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Printed Circuits as Part of a 3-D Printed Object (Video)
Affordable 3-D printing is still young; just a few years ago, it would have been nearly impossible to have an arbitrary three-dimensional piece of plastic (or resin, or sometimes metal) created from a software description in a box that fits on your desk. But in the several years the printing of *things* has moved fromquaint, quixotic, futzing-about hobby into something that works (fairly) reliably in ever more garages, schools, and hackerspaces, it's gotten good enough that you can now download and print quite a few objects that are available for download, or scan small items to replicate, or scan your friends to print out as statuettes. However, for the most part, these printed pieces are static, and finished. With care, you can print things like a chain, or even a ball joint, but you're still limited mostly to one basic material at a time. (Printing with multiple colors is getting easier, though.) If you want to print a flashlight or a robot, you'll need to add wires and other circuitry as a separate step. That's what the folks at Rabbit Proto (get it?) are trying to change. With the system they're working on, a filament printer is used to fabricate the object itself, but at the same time, both capacitive and conductive features can be baked -- or rather printed -- right in, with a separate print head. We talked with Alexandre Jais and Manal Dia of Rabbit Proto about how the system works, and why you might want to use it. (Alternate video link.)
Stereolithography machines existed, but they were like the Mitsubishi's Avance-25 (both a sinterer, and a CNC mill), well out of the reach of the average person, so the ideas really didn't come around until more people had experience with this technology.
One of the more notable advances I'm seeing is using 3D printing with dissolvable filament in the same way that lost wax castings are done. Make a figure with sprues, embed it in a mold, use a solvent to get the filament out, pour in silver/bronze/metal of choice, let cool, crack the mold off and grind off the sprues, done. This won't make extremely detailed pieces or pieces with a heavy temper (i.e. no 1911 gun parts), but it would make some usable items in metal.