My deam of custom 45s in a classic home jukebox inches closer and closer.
. .
But I'm certain I'd lose it.
Well, we've got a long way to go between printed nanoscale tchotchke and something functional, but yeah, it does seem like a big step in that direction. I've seen some rather sophisticated fully functional planetary gear assemblies and such printed all at once on a makerbot, and while it took a lot of trimming to get it working properly I suspect such a thing would be far easier and cleaner to do in a precision instrument like this, especially since (I believe) the polymerization process used means that the printed structure is basically suspended in a neutral buoyancy tank during the process, allowing for far less supporting structure that will need to be removed afterwards. And once we can print a fully articulated micro-scale robot, well then all we'll need is the ability to add motors, sensors, batteries, and a CPU...
Hmm, okay, so still maybe a ways off. Still, researchers have managed to harness bacteria for propulsion, and a syrup reservoir would make a good nanoscale fuel tank for those. Sensors could be a bit of a challenge, or maybe not - I don't know the state of the art on that front, but for a CPU a nervous-net based architecture could potentially manage quite sophisticated behavior using only a handful of transistors and very primitive sensors, even if we would have to control it more like a remote control cockroach/rat/etc. than a deterministic robot.
Interesting times...
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Right now it can take weeks to make complete microchip with the current fabrication methods. The fabrication size of this printer isn't that great however since most of what is seen in the TFA looks to be around 100 nanometers compared to the 28 nanometers a modern fab can make. However, it would be great to have for rapid prototypes of processors or be used to make devices that fabricate well at large sizes like flash memory.
This printer would work extremely well for MEMS devices since the complex structures such sensors can now just be printed rather than deposited and etched over and over again in a microchip fab.
With the mention of the word 'nano', I was hoping for an advance in molecular/atomic printing. I'd love the ability to mass produce objects (even just cubes) of various materials.
Careful with those - De Beers might strongly object to mass producing cubic structures from carbon atoms.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
I dare say the value of such objects will sharply decline if their production becomes cheap.
Well, they never specified which unit the nano- was prefixed to.
A nanoparsec would be about 30,000km, a nanolightyear around 10,000km, and a nano-AU would be around 150m. By any of those, the ESB would be "nano-scale" (or below).
Could this thing (reasonably) print a mechanical computer a la Babbage? Not a joke question. Would it be possible to power it? Could frictional problem be (reasonably easily) addressed?
This isn't about printing nano scale action figures it's about making nano scale prototype parts. It may not be true nano scale printing as some point out but it's close and still printing on a scale which would require extremely expensive hardware. A few years ago there was no such things as 3D printing and now they are printing at several thousandth scale. How long until they are printing based on individual atoms?
Because the biggest problem with existing 3d printers, IMO, was lack of precision. Combine this precision with large-scale 3d printing, and you'll be able to print up extremely precise components whose measurements matter almost to the micron.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Price may, value depends on usefulness.
Not everything that has a high value has a price tag attached to it. No matter what our market tries to blind you with.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You're barking up the wrong tree. Getting to this precision isn't the problem with "normal scale" prototyping. That could be accomplished long before the advent of 3D printing, and high precision prototypes are not really the area where 3D printers are used. At least not the consumer grade models that most people know about.
3D printing was and is about is to make the whole deal cheap. To give everyone access to the ability to produce plastic prototypes that doesn't involve a process that resembles playing with very expensive Play-Doh.
This thing is a completely different beast altogether. From the looks of it alone you can easily tell that "cheap" wasn't really one of the corner stones this project rested on. Building really tiny things was.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
...Doh!!!
Python coder | PyQt Applications | Writer
I'm childish enough to find many things amazing.
Sometimes in the wee hours when the mind roams I still get a hint of the simple rush from my first experience with an interactive computer, one of the early 8-bit machines: I press a key, and a letter shows up on the screen. Very simple it is; yet all the tech, all the science underlying it, the full range of variously insightful to plodding accomplishments needed to design and build the circuits and instructions still fascinates. I try to appreciate and accord value to well-designed, well-made items that are shepherded through the constraints of materials, cost to build, and market vagaries, amongst others - be it a nail clippers or a CPU.
My knowledge being small, my understanding smaller, my ignorance vast as Universe, there's plenty for amazement.
Am I amazed enough for you, or will you slough me off as simply dotty?
I feel pretty much the same way. People take so much for granted, Even cutlery,,, how long would it take for an Iron Age blacksmith to craft a single cutlery set? Chariot wheels are actually quite complex. A composite bow? Contrast that with a modern electronic item, or any of a huge range of custom=designed materials. The insight required to modify genomes to produce somewhat predictable outcomes?
It's staggering. I think anyone who misses the significance of all of this is seriously lacking in imagination.