3dprinting
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NASA funds 3D food printer, pizza is the first item on the menu
Last week we had lab-grown burgers; this week it's powdered pizza. NASA's gotten in on the synthesized food action by awarding a $125,000 grant to Anjan Contractor, head of Systems & Materials Research Corporation, to develop a 3D food printer. The first device Contractor plans to build under the six-month grant is based on RepRap's open-source hardware and will be designed to print a pizza comprised of three layers of nutritional powders mixed with water and oil. As the final frontier gets further and further away, NASA's need for a nutritious, long-lasting food supply suitable for space travel grows. Since the powders used in Contractor's design -- potentially sourced from insects, grass and algae -- have a shelf life of about 30 years, his 3D food printer would be well-suited to the task. If your appetite's survived the idea of snacks made from pulverized insects, you can watch the grant-winning prototype print some synthesized chocolate after the break.
3D-printed photographs: a new twist on your holiday snaps
Got hordes of old photos you don't know what to do with? Well, if you've got access to a 3D printer, what about blessing them with a third dimension? That's what Instructables stalwart Amanda Ghassaei (of 3D printed records fame) has done using an Objet Connex500, some algorithmic wizardry and a bit of left-field thinking. The images, rather than full 3D renderings, are still meant to be viewed in 2D, but use different thicknesses of print to create a silhouette effect. Ghassaei converts images to black and white, and assigns different printing densities to each grayscale pixel value. The results are surprisingly intricate, and still manage to impart a sense of texture. Fortunately for those interested in doing their own, this is Instructables, so, all you need to do is follow along at the source.
Liberator gun made with consumer 3D printer, plastic pistol fires nine shots successfully (video)
Defense Distributed's plan is to put the power of guns in the hands of every person with access to the internet and a 3D printer. Until now, however, we'd only seen the Liberator pistol built using an expensive industrial-grade printer -- despite the fact that the blueprints for gun have been downloaded by thousands of people who don't have access to such a high-end machine. One of those folks decided to put the Liberator in the hands of the printing proletariat by making it with a consumer-level Lulzbot A0-101 3D printer, a nail and some common screws. This new version, called the Lulz Liberator, differs from the original in that it's got a rifled barrel and uses metal hardware to hold it together (as opposed to printed plastic pins). Printing it took around two days and used about $25 worth of generic ABS material, and the pistol produced was fired successfully nine times, but its creator claims it could've shot more. It's still a far cry from a Glock or Beretta, of course, as the gun misfired several times, and removing spent shell casings required the use of a hammer. So, it's not quite ready for prime time, but it's one more bit of proof that the age of printed pistols is officially upon us. [Image Credit: Michael Guslick]
Type A Machines previews aluminum-framed Series 1 Pro 3D printer
If you've navigated through the endless sea of 3D printers at this weekend's Maker Faire, you may well have caught a glimpse of the Series 1 Pro, the latest offering from San Francisco-based Type A Machines. The printer, which is still in the "engineering concept" phase, trades its predecessor's wood frame for a more solid aluminum version. The WiFi-compatible device has a build volume of about 18 liters, according to the company, and will be available in the third quarter of this year. That's the printer up top, pictured alongside Mark II, a little robot printed on the original Series One. Down below, you'll find a short press release.
Formlabs ships first Form 1 3D printer, Kickstarter backers should see theirs next week
Some might say it's been a long, long while since October -- with "some" referring to the swath of Kickstarter backers who've been waiting oh-so-patiently for a Form 1 to call their own. Formlabs has just confirmed via a company blog post that the very first Form 1 3D printer shipped out today, as the Collector's Edition Form 1 and half of the Initial Formation tier of pledges hopped on a variety of delivery trucks. The rest of you backers can expect to begin printing "by the end of next week." For those keeping count, the Form 1 is actually a few months behind schedule, but in all honesty, that's pretty good considering the up-and-down nature of crowdfunded projects that manage to find the limelight. The outfit is reminding folks that Form 1 units are shipped as they're produced, fulfilling Kickstarter rewards and preorders by priority. Specifics on group deliveries won't come for a few more weeks, but those in the Bay Area can swing by Maker Faire (or ICFF if you're in the Big Apple) to catch an early glimpse. Oh, and if you're just now hearing of this thing? You can place a $3,299 order right now, but you probably won't get it until July. Them's the breaks, kids!
Editor's Letter: 3D printing grows up
In each issue of Distro, editor-in-chief Tim Stevens publishes a wrap-up of the week in news. Another week with Google Glass and, as I grow more accustomed to having it in my life, I find myself struggling more and more to come up with reasons to wear the thing. I'm still very happy to stop on the street and give people a demo, but if I'm being honest, I don't need that much attention from strangers in my life. Don't get me wrong, I'm still very excited about the potential here, but it's safe to say the novelty is running out. Still, this week Glass did get a nice improvement. The XE5 update was released late Tuesday night and shipped with a series of small but important niceties, like notifications from Google+ and the ability to do a search from anywhere in the UI. Unfortunately, this update also changes things such that uploads will only occur from the headset when it's plugged in and on WiFi. That'll help battery life -- at a somewhat unfortunate cost to wireless functionality.
3D-printed firearm plans downloaded 100,000 times, State Department steps in
That didn't take long -- just days after its first test fire, the Liberator, a 3D-printed pistol designed by Defense Distributed founder Cody Wilson, has caught the attention of the federal government. It's hardly a surprise: the arm's blueprints were downloaded more than 100,000 times since going live on DefCAD this week. It's not the amount of downloads that's causing trouble, though, it's who is downloading them. In a letter from the US State Department, Wilson was told that it's a violation of the International Traffic in Arms Regulations to "export any defense article or technical data for which a license or written approval is required without first obtaining the required authorization from the DDTC (Directorate of Defense Trade Controls)." The letter goes on to explain that these downloads legally count as exports under the law, telling Wilson to remove the plans from public access immediately. "That might be an impossible standard," Wilson told Forbes. "But we'll do our part to remove it from our servers." As it turns out, most of the gun's downloads were served via Mega, making full removal near impossible. Still, Wilson seems optimistic about the situation, explaining to Forbes that conversation will help mold the discussion on 3D printed weaponry. "Is this a workable regulatory regime? Can there be defense trade control in the era of the internet and 3D printing?" We're looking forward to discovering the answer ourselves.
The Liberator, the first completely 3D-printed gun, gets test-fired (video)
The (almost) all-plastic 3D-printed Liberator pistol was announced by Defense Distributed late last week, but with the gun's blueprints and construction details now live on the company's own DefCAD design site, it's also released a video taken during its testing. In front of a Forbes onlooker, the clip apparently shows a .380 caliber bullet being fired by the Liberator. The only non-plastic part of the design is a common nail, which acts as the firing pin. Defense Distributed's founder Cody Wilson has worked over a year on the project, apparently citing the one-shot pistols that were designed to be air-dropped over France during World War II as inspiration -- also called the Liberator. This modern version is, however, formed of 15 components made inside a Stratasys Dimension SST 3D printer. The video of the test shot and more details are right after the break.
Staples selling 3D Systems' Cube printer online, select retail availability starting in June
Staples is pushing its consumer printing offerings into the third dimension. The office supply chain has begun selling 3D Systems' Cube printer through its site, as of this morning. Come the end of June, the WiFi-enabled, semi-portable printer will be hitting a select number of retail locations for $1,300. The Cube's availability follows news of some higher-end 3D printing offerings at a very select number of Staples locations. Check the source link below to pick up the Cube in one of five colors -- and if you need some enthusiastic testimonies regarding the revolutionary nature of consumer 3D printing, be sure to click through to the press release below.
Princeton crafts a 3D printed bionic ear with super hearing, creepy looks
Scientists have toyed with printing ear implants for ages, but they've usually been more cosmetic than functional. Princeton has just developed a bionic ear that could transcend those mere replacements to offer a full-on upgrade. Rather than seed hydrogel with cells and call it a day, the researchers 3D printed a blend of calf cells, hydrogel and an integrated, coiled antenna made from silver nanoparticles. The frankly spooky project doesn't resemble a natural ear all that closely, but it merges organic and synthetic more gracefully than inserting a chip into an existing implant. It can also expand hearing beyond normal human levels: the experimental version picks up radio waves, for example. Although the ear is just the first step on a long path toward natural-feeling bionics, it already has us wondering if we'll be actively seeking out replacement body parts in the future... not that we're about to go all Van Gogh to get them.
iMakr 3D printing store opens in London, carries Solidoodle and more
The notion of a physical store dedicated to 3D printing is still new to us, and Solidoodle's Asia-focused plans didn't give much reassurance that we'd see more shops in English-speaking countries all that soon. iMakr may have just come to our rescue by opening what it claims is the world's largest 3D printing store in London's Farringdon area, occupying 2,500 square feet across two floors. The showroom has both workshops as well as printers to buy on the spot, including the Solidoodle 3; we've reached out to get the full selection, although iMakr's online channel already sells MakerBot's Replicator 2 and a few less immediately recognizable brands. We're still far from having a 3D printing store on every corner, but the London store gives the retail concept some legitimacy.
Inhabitat's Week in Green: flying electric car, 3D-printed livers and a two-story-tall bike
Each week our friends at Inhabitat recap the week's most interesting green developments and clean tech news for us -- it's the Week in Green. The Northern Hemisphere is finally beginning to wake up from a long, cold winter, and green vehicles are taking to the skies. This week Korean automaker Hyundai unveiled a multi-rotor flying electric car for congested cities and SolarWorld and PC-Aero announced plans to launch two new solar-powered electric airplanes at an air show in Germany. Speaking of sun-powered planes, the Solar Impulse just made its final test flight around the San Francisco Bay Area before embarking on a cross-country voyage next week. Even cycling is reaching new heights -- bike hacker Richie Trimble recently built a two-story-tall bike that soars above car traffic.
Visualized: A walk through the Inside 3D Printing Conference and Expo
We didn't find much in the way of news at the Inside 3D Printing Conference and Expo here in NYC (and, we're sad to say, our press badges were just old-fashioned 2D printed), but there was plenty to look at, thankfully. Between the slew of business and consumer devices and the boatload of printed objects, the event was part business conference, part art show. And while the real star was the still-fresh world of desktop home printers, plenty of companies brought out their big-gun industrial devices (including at least one really sweet giant 3D scanner). Peep the gallery below to check out some of the eye candy from the event.%Gallery-186504%
Doodle3D aims to make 3D printing easy enough for anyone, is totally rad
You'll forgive us for frontloading this informational post about Doodle3D -- a simple sketching software tool, complete with hardware dongle, that's being Kickstarted -- with superlatives like "totally rad," but it's difficult to feel otherwise. The software is very accessible, enabling 2D drawings done on a computer, tablet, or smartphone to be wirelessly sent to a hardware dongle attached to a variety of 3D printers. Just like that, drawings are magically turned from crude 2D images into physical 3D objects; this principle is demonstrated in the group's Kickstarter video (below the break), which features a variety of non-techie folks using the application to thrilling results. More importantly? Not a single companion cube! If you'd like to contribute, several tiered options are available. The early bird special affords 100 lucky folks a Doodle3D WiFi box for just $88, but that's quickly running out. The box will otherwise run you (at least) $99, and the team is expecting to ship them sometime in September -- should the project reach its $50,000 goal, that is. With 35 days to go and just over one fifth of that goal already funded, it's looking like that won't be an issue.
3D printed speakers give you a custom light show to go with your tunes (video)
3D printing is still in its relative infancy, but more and more folks are using machines like the MakerBot Replicator and Formlab's Form 1 to turn digital plans into physical reality. An Autodesk engineer named Evan Atherton has access to a much more capable (and expensive) 3D printer, an Objet Connex 500, and as a design exercise decided to use that printer to create a finished product. You see, a lot of 3D printers are used for rapid prototyping, as opposed to product manufacturing. Join us after the break for a video interview with Atherton explaining how he created these sonic beauties.
Oxford University researchers create new 3D printed 'soft material' that could replace human tissue
Water and fat -- those are the two primary building blocks Oxford University researchers have used to 3D print the droplet you see above. Sounds unremarkable until you consider its intended application as a human tissue replacement. By stringing together thousands of these so-called droplets (which measure about 50 microns across) using a custom-built 3D printer, the Oxford team believes it has engineered a "new type of material" that could eventually be used to ferry drugs throughout our internal systems to a specific target site, fill-in for damaged tissues or even mimic neural pathways via specially printed protein pores. The potential applications for medical science are impressive enough, but consider this additional benefit: since the droplets contain no genetic material, scientists can completely sidestep all the ethical red tape surrounding the alternative stem cell approach to artificial tissue. At present, the team's been able to string about 35,000 of the droplets together, but there's no real cap as to how large or even what type of networks can be made. If the money and equipment are willing, this Oxford team can make scifi dreams come true.
Notre Dame students highlight method for 3D printing skeletons of living animals
Can you really claim to love your pet if you haven't printed out its skeletal structure for your mantle? Sure everyone expresses themselves in different ways, but the "3D Printing of Preclinical X-ray Computed Tomographic Data Sets" outlined by a team of Notre Dame students and a rep from MakerBot certainly beats getting your pet's face printed on a sweater. The researchers have outlined a method for CT scanning live mice, rats and rabbits and printing out their skeletal structures in plastic. There are some cool research applications for such functionality, but more importantly, who could ask for a creepier gift for the pet owner in your life?
MakerBot and OUYA join forces to let you print your own console enclosure
How to pass the time as the first OUYA consoles start shipping to backers? Well, if you've got a 3D printer at home, you can spend the hours printing your very own enclosure for the Android-based console. The gaming company has joined forces with MakerBot on a 3D printing development kit that'll let you customize your case at home. The plans, which were apparently optimized for the second generation Replicator, let you go crazy with custom designs and patterns, because while the rest of the world will get their chance to pick up a console this summer, yours can still be a special snowflake. You can check the plans out on Thingiverse in the source link below.
Inhabitat's Week in Green: the Soundscraper, bedroom algae biofuel lab and the revival of the gastric-brooding frog
Each week our friends at Inhabitat recap the week's most interesting green developments and clean tech news for us -- it's the Week in Green. The first week of spring kicked off with a bang for the architecture community as Japanese architect Toyo Ito was awarded the 2013 Pritzker Prize. Meanwhile Christo unveiled the world's largest inflated indoor sculpture in Germany and MIT researchers announced plans to 3D print a pavilion inspired by the technique that silkworms use to build their cocoons. Inhabitat also showcased several futuristic skyscraper concepts -- including the Soundscraper, which transforms auditory vibrations into clean energy, and the Zero Skyscraper, which is a post-apocalyptic survival structure. And we profiled some fascinating adaptive-reuse projects, including a grain elevator that was transformed into a student housing complex in Oslo and a Cold War-era missile silo that was converted into an underground home in Upstate New York.
Alt-week 3.23.13: Universal snapshots, cosmic world records and print your ride
Alt-week peels back the covers on some of the more curious sci-tech stories from the last seven days. If you are a fan of absolutes, then you are in the right place. We have a first, a fastest and a biggest in this week's round-up of all things sci-tech. We'll try to add one more to that -- a quickest. The quickest intro for this feature ever. Did we manage it? This is alt-week.
