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Researchers Develop 3D Printed Objects That Can Track and Store How They Are Used (washington.edu)
Researchers at the University of Washington have developed 3D printed assistive technology that can track and store their use -- without using batteries or electronics. From a blog post on University of Washington: Cheap and easily customizable, 3D printed devices are perfect for assistive technology, like prosthetics or "smart" pill bottles that can help patients remember to take their daily medications. But these plastic parts don't have electronics, which means they can't monitor how patients are using them. Now engineers at the University of Washington have developed 3D printed devices that can track and store their own use -- without using batteries or electronics. Instead, this system uses a method called backscatter, through which a device can share information by reflecting signals that have been transmitted to it with an antenna.
"We're interested in making accessible assistive technology with 3D printing, but we have no easy way to know how people are using it," said co-author Jennifer Mankoff, a professor in the UW's Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. "Could we come up with a circuitless solution that could be printed on consumer-grade, off-the-shelf printers and allow the device itself to collect information? That's what we showed was possible in this paper." The UW team will present its findings next week at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology in Berlin.
"We're interested in making accessible assistive technology with 3D printing, but we have no easy way to know how people are using it," said co-author Jennifer Mankoff, a professor in the UW's Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. "Could we come up with a circuitless solution that could be printed on consumer-grade, off-the-shelf printers and allow the device itself to collect information? That's what we showed was possible in this paper." The UW team will present its findings next week at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology in Berlin.
Now makers of some 3D printed objects will know _exactly_ what orifice people are inserting them into!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
A picture is worth a thousand summaries.
They announced the exact same thing a year ago, they had a Tide detergent container with a flow-meter on the spout.
3D printed objects will now come with CoCs
You will be made unemployable and tortured by hobos if you are a mmaallleeee
Or a Code of Cumduct?
Kot is German for Shit, and pronounced like Code is in German, so here, Kot of Cuntuct works too.
They all seem to fit.
It looks like they used conductive filament on some parts, to create basically RFID tags, which have to be read by external electronics in the same room.
They then made the tag(s) move in patterns (e.g. via gears/ratchets) that could be detected and used to find out something about the device state.
So really, they just disguised the one electronically active (or rather passive) part as "conductive filament".
Still nice though. But a much smaller claim.
Especially since you still need an electonic radar in the room, to read it.
Come on, this is *exactly* what RFID tags do. So they can 3D print them within an object during its construction. That is sort-of new. But this isn't revolutionary at all.
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