I particularly love the "less guns == less gun crime" arguments. This is like saying that a lot of race cars are red, so let's ban red cars to make the streets safer. After a decade, the number of car deaths due to red cars is reduced to nearly zero, so you loudly trumped the fact that the streets are safe from red cars!
So reducing gun crime is an admirable goal is you would hate to have a loved one shot to death, but not bothered so much if they are bludgeoned or stabbed to death.
Point in case: I ran the numbers for Australia myself (even adjusted for population). Since the have almost banned all guns, gun deaths have gone WAY down. However, stabbings have gone up. The net effect is that overall violent crime is up by 40%, while murders went down a little. For every single person in Australia NOT killed, there were approximately 656 more people subject to assault or sexual assault. Yet people laud this country as being a great model for gun control. No thanks.
DETAILS: All crime numbers came from the Australian government, years 1995 and 2007 (last year I could find numbers for). Population numbers were approximate to 1,000 for 2007, approximate to 100,000 for 1995.
There are a lot of open-source printers out there. Security mechanisms??? Look up "open source" and show me what security mechanisms can withstand that...
Also, what "security mechanisms" are built into printers? I remember that some yellow dots would be added as kind of a serial number to know which printer made the print a few years ago. Great for proving guilt after the fact, but useless for actually stopping anything.
Oh, and printer software is supposed to magically know that this hollow tube is actually a barrel and not a drinking straw?
Have you even heard of a "3D" printer? They will only get better and more affordable. It is already illegal to sell a gun that you made yourself unless you are a licensed manufacturer. So, there are only two types of people that can legally manufacture guns at all:
1) Real companies who file the paperwork and pay their taxes. And a "real" business would not dare sell an all-plastic gun because of liability issues (both "getting past a metal detector" suits as well as "this thing blew up in my face" suits).
2) It is perfectly legal to make a gun for your own use. However, you cannot legally sell or transfer the gun to another person. After you die, it must be destroyed.
If an enterprising criminal wants to make a bunch of 3D printed guns and sell them, he is ALREADY breaking the law, no matter if they have metal or not. Once again, honest people do not need this law, and criminals will not obey it.
Oh, wait. Is this the "magic" law that criminals will suddenly start obeying?
Ummm. It is already completely illegal to sell a gun without being a licenses manufacturer (read "company with deep pockets). Nobody in their right mind would actually sell a plastic gun due to the liability issues involved. Gets smuggled past a metal detector = massive law suits from relatives of victims = no more company.
First, the law was first passed once the first Glocks came out with a polymer frame. All Glocks have been VERY detectible with any metal detector, as the barrel and slide are all solid metal. So this law was passed out of complete ignorance and an irrational fear for something that, quite simply, was not a problem in the first place. Yes, the law makers that want to tightly regulate guns do not actually know much about them -- what a surprise.
Now, this law is trying to be applied to home printers. Really, all you will have to do is buy the printer and set it up. Download the design files, and run them through the printer. Add ammo and shoot. Assuming that your printer is good enough, and that the files are formatted for your particular model of printer, then making your own gun should be pretty easy -- well within the reach of anybody with a few thousand to blow on a printer. Currently, there might be software issues, but I am sure that printing will get easier as time goes on, not harder.
As to there being little public benefit in plastic guns, there is little benefit to the law itself. People who intend to do bad things with guns are not going to be stopped by yet another law. Honest citizens will do anything wrong even with a plastic gun.
Stopping a technology from being created? Yup. That has worked out quite well in the past. Look at the DMCA. Stopped piracy cold, with absolutely no bad effect at all. I sure am glad that nobody has managed to cook up crystal meth in their own home because the laws clearly make trying to do this with, say, an empty soda bottle are illegal. Explosives are also illegal to play with, so nobody has figured out how to use a pressure cooker to make a bomb. I feel safer already.
This law is like trying to stop rape by making penises illegal.
Now, back in the real world, criminalizing objects rather than behavior only hurts the honest citizens, while doing nothing to stop the real criminals.
First, let's assume that we can categorize people into two categories: honest and criminal.
A ban on "plastic" guns from a 3D printer will do exactly what?
1) It will stop the honest people from making their own 3D printed guns. These are the people who obey the law. Since these people are the ones who obey the law, who cares if they have a plastic gun? They will not do anything bad anyways. For the record, the number of guns used in crimes is something like 0.001% of the total guns out there. Similar argument for gun owners.
2) If a criminal wants to commit crimes with a 3D printed gun, do you really think that they will actually obey the law banning plastic guns? If so, you are a special kind of stupid.
So, this law will do absolutely NOTHING to stop crime with "plastic guns" that can be printed in your own home.
I should also like to point out that even a plastic gun will NOT shoot plastic ammunition. Bullets are made of metal -- and should be readily detected by any decent metal detector.
I have always heard of them as sand fleas. However, it appears that the internet agrees with you. I have tried vain searches for "sand flea" pictures before, but never really found them. It appears that what I was chasing was really an "Emerita talpoida" and not "Talitridae." In fact, not even the same order! Thanks for the info.
I used to live in Florida, and would often go catch "sand fleas" at the beach. These are crustaceans that vary from about 1/2" to 1-1/2" long. After a wave washes up on shore, when it recedes you can often see little "v" shapes in the water as it rushes back towards the ocean. Scoop up some sand around that area and you will often find a sand flea. They are perfectly harmless and useful as fish bait.
These are NOT the same sand fleas as what this article discusses. According to Wikipedia, what I was catching for my kids to play with was a "Talitridae." This nasty bug in the article is a "Chigoe flea." Both can be called by the same name, but are completely different animals.
Are you kidding? She just got a PhD from the school of hard knocks! She would be the first one to go so, since she just completely lost every last shred of her complacency.
Thinking that living off of a credit card is a good idea... Thinking that only criminals should have guns, but not honest citizens... Sounds pretty blue to me.
The interesting thing here is that being legally bared from owning or possessing a firearm is still not probable cause for a warrant.
The reporter was NOT bared from owning a weapon. They dug up some "resisting arrest" charge on her husband over 25 years ago, so he was the supposed "target!" The restriction on her rights to own a gun are only the same ones that every honest citizen of Maryland has to put up with.
As sad as it is, nothing about this story surprises me. This is the "hope and change" that we were promised.
And yet cell phones existed back then -- I had one. Hand-held computers existed back then (Palm anyone?) -- and I had one. Both had a processor, display, and battery. It did not take a genius to figure out that one device could, one day, be able to do both. Honestly, my biggest problem with the concept of a "smart phone" 15 years ago is that I worried about running an operating system which could crash just when I might need to make a "911" call. And, you know what? I have had my phone crash or lock up at the most inconvenient times, and had to reboot my phone so that I could make an important phone call.
The convergence of the two was hardly surprising. Phones getting cheaper and adding features -- very predictable. Getting better processors -- also predicted. All of those were realy evolutionary -- fairly predictable based on current trends. Touch-screen being capactive instead of resisteive -- well, that was a new one, but merely a detail.
The fact that they were all touch-screen, with no slide-out keyboards? That was not guaranteed. The fact that Apple came out with the first truly viable smart phone? NOBODY predicted that 20 years ago. But those are details. Existing products getting better, smaller, faster, cheaper. No surprises. The only surprise was the names on the back of the boxes. New markets? Predictable. Exactly HOW they would evolve was a different story, but it was generally assumed that new technology would be disruptive to the status-quo.
I can easily see real difficultes in getting down to 180nm, especially with the stuff needed to build circuits. I hope you are right. I hope that there is some technology that I am unaware of that will allow this sort of thing to happen. Even if the precision is NOT the problem, you still would practically have to build the entire circuit in one step, since a stray dust particle could ruin the entire thing. That definitely means a one-box solution. How would this work? How do you lay down the N and P regions? How do you add metal layers? How do you form the oxide? How do you put vias in the structure? Who knows?
Hmmm. That is actually an original idea on the subject. I could think of a lot of practical reasons that might stop you, but there is actually a chance that you are on to something.
The only real down-side is that if this type of thing WAS possible, it would take years of work to make it happen. In the lab in 5-10 years? Maybe. In the home in 15? Not likely (unless you have an extra million dollars lying around). Even products designed for consumers (like the CD player, DVD player, etc.) start out at least an order of magnitude more expensive than price a decade later. The first CD player in the 1980's was something like $800. Even a decade later they were around $100.
I am not saying that such a thing will not happen. I am just saying that, even if possible, it is not likely to be in the home if 15 years.
That is, if we can keep hysterical police state nutters from smashing that which they do not understand.
Well, according to popular belief, guns are inherently evil. Therefore, anything that can make a gun must also be inherently evil.
Once you believe that objects themselves are capable of being evil, that opens up the floodgates of this type of thing. A gun in the hands of an honest person is about as evil as a toaster, or a pressure cooker, or a baseball bat, or a box of spaghetti. Objects do not matter, it is the person wielding the object that makes the difference. Yet many politicians would rather focus on the tools and ignore the people.
Politicians also never seem to understand that laws are only obeyed by honest citizens, and those prone to criminal behavior will obey laws about owning guns about as much as they obey laws about stealing and murdering.
I love seeing the "weapons free environment" sign at my local Ikea. If there were a person who had mass-murder on his mind, would he see that sign and suddenly realize that his gun was not allowed in there are ralize that his nefarious plan was foiled? Or, would he think that he is then safer, since nobody will be armed and able to stop him until the police arrive?
Fair enough. What you are talking about is simply printing your own circuit boards. Already possible at home. It needs to be refined a **LOT** to get to the level of making your own iPod. However, even if printing it WAS possible at home, you still have to assemble it. That is an even trickier proposition. Pick-and-place, along with having an oven is what is used today, and you do not want to do those by hand. There are enough different steps in building and assembling a circuit board that I cannot imagine that one box would be able to do it.
What **WOULD** be possible would be to design your own circuit board on a computer, and send the files to a remote factory that could build and assemble the entire thing for you, and ship you a working board. You can already get circut boards built this way, but you are sent bare boards and have to put the parts on yourself. If they could also populate tand test he board for a reasonable cost, the next revolution would begin.
A lot of work needs to be made to the infrastructure: the factory would need a supply of almost every imaginable common part, all easily accessible to the pick-and-place machine without human intervention. testing would need to be completely automated without human intervention too (if you start having to pay people to do setup for one or two boards, the cost will go way up). For testing, JTAG can only go so far if you have a lot of discrete "glue" logic and passives on the board.
You are absolutely right about the simpler devices such as hearing aids. Nobody is using 3D printers to make a million items. They are being used for the "fringe" products where only a few are needed, or making prototypes of entirely new products. The fringe is where all the cool stuff is happening.
I should also like to point out that 3D printing has existed for over 15 years. It just took that long to get the price and size down enough for home use. However, the seeds were there almost two decades ago. I actually held a 3D plastic model in 2000. The technology existed then.
When it comes to making tiny transistors, there IS NO OTHER METHOD besides the conventional silicon fab.
There were some experiments to print circuits using modified ink-jet printers (in theory, all you need is a conductor, an insulator, and an 'N-type' and a 'P-type" semiconductor). These actually worked (nobody said that they worked well, or were capable of any type of speed). Even assuming that this technology takes off and gets millions of dollars in research, there are fundamental limits in this type of technology. You will not be able to "spray" transistors at the size that we are talking.
Now, if I wanted to prototype a million-transistor digital circuit right now without takint it to a real silicon fab, let me list the ways that this can be done today. 1) Simulate in software. 2) Put on an FPGA. All other methods (including hardware-accelerated simulations) are combinations or enhancements of the above two approaces. There is no thrid approach, even in the labs, as far as I am aware.
Let's look at building a custom chip in a 28nm process. The mask costs are easily over one million dollars. This means that the very first chip that you get back will cost over $1,000,000. The 2nd might only be $50, but the first one is the expensive one. If you find a bug, hopefully the problem is small enough that you can re-use most of the masks. If not, expect to hand over another million for a re-spin. So, if your design is risky and you are not guaranteed that it would work, paying $250,000 for a single prototype made by some other method would be a bargain! Yet there is nobody out there offering to prototype an ASIC like this.
The old saying is that what we have in our homes today was in the labs 20 years ago. There is nothing in the lab right now that looks promising for making your own high-density circuits right now, other than the FPGA. Low-density? Yes. Hundreds or maybe even thousands of transistors? Maybe. Millions of transistors? No way that I can forsee.
Well, I do have a master's degree in electrical engineering, and I design silicon for a living. I think that makes me at least a little qualified to answer. I am also capable of making a point without having to resort to personal attacks and insults. That is the sort of thing that you do when you do not know enough to actually use facts.
The problem with electronics is one of scale. To get millions of transistors, you need TINY transistors. Tiny transistors = machines with extreme precision, and an incredibly clean environment. Current technology has 28 nm process as the mainstream, with 22 nm being more cutting edge, and right now, anything smaller is "bleeding edge" with yield problems.
So, given this, I would consider 250 nm to be a nice goal to be able to do anything "real." 250 nm is 1997 technology, and ten times larger than current processes (along one axis, 100 times bigger for 2D items). This is about the same size as some larger viruses!!! Can you imagine a home device capable of the precision of the size of a virus? How much would that cost?
Now, home electronics DOES have a lot of DIY-type stuff. Things like the Arduino come to mind. How about an FPGA (since you are an expert, I am sure that you already know what an FPGA is)? The humble FPGA is one of the greatest things for a DIY-electronics enthusiast. If there is to be a real home-electronics revolution, it will likely come from making your own boards, maybe with a few hundred transistors for analog and interface stuff, along with an FPGA to do all of the heavy lifting. Still, soldering a large FPGA is not for the timid.
Printing an iPod??? Not a chance. Printing an iPod case? Sure.
Sorry, you cannot print electronics. Well, you *CAN* (some have experimented with this), but your iPod would have the size and consistency of a phone book. Even a simple processor these days consists of tens of millions of transistors. Same for memory.
I can envision two scenarios for printing electronics:
1) Print just the board yourself. This is certainly feasible, eventually. However, assembly of something the level of a iPod requres soldering which simply cannot be done at home. Try soldering a BGA with 1,000 pins. This CAN be done is a toaster oven (but not by beginners), but requires a lot of knowledge to get it to work. Add in memory, caps, resistors, etc., and the odds of getting something out without any defects seems unlikely.
2) Print the entire circuit yourself. It is possible to print transistors, but not to the scale needed. I would guestimate that thousands of transistors on a sheet of paper would be possible, but that is still a far way off from printing millions. Modern transistors can most closely be compared in size to a red blood cell. That sort of scale is difiicult to achieve with billions of dollars of equipment.
Printing of electronics will be awesome when it comes, but it will have limits. Expect some fantastic hobbyist inventions, but it will not be able to even come close to commercial products.
Slashdot Mirror
Quite true.
Sorry. That is illegal. You cannot transfer a gun without a serial number.
I particularly love the "less guns == less gun crime" arguments. This is like saying that a lot of race cars are red, so let's ban red cars to make the streets safer. After a decade, the number of car deaths due to red cars is reduced to nearly zero, so you loudly trumped the fact that the streets are safe from red cars!
So reducing gun crime is an admirable goal is you would hate to have a loved one shot to death, but not bothered so much if they are bludgeoned or stabbed to death.
Point in case: I ran the numbers for Australia myself (even adjusted for population). Since the have almost banned all guns, gun deaths have gone WAY down. However, stabbings have gone up. The net effect is that overall violent crime is up by 40%, while murders went down a little. For every single person in Australia NOT killed, there were approximately 656 more people subject to assault or sexual assault. Yet people laud this country as being a great model for gun control. No thanks.
DETAILS: All crime numbers came from the Australian government, years 1995 and 2007 (last year I could find numbers for). Population numbers were approximate to 1,000 for 2007, approximate to 100,000 for 1995.
There are a lot of open-source printers out there. Security mechanisms??? Look up "open source" and show me what security mechanisms can withstand that...
Also, what "security mechanisms" are built into printers? I remember that some yellow dots would be added as kind of a serial number to know which printer made the print a few years ago. Great for proving guilt after the fact, but useless for actually stopping anything.
Oh, and printer software is supposed to magically know that this hollow tube is actually a barrel and not a drinking straw?
Ever heard of CSS? Breaking that was a new technology once. Copying a recipe is isn't new. Coming up with the recipe is.
Copying a recipe for a liberator pistol is not new either.
Please use logic. It has been proven to work.
Have you even heard of a "3D" printer? They will only get better and more affordable. It is already illegal to sell a gun that you made yourself unless you are a licensed manufacturer. So, there are only two types of people that can legally manufacture guns at all:
1) Real companies who file the paperwork and pay their taxes. And a "real" business would not dare sell an all-plastic gun because of liability issues (both "getting past a metal detector" suits as well as "this thing blew up in my face" suits).
2) It is perfectly legal to make a gun for your own use. However, you cannot legally sell or transfer the gun to another person. After you die, it must be destroyed.
If an enterprising criminal wants to make a bunch of 3D printed guns and sell them, he is ALREADY breaking the law, no matter if they have metal or not. Once again, honest people do not need this law, and criminals will not obey it.
Oh, wait. Is this the "magic" law that criminals will suddenly start obeying?
Ummm. It is already completely illegal to sell a gun without being a licenses manufacturer (read "company with deep pockets). Nobody in their right mind would actually sell a plastic gun due to the liability issues involved. Gets smuggled past a metal detector = massive law suits from relatives of victims = no more company.
First, the law was first passed once the first Glocks came out with a polymer frame. All Glocks have been VERY detectible with any metal detector, as the barrel and slide are all solid metal. So this law was passed out of complete ignorance and an irrational fear for something that, quite simply, was not a problem in the first place. Yes, the law makers that want to tightly regulate guns do not actually know much about them -- what a surprise.
Now, this law is trying to be applied to home printers. Really, all you will have to do is buy the printer and set it up. Download the design files, and run them through the printer. Add ammo and shoot. Assuming that your printer is good enough, and that the files are formatted for your particular model of printer, then making your own gun should be pretty easy -- well within the reach of anybody with a few thousand to blow on a printer. Currently, there might be software issues, but I am sure that printing will get easier as time goes on, not harder.
As to there being little public benefit in plastic guns, there is little benefit to the law itself. People who intend to do bad things with guns are not going to be stopped by yet another law. Honest citizens will do anything wrong even with a plastic gun.
Stopping a technology from being created? Yup. That has worked out quite well in the past. Look at the DMCA. Stopped piracy cold, with absolutely no bad effect at all. I sure am glad that nobody has managed to cook up crystal meth in their own home because the laws clearly make trying to do this with, say, an empty soda bottle are illegal. Explosives are also illegal to play with, so nobody has figured out how to use a pressure cooker to make a bomb. I feel safer already.
This law is like trying to stop rape by making penises illegal.
Now, back in the real world, criminalizing objects rather than behavior only hurts the honest citizens, while doing nothing to stop the real criminals.
First, let's assume that we can categorize people into two categories: honest and criminal.
A ban on "plastic" guns from a 3D printer will do exactly what?
1) It will stop the honest people from making their own 3D printed guns. These are the people who obey the law. Since these people are the ones who obey the law, who cares if they have a plastic gun? They will not do anything bad anyways. For the record, the number of guns used in crimes is something like 0.001% of the total guns out there. Similar argument for gun owners.
2) If a criminal wants to commit crimes with a 3D printed gun, do you really think that they will actually obey the law banning plastic guns? If so, you are a special kind of stupid.
So, this law will do absolutely NOTHING to stop crime with "plastic guns" that can be printed in your own home.
I should also like to point out that even a plastic gun will NOT shoot plastic ammunition. Bullets are made of metal -- and should be readily detected by any decent metal detector.
I have always heard of them as sand fleas. However, it appears that the internet agrees with you. I have tried vain searches for "sand flea" pictures before, but never really found them. It appears that what I was chasing was really an "Emerita talpoida" and not "Talitridae." In fact, not even the same order! Thanks for the info.
Just a note to confused people... like me.
I used to live in Florida, and would often go catch "sand fleas" at the beach. These are crustaceans that vary from about 1/2" to 1-1/2" long. After a wave washes up on shore, when it recedes you can often see little "v" shapes in the water as it rushes back towards the ocean. Scoop up some sand around that area and you will often find a sand flea. They are perfectly harmless and useful as fish bait.
These are NOT the same sand fleas as what this article discusses. According to Wikipedia, what I was catching for my kids to play with was a "Talitridae." This nasty bug in the article is a "Chigoe flea." Both can be called by the same name, but are completely different animals.
I vote for Reaper too. Great program at a very reasonable price, no stupid DRM, and updates included.
Do you have a laptop AND a desktop? Install the software on both, no problem. No USB key needed.
They could not, since she never intended to release the names. The "wronged" parties could try to sue the TSA, but that is about it.
Are you kidding? She just got a PhD from the school of hard knocks! She would be the first one to go so, since she just completely lost every last shred of her complacency.
Thinking that living off of a credit card is a good idea... Thinking that only criminals should have guns, but not honest citizens... Sounds pretty blue to me.
The reporter was NOT bared from owning a weapon. They dug up some "resisting arrest" charge on her husband over 25 years ago, so he was the supposed "target!" The restriction on her rights to own a gun are only the same ones that every honest citizen of Maryland has to put up with.
As sad as it is, nothing about this story surprises me. This is the "hope and change" that we were promised.
The truly sad thing is that if this had been done under a red president instead of a blue one, the media would be raising holy hell right about now.
In the hands of an honest man, a gun is only dangerous to criminals.
And yet cell phones existed back then -- I had one. Hand-held computers existed back then (Palm anyone?) -- and I had one. Both had a processor, display, and battery. It did not take a genius to figure out that one device could, one day, be able to do both. Honestly, my biggest problem with the concept of a "smart phone" 15 years ago is that I worried about running an operating system which could crash just when I might need to make a "911" call. And, you know what? I have had my phone crash or lock up at the most inconvenient times, and had to reboot my phone so that I could make an important phone call.
The convergence of the two was hardly surprising. Phones getting cheaper and adding features -- very predictable. Getting better processors -- also predicted. All of those were realy evolutionary -- fairly predictable based on current trends. Touch-screen being capactive instead of resisteive -- well, that was a new one, but merely a detail.
The fact that they were all touch-screen, with no slide-out keyboards? That was not guaranteed. The fact that Apple came out with the first truly viable smart phone? NOBODY predicted that 20 years ago. But those are details. Existing products getting better, smaller, faster, cheaper. No surprises. The only surprise was the names on the back of the boxes. New markets? Predictable. Exactly HOW they would evolve was a different story, but it was generally assumed that new technology would be disruptive to the status-quo.
I can easily see real difficultes in getting down to 180nm, especially with the stuff needed to build circuits. I hope you are right. I hope that there is some technology that I am unaware of that will allow this sort of thing to happen. Even if the precision is NOT the problem, you still would practically have to build the entire circuit in one step, since a stray dust particle could ruin the entire thing. That definitely means a one-box solution. How would this work? How do you lay down the N and P regions? How do you add metal layers? How do you form the oxide? How do you put vias in the structure? Who knows?
Hmmm. That is actually an original idea on the subject. I could think of a lot of practical reasons that might stop you, but there is actually a chance that you are on to something.
The only real down-side is that if this type of thing WAS possible, it would take years of work to make it happen. In the lab in 5-10 years? Maybe. In the home in 15? Not likely (unless you have an extra million dollars lying around). Even products designed for consumers (like the CD player, DVD player, etc.) start out at least an order of magnitude more expensive than price a decade later. The first CD player in the 1980's was something like $800. Even a decade later they were around $100.
I am not saying that such a thing will not happen. I am just saying that, even if possible, it is not likely to be in the home if 15 years.
Well, according to popular belief, guns are inherently evil. Therefore, anything that can make a gun must also be inherently evil.
Once you believe that objects themselves are capable of being evil, that opens up the floodgates of this type of thing. A gun in the hands of an honest person is about as evil as a toaster, or a pressure cooker, or a baseball bat, or a box of spaghetti. Objects do not matter, it is the person wielding the object that makes the difference. Yet many politicians would rather focus on the tools and ignore the people.
Politicians also never seem to understand that laws are only obeyed by honest citizens, and those prone to criminal behavior will obey laws about owning guns about as much as they obey laws about stealing and murdering.
I love seeing the "weapons free environment" sign at my local Ikea. If there were a person who had mass-murder on his mind, would he see that sign and suddenly realize that his gun was not allowed in there are ralize that his nefarious plan was foiled? Or, would he think that he is then safer, since nobody will be armed and able to stop him until the police arrive?
Fair enough. What you are talking about is simply printing your own circuit boards. Already possible at home. It needs to be refined a **LOT** to get to the level of making your own iPod. However, even if printing it WAS possible at home, you still have to assemble it. That is an even trickier proposition. Pick-and-place, along with having an oven is what is used today, and you do not want to do those by hand. There are enough different steps in building and assembling a circuit board that I cannot imagine that one box would be able to do it.
What **WOULD** be possible would be to design your own circuit board on a computer, and send the files to a remote factory that could build and assemble the entire thing for you, and ship you a working board. You can already get circut boards built this way, but you are sent bare boards and have to put the parts on yourself. If they could also populate tand test he board for a reasonable cost, the next revolution would begin.
A lot of work needs to be made to the infrastructure: the factory would need a supply of almost every imaginable common part, all easily accessible to the pick-and-place machine without human intervention. testing would need to be completely automated without human intervention too (if you start having to pay people to do setup for one or two boards, the cost will go way up). For testing, JTAG can only go so far if you have a lot of discrete "glue" logic and passives on the board.
You are absolutely right about the simpler devices such as hearing aids. Nobody is using 3D printers to make a million items. They are being used for the "fringe" products where only a few are needed, or making prototypes of entirely new products. The fringe is where all the cool stuff is happening.
I should also like to point out that 3D printing has existed for over 15 years. It just took that long to get the price and size down enough for home use. However, the seeds were there almost two decades ago. I actually held a 3D plastic model in 2000. The technology existed then.
When it comes to making tiny transistors, there IS NO OTHER METHOD besides the conventional silicon fab.
There were some experiments to print circuits using modified ink-jet printers (in theory, all you need is a conductor, an insulator, and an 'N-type' and a 'P-type" semiconductor). These actually worked (nobody said that they worked well, or were capable of any type of speed). Even assuming that this technology takes off and gets millions of dollars in research, there are fundamental limits in this type of technology. You will not be able to "spray" transistors at the size that we are talking.
Now, if I wanted to prototype a million-transistor digital circuit right now without takint it to a real silicon fab, let me list the ways that this can be done today. 1) Simulate in software. 2) Put on an FPGA. All other methods (including hardware-accelerated simulations) are combinations or enhancements of the above two approaces. There is no thrid approach, even in the labs, as far as I am aware.
Let's look at building a custom chip in a 28nm process. The mask costs are easily over one million dollars. This means that the very first chip that you get back will cost over $1,000,000. The 2nd might only be $50, but the first one is the expensive one. If you find a bug, hopefully the problem is small enough that you can re-use most of the masks. If not, expect to hand over another million for a re-spin. So, if your design is risky and you are not guaranteed that it would work, paying $250,000 for a single prototype made by some other method would be a bargain! Yet there is nobody out there offering to prototype an ASIC like this.
The old saying is that what we have in our homes today was in the labs 20 years ago. There is nothing in the lab right now that looks promising for making your own high-density circuits right now, other than the FPGA. Low-density? Yes. Hundreds or maybe even thousands of transistors? Maybe. Millions of transistors? No way that I can forsee.
Well, I do have a master's degree in electrical engineering, and I design silicon for a living. I think that makes me at least a little qualified to answer. I am also capable of making a point without having to resort to personal attacks and insults. That is the sort of thing that you do when you do not know enough to actually use facts.
The problem with electronics is one of scale. To get millions of transistors, you need TINY transistors. Tiny transistors = machines with extreme precision, and an incredibly clean environment. Current technology has 28 nm process as the mainstream, with 22 nm being more cutting edge, and right now, anything smaller is "bleeding edge" with yield problems.
So, given this, I would consider 250 nm to be a nice goal to be able to do anything "real." 250 nm is 1997 technology, and ten times larger than current processes (along one axis, 100 times bigger for 2D items). This is about the same size as some larger viruses!!! Can you imagine a home device capable of the precision of the size of a virus? How much would that cost?
Now, home electronics DOES have a lot of DIY-type stuff. Things like the Arduino come to mind. How about an FPGA (since you are an expert, I am sure that you already know what an FPGA is)? The humble FPGA is one of the greatest things for a DIY-electronics enthusiast. If there is to be a real home-electronics revolution, it will likely come from making your own boards, maybe with a few hundred transistors for analog and interface stuff, along with an FPGA to do all of the heavy lifting. Still, soldering a large FPGA is not for the timid.
Printing an iPod??? Not a chance. Printing an iPod case? Sure.
Sorry, you cannot print electronics. Well, you *CAN* (some have experimented with this), but your iPod would have the size and consistency of a phone book. Even a simple processor these days consists of tens of millions of transistors. Same for memory.
I can envision two scenarios for printing electronics:
1) Print just the board yourself. This is certainly feasible, eventually. However, assembly of something the level of a iPod requres soldering which simply cannot be done at home. Try soldering a BGA with 1,000 pins. This CAN be done is a toaster oven (but not by beginners), but requires a lot of knowledge to get it to work. Add in memory, caps, resistors, etc., and the odds of getting something out without any defects seems unlikely.
2) Print the entire circuit yourself. It is possible to print transistors, but not to the scale needed. I would guestimate that thousands of transistors on a sheet of paper would be possible, but that is still a far way off from printing millions. Modern transistors can most closely be compared in size to a red blood cell. That sort of scale is difiicult to achieve with billions of dollars of equipment.
Printing of electronics will be awesome when it comes, but it will have limits. Expect some fantastic hobbyist inventions, but it will not be able to even come close to commercial products.