3dprinter
Latest
Barclays' 'MakerSpaces' offer 3D printing to local businesses
The worlds of banking and technology intersect at many points, but you'd hardly consider 3D printing a shared interest. In Barclays' "MakerSpaces," though, it's common ground. Equipped with 3D printers, laser cutters, tools and technicians, Barclays has begun setting up these maker-friendly zones in vacant branch and office spaces. The bank is making their facilities available to local businesses (customers and non-customers alike) for rapid prototyping and such, with community events, corporate days, school trips and training sessions filling blank spaces in the calendar.
Build your own action figures with the new ThingMaker 3D printer
The original ThingMaker was all about making little rubbery monsters. However, the new ThingMaker unveiled at Toy Fair this week can make whatever you can imagine in its app -- no metal molds necessary.
Glowforge is a laser cutter for DIY enthusiasts
The onslaught of 3D printers has created a booming market for machines that can make quality products at home. Glowforge is a new object-maker that's a 3D laser printer, cutter and engraver rolled into one. It will help DIY enthusiasts churn out a range of products with wood, acrylic, leather, fabric or even glass. The cutter uses a dual camera technology for realtime autofocus so it helps aligns the laser head with your pattern and makes the cutting process easy. The camera recognizes the material and even follows the beam of light, which is the width of a human hair, so it can adjust the timing and position every step of the way.
Ultimaker's latest 3D printers let you swap the nozzles
The Ultimaker 2 became a popular 3D printer after it was launched in 2013, thanks to a combination of high-resolution output, sharp looks and decent pricing. The fact that it outputs larger-than-average objects for its size also makes it attractive for industry prototyping, schools and medical use. The company just launched a pair of successors, the Ultimaker2+ and the Ultimaker2 Extended+ for extra large model output. Company CEO Jos Burger said it tapped "countless collaborations and insightful feedback" from customers while redesigning the model.
Makerbot just made a more reliable 3D printer head
Makerbot unveiled a new extruder for its 5th generation 3D printers today. The component, dubbed the Smart Extruder+, reportedly offers superior performance, longevity, and reliability than the current iteration. The company improved the extruder's thermal management system and added more accurate print sensors to further boost performance.
Add a 3D printer to the list of things your phone can replace
Smartphones have taken over almost every aspect of our lives. We spend a good chunk of our days clicking links, swiping faces, exchanging emoji or listening to computer-picked playlists. Soon, we'll be able to use our devices to print 3D objects. Researchers at Taiwan Tech have built a 3D printer that uses the light from a smartphone or tablet to cure resin. They created a photopolymer that hardens with visible light instead of lasers or UV radiation. So, unlike the typical encased 3D printer, the team's phone-based device prints objects in the open, as long as it's placed in a dark corner.
Nexa3D needs your cash to make its 'ultrafast' 3D printer
Not long ago, we saw a new kind of super-fast 3D printer that works by "growing" objects from resin, rather than laboriously depositing the print material in layers. Another company called Nexa3D has launched a product on Kickstarter that's similarly quick, claiming that you'll be able to print objects at a speed of around 1-inch every 3 minutes. That's around 25-100 times faster than a regular 3D printer, and objects can be made to around 120 microns of detail, fairly close to the resolution of a Makerbot Replicator 2. Like the Carbon 3D printer we saw earlier, this new system works by using light to harden a photo-curing resin that is gradually extruded from a tank.
Researchers 3D print 'Lego bricks' of functional stem cells
A team of scientists from Beijing's Tsinghua University have reportedly devised a means of producing uniform embryonic stem cells with a 3D printer. These cells stack like organic Lego bricks and could form the structural basis for future lab-grown organs. "It was really exciting to see that we could grow embryoid body in such a controlled manner," lead author Wei Sun said in a statement. "The grown embryoid body is uniform and homogenous, and serves as a much better starting point for further tissue growth." The study published yesterday in the journal Biofabrication.
Kanye West is afraid 3D printers will ruin the fashion industry
Kanye West has a way with words. He's not known for often, if ever, holding back on whatever thoughts cross his mind. In a recent episode of Keeping Up with the Kardashians, the musician-turned-self-proclaimed-designer had an interesting thing to say about 3D printers: He believes they will ruin the fashion industry. During a visit to the Tumo Centre for Creative Technologies in Yerevan, Armenia, Kanye was shown a 3D printer and said, "This is what I'm afraid of here, 3D printing, because the internet destroyed the music industry and now this is what we're afraid of right now with the textile industry." The school guide tried to defend the machine by telling him it doesn't print designs on its own, pointing out that you need someone to bring those to life in the first place. "Yeah. What I'm saying [is] there will come a time where it's, like, people are making the shoes at home," he replied.
3D-printed, eye-tracking top reacts and contorts to creepy stares
The ultimate defense against the wandering eye: this 3D-printed design project reacts to anyone that's looking, thanks to a built-in camera and some facial tracking algorithms. Architect and designer Behnaz Farahi fashioned a top out of plastic, monochromatic spikes: these then undulate depending on what the camera picks up... and where you're looking. Yes, you. The project is the latest 3D-printed collaboration between Farahi, Pier 9 and Autodesk. As you'll see in the video after the break, there's a creepy degree of organic movement to the spikes — it looks like the clothing is almost breathing, ironically making you want to stare at it even more. Sorry.
ICYMI: Weather in a box, cyborg drummer and more
#fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-596751{display:none;} .cke_show_borders #fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-596751, #postcontentcontainer #fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-596751{width:570px;display:block;} try{document.getElementById("fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-596751").style.display="none";}catch(e){}Today on In Case You Missed It: The world's biggest 3D printer was just unveiled in Italy and it's a hefty 40 feet tall and 20 feet in diameter, earning its name, "Big Delta." Its intended purpose is to build mud huts for emergency housing. A device called the Tempescope can be synced with an app in your home and actual rain or show condensation for fog, depending on the day's weather forecast. And a drummer who lost his right arm is back in the game, fiercer than before, with help from a robotics professor.
Spanish cancer patient gets a 3D-printed titanium rib cage
Is there anything 3D printers can't do? A 54-year-old Spanish man, who had a cancerous tumor in his chest wall, was recently fitted with a 3D printed sternum and rib cage. While the first-of-its-kind implant seems like a Marvel Comics experiment with Adamantium, in reality, it was an ingenious, life saving medical solution that used lightweight yet sturdy, Titanium. The metal printing technique gave the surgeons at the Salamanca University Hospital in Spain the flexibility they needed to customize the complex and unique anatomy of their patient's chest wall.
ICYMI: Coral protector bot, non-ugly wearable glasses & more
#fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-251016{display:none;} .cke_show_borders #fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-251016, #postcontentcontainer #fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-251016{width:570px;display:block;} try{document.getElementById("fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-251016").style.display="none";}catch(e){}Today on In Case You Missed It: The nation's largest vision insurance company, VSP, is beta-testing wearable health-tracking glasses and somehow they don't even look ridiculous. An autonomous robot submarine is patrolling coral reefs and killing the starfish that normally eat coral, to preserve the reef. (So many conflicting feelings, amirite?) And MIT researchers are back with another 3D printer to blow your mind. This one is machine-vision enabled, meaning it can scan as it prints and correct itself.
MIT scientists make it easy to tweak designs for 3D printing
Two different groups of MIT researchers found a way to print out objects with glass instead of plastic and to make a printer spew out 10 different materials at once earlier this year. This particular team along with researchers from the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya in Israel, however, have chosen to focus on creating a system that makes it possible for even novices to customize the objects they want to print. Designers typically have to adjust a CAD file to tweak the object's looks by typing in numerical values, and then wait for minutes to hours for a simulation software to make sure the final product is viable. The system this group developed dramatically speeds up the process.
Despite recent challenges, Makerbot opens new factory in NYC
The past few months haven't been easy for Makerbot. But it doesn't seem like the restructuring and sizable layoffs are affecting the company's progress. Today it announced the opening of a new, 170,000-square-foot manufacturing center in New York City. For Makerbot, it means being able to double the production capacity of 3D printers, as well as offer better quality assurance for these machines -- and, considering a recent lawsuit, the timing couldn't be better. This doesn't only signal a commitment from Makerbot to keep growing its own operations, but also shows it doesn't plan to give up on a 3D-printing industry that's been struggling. The huge, upgraded space is located in Brooklyn's Industrial City, so you can expect Makerbot's 3D printers to keep the "Designed & Built in Brooklyn" branding for at least the next ten years.
Lawsuit claims MakerBot knowingly sold glitchy 3D printers
If you bought one of MakerBot's fifth-generation 3D printers only to have trouble running it, you're not alone. A recently filed class action lawsuit alleges that MakerBot and its parent company Stratasys committed a "fraudulent scheme" by knowingly shipping these Replicator printers with flawed extruders (the part that melts and deposits filament) that tend to clog. Supposedly, management was bragging about rapid growth to investors at the same time it was skimping on quality control and dealing with loads of returns and repairs. By the time MakerBot was starting to lay off workers and otherwise admit that things had gone off the rails, shareholders had lost millions of dollars.
Artists paint light using 3D printers and twisted video walls
Who said that you had to paint light by waving an arm around? Certainly not Ekaggrat Singh Kalsi and Daniel Canogar, both of whom have created art using some decidedly unusual tech. Kalsi's project generates floating color portraits thanks to a modified 3D printer -- as you'll see in the clip below, it's akin to forming a hologram line by line. Canogar's work, meanwhile, uses twisted, mobius-like LED tiles as video walls that produce unique (and occasionally mind-bending) effects at different angles. You probably won't see these pieces in person, but they're proof that light-based art holds a lot of untapped potential.
Bricasso 'printer' makes mosaic art out of Lego tiles
If you fancy playing with Lego blocks and you're not familiar with Jason Allemann, take a few minutes to browse his work. He's one set of hands behind JK Brickworks, a site that posts rather unique builds with the plastic bits, including gravity-powered walking animals. For his latest project, Allemann built Bricasso: a device that scans an image and then "prints" a mosaic of it using 1x1 tiles. What's more, it's constructed entirely out of Lego parts. Bricasso uses a Mindstorms EV3 color sensor to scan the source photo -- which has to be pixelated from the jump -- and saves the data needed to complete the finished piece.
The Palette brings multiple colors to your 3D printer
3D printers are great for homemade toys. But most affordable desktop machines can only print monochrome models. Mosaic Manufacturing, a Montreal-based startup, has created The Palette, a filament feeding system that turns a single-extruder 3D printer into a multicolor printing machine. It acts like a bridge between your current printer and ever-evolving filament options. You can feed it up to four colors or play around with wood, steel or conductive varieties. It works in tandem with your machine, so it calculates and cuts the filaments needed for each element in a design before fusing them into one continuous string for your printer.
Disney Research has a 3D printer that can sew bunnies for you
3D printing has resulted in solid solutions like cartilages, organ replicas and even tortoise shells. But Disney Research now has a printer that can create soft, bendable objects - think 3D printing stuffed toys. The mechanics of the printer are similar to conventional machines that use plastics or metals, except this one works with fabric to create flexible and functional objects. Most additive 3D printers are designed to deposit materials in a specific spot, but fabric requires an alternative technique that imitates sewing or layering.
