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OLO, World's First Portable 3D Printer Prints On Top Of Smartphones (hothardware.com)
MojoKid quotes a report from HotHardware: The OLO 3D Printer was first announced in October at the World Maker Faire in New York, where it earned itself an Editor's Choice award and accolades. The developers behind OLO call it a "smartphone 3D printer" as it requires a smartphone to operate. Designs can either be downloaded from the internet from the device, or copied over from a computer once it's created. When placed on a desk, the OLO looks like an inconspicuous little box, but inside, it can craft items up to 400 cm3 in volume. Its developers call the OLO "portable," and it has the specs to match at 1.7 lbs with a physical size of only 6.8" x 4.5" x 5.8." OLO is a unique printer not only because of its small form factor and low price point ($99), but because of its operation. Once the 3D model is loaded, the bottom section of OLO can be placed on top of your phone, and then the resin of your choice is poured inside that structure. You then place the top half of OLO on top and wait a few hours for it to do its thing. The resin hardens by using the light emitted from the smartphone it sits on top of, generated from the OLO app.
Using a smartphone screen is clever, but I wonder how much resolution you would really get since the pixels on a phone are purposely non-directional. Also, Wouldn't the resin harden on it's own inside the bottle under ambient light?
Who is going to leave their phone under this thing for a few hours? And what happens if I get a call mid-print?
This reads like a story on paid publication sties for marketing.
won't someone think of the phones?
and then that moment when an important call comes in and you wreck your print job by bumping the printer while trying to grab the phone before the call goes to voice mail........ 2 hours later to charge back up you can re-run that 4 hour print job.
There are a LOT of things that dont make sense to me. smartphones dont put out a lot of light and it varies based on phone, it's not like 1000 lumen projectors used for real photometric 3d printers. so a print would take insane amounts of time..... so what happens when I get a call during a print?
they really dont give any good details for someone to make a good decision on.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
If you add in the cost of a smart phone it's not so low anymore. Sounds like a gimmick.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Now I can print all kinds of low-res plastic crap on a whim at the beach and send it straight into the ocean where it was headed anyway.
> wouldn't the resin harden on it's own inside the bottle under ambient light?
If the bottle were clear it would.
For those who don't care to do cube roots and metric- imperial conversions in their head at the moment , 400cm3 is about 2.9 inches cubed. (Not 2.9 cubic inches)
For those freaked out about leaving their phone on the desk for a few hours, you can use one of the old phones you hae in the junk drawer. No phones in junk drawer? You can find one on ebay for about $20.
3D printers are still a "thing"? I thought by now the unrealistic hype would have died down and the interest in plastic blobs forgotten.
So light hardens the resin, but the magical bottles of resin that let plenty of light in from the pictures don't let it harden? Fail.
1. Bleed. Lots of bleed.
2. Cannot calibrate properly because different phone screens have different intensities and spectra. Even within the same model of phone.
3. Occupies your phone.
4. What advantage does this have over a cheap LCD panel anyway?
5. Resin can offer a superior print quality, if you weren't dealing with photons escaping in the wrong direction, but it's also expensive and hard to get.
6. And offers no consistency in quality control, so good luck using cheap stuff off ebay.
7. Oh, and it has a shelf life.
8. Did they mention it's also moderately toxic when liquid?
9. And that you have to clean those printers out if you want to leave them unused for a while to keep the resin from setting inside them?
10. That's the smallest build area of any printer I've ever seen.
It's a gimmick. I hope that one day a cheaper, more practical resin printer will be introduced for the masses - but this is not that printer. It is certainly an interesting approach though, using an LCD rather than the usual elaborate and expensive multi-laser setup. It just needs to be done in a form that isn't quite so ridiculously cheap - corners are cut getting a design that cheap to manufacture that you can't even afford an LCD panel, and have to instead pretend the omission of a vital component is somehow a feature.
Since when did "doesn't really exist yet" equate to "First"? And I'm comfortable in saying it doesn't exist yet because I looked for the app on the Google App store and it isn't there. No app, no product. No product, no "first" claim can be valid.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
I routinely avoid any products that require a smartphone to operate. Why? Because in practice the longevity of the device depends on the vendors continuously updating the software to support new operating systems - this is especially true for iOS.
In 10 years, you're almost guaranteed there's no way to make it work.
This is another pure marketing post.
I think we are seeing the business model of the new /. in operation.
Remember the good old days, when a mere mention in an obscure SlashDot story could crash sites?
Those days are long gone.
This year will see the first lawsuits against 3D printers (and software) for IP piracy.
You wouldn't print a car, would you?
. . . .of a 2013 (which still hasn't shipped). The only real innovation here seems to be the feed system (pedestal-pull rather than float the resin on salt-water) and a wider variety of resins. . .
Scam!
Indeed, the Peachy Printer is incredibly late. I've always thought their "floating" idea was a bit strange. At least they're not using the sound output of a computer to control the laser anymore.
If you want to see amazing follow-ups about the production of a Kickstarted 3D printer, look at the Tiko 3D printer.
Looks interesting. A bit late as well, but one expects that from Kickstarters. I should know, first Kickstarter I was in on, was Star Citizen. Now 2 1/2 years late. . .
I wonder how much data this combination will send back to the manufacturers? Say goodbye to your great ideas.
trying to find a use for my recently decommissioned S5.
it's an interesting concept and cheap. Can it produce figures for D&D games on the fly? I guess I'll find out in September
Maybe I'm missing everybody's humor, because it looks to me like you people actually think this is real. Come on, it's obviously a joke. There isn't one single good thing about the idea. It's not practical and it's not possible. Think about what date is coming up in a few days.