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Mattel Unveils $300 3D Printer (computerworld.com)
Lucas123 writes: Perhaps in an attempt to get out ahead of the consumer 3D printing market, which has allowed popular toys such as Legos to be replicated, Mattel today announced it would begin shipping its $300 fused filament fabricator machine in October. Mattel's ThingMaker at-home toy-making device, reinvents the company's iconic 1960s toy by the same name. The new ThingMaker allows users to upload design files via Mattel's proprietary Design App, which works on Android or iOS devices. The 3D printer can then print single-part toys or print hundreds of different parts to be assembled into toys using ball-and-socket joints. Mattel's ThingMaker Design App is based on Autodesk's Spark, an open 3D printing platform that provides extensible APIs for each stage of the 3D printing workflow. Because it's based on an open architecture, the ThingMaker Design App also works with other 3D printers; it is available now and free to download for iOS and Android devices.
Priceless.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Way back in the day, they came out with the Barbie Digital Camera. It was the cheapest digital camera on the market by far. Many people who had no interest in Barbie bought them. It was $79 when most cameras were $300+, they got the price down by, among other things, using damaged DRAM chips.
http://www.superkids.com/aweb/...
How much would it cost to print a RealDoll-type sex toy on one of these?
I'm asking for a friend.
Trolling is a art,
At least, it was for a six-year-old kid. It fell victim to the "maybe we shouldn't have kids handling 400-degree hot molds" mindset, with an added dose of "maybe all those volatile organic fumes aren't the greatest thing for your kid to be huffing".
Let's hope the new one is worth of the name.
Can I print replacement battery covers with it? That would be pretty useful. The finish looks pretty good I wonder if the tolerances are good enough for the clips to work.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
Lots of people will point out the many problems with this system, but from an initial glance(*):
1) The filament spools are not chipped. You can get filament from other vendors and rewind them on your spools. Chances are, other vendors will notice this and start selling ThingMaker spools.
2) The FAQ states that if you don't have a printer, there are many places that will print parts for you. I assume this means that the output format *isn't* proprietary, possibly a bog-standard stl file that you can have printed anywhere.
If, and this is a big if, the heads can be easily replaced, then this could be quite an exciting development in 3d printing. As hackers, we'll be able to get cheap used 3d ThingMakers off of eBay for decades.
(*) Please correct me if any of these are wrong
Looks like Ken is finally gonna get some junk.
Anybody want a peanut?
The tolerances for Lego are at only 2 microns. Still think it "easily" makes it? Considering the printer you describe is a few years old, I'd be surprised if it is even within an order of magnitude of that tolerance. I know of absolutely no 3d printer, at any price, that can reliably create parts at the levels of precision that can be ordinarily met with injection molding.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I've seen that reported as the mold tolerance, which is not the same as the plastic tolerance which is more on the order of 10-20 microns. Some engineers at my work place got an argument about this once, and bought a small pack of Lego bricks and it is closer to 50 microns for wall thickness and larger for some of the big dimensions (as in the full range of values, not the standard deviation). This makes sense, because if they need 2 micron accuracy to work over all dimensions, pieces warmed up by your hand would not fit ones at room temperature.
20-40 micron printing is pretty common now, and even for several years with laser sintering. Stratasys has had 16 micron resolution commercially available since at least 2011-2012ish. One of the advertised uses now for sintered metal is for making inserts to be used in injection molding. Places that need higher precision still have to make their own instead of using off the shelf equipment, but research printers have been doing 10 micron or smaller precision for nearly 15 years now. When we have some thing with a very small feature size, on the order of 30-50 microns, we have a connection with with a university team that will rent out use of their micro laser sintering setup for occasional runs. Although it only has a 2x2x1 cm working volume, unlike the much larger 16 micron setups.