Slashdot Mirror
15-Year-Old Developing a 3D Printer 10x Faster Than Anything On the Market
New submitter jigmypig writes: One of the main issues with 3D printers today is that they lack in one area; speed. A 15-year-old boy named Thomas Suarez is developing a 3D printer that he says is the most reliable, most advanced, and faster than any 3D printer on the market today. In fact he claims it is 10 times faster than any 3D printer ever created. "There's something that makes me want to keep going and keep innovating," he says, laughing at being asked if he'd be better off outside climbing trees or riding a bike. "I feel that my interests will always lie in technology. Maybe I should go outside more but I just really like this stuff."
Great claims. Nothing to back them up.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
One of the main reasons 3D printers are slow is that bad things happen when you try to go too fast, such as warping. Unless he's created a new material, he's not going to fix that.
Sure, speed would be nice, but this is not really true:
3D printers lack in a whole lot of areas, and speed is not at the top of the list. There are a ton of things that you can't do with a 3d printer because the parts are too large, too intricate, need different materials than 3d printers can handle, or are too expensive to 3d print. As more of those problems are solved, the range of things you can plausibly 3d print expands significantly. Now once you can print something in 12 hours, it's great if you could print it in 2 hours or 20 minutes instead, but just being able to do it at all is the biggest step.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
It would be nice if there was a video, picture, or something to substantiate all of these claims.
I welcome advances in this field, but the wunderkind trope has been played too many times lately
.
"I am Superman and I can kick your house in!"
Table-ized A.I.
Call me when he actually made one.
Generally, if they have to hype the age of the person developping it, it's because there's not a whole lot of substance there. Call me when he ships something interesting.
Eddie Krassenstein and cohorts, have been at this constantly for the past months. They have made up so many stories, which lack any kind of verification. Do not trust anything that comes from 3Dprint.com. It's just a bunch of marketing assholes trying to make their web-property more valuable by pumping out bullshit that people scoop up and retransmit. Slashdot, please don't stoop this low.
Have to been to the malls lately? No one hangs out there anymore.
I've seen far too many "whizkid makes incredible invention" turn out to be "parent's pet project attributed to kid for fame and glory". School science projects are not meant to be an exercise in outsourcing to parents either.
Though that marketing video, while "snazzy", is pretty pedestrian, as marketing videos go.
There are some bona fide "kid geniuses" out there who have done amazing things (though many with lots of help from family/friends/other adult geniuses). That said, there are 100 times more who talk a good line, but have nothing to show for it.
I'll wait until I see the goods before I pronounce anyone "kid genius".
-SS "Teach the ignorant, care for the dumb, and punish the stupid."
I hope he doesn't use his teeth to create 3D objects.
This is not the sig you're looking for.
What...the high intensity youtube video with techno-music and flying text wasn't enough proof?
Man, what are they gonna have to do to get through to you... make it work or something?
Slashdot needs to knock it off with these "Child genius is going to totally upstage all those stupid companies and make something amazing!" stories they run some time. The thing is, they are essentially never true and we as geeks should know better.
Smart kids often have the problem of thinking they know everything. They have the brains to be well above their peers at pretty much everything, and so have a confidence in their knowledge and intelligence, but lack the experience to understand the limitations of both in the larger world. Hence they'll think that they have found an "obvious" solution to a problem in the world that nobody else has managed to think of. I'm sure most of us felt like that at one time or another as children.
However, it turns out that smart kids become smart adults, and those smart adults get job making the thing we use, solving the problems we have, and so on. So, usually if there's something that hasn't been solved, the reason is that there is NOT a simple solution. There isn't something that a kid will just say "Oh look, here's a better way to do it." Rather it is a complex problem and thus the solutions are complex.
So Slashdot needs to quit with stories on shit like this unless there' something to back it up. A printer actually gets released based on this kids design? Ok that's a story. Some kid says he can do way better than anyone else? That's not a story. That is, to quote the Reapers, "A confidence borne of ignorance." It's not news.
> not all of grew up in a sweat shop loser.
I think you meant 'looser'. Your use of the correct word conflicts with the rest of your sentence.
I am skeptical. If you're using FDM, I think that in order to print 10X faster, you can't use either ABS or PLA. The print head of the machine will have to be very low mass, which also rules out plastics with high melt temperatures like ABS and PLA. I don't think FDM printing can achieve a 10X speed increase.
If you go to stereolithography where you're using a projector to harden a photopolymer, you might achieve a 10X speed increase with the right chemistry and the right light source.
Without any evidence of what the kid is doing or even knowing if he has built an operational prototype, meh. All sorts of people claim all sorts of stuff on the internet without backing any of it up.
Every few years we come across one of these articles where some teen claims an amazing breakthrough
16yr old and Encryption
17yr old nuclear bomb detector Note that he claims he built a nuclear reactor when he was 14..
Can I get an article if I write a blog when I discuss some unsubstantiated claims that my golden retriever has found a way to increase the aerial density of a HD by 100x based upon chew marks in a shank bone?