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The shape of things to come: A consumer's guide to 3D printers
CES 2013 proved to be something of a coming out party for consumer-facing 3D printers. Sure MakerBot earned a fair amount of attention at last year's show with the announcement of the Replicator, which snagged its share of awards from various press outlets. This year, however, saw a relative deluge in 3D-printing representation, with strong showings from 3D Systems, FormLabs, MakerBot and the cloud-based 3D printer, Sculpteo. Even with so many companies rising to prominence, the dream of truly mainstream 3D printing still feels a ways off -- if that is indeed where we're inevitably heading. These nascent days are an exciting time, with a diverse array of companies and organizations vying to be the first to bring the technology to our homes. In a sense, many roads lead back to RepRap, the open-source, community-fueled project aimed at creating a self-replicating machine. As such, the same basic technology underlies many of these devices. At their core, these 3D printers are not unlike their 2D counterparts, offering a way to translate images on computer screens into real-world analogs -- only in this case they're objects you can hold in your hand. Most of these work by melting plastic (largely Lego-like ABS or biodegradable PLA) and squirting it out through extruder heads. The heads operate along the X and Y axes, while the build platform (generally heated in the case of ABS and unheated for PLA) moves downward, allowing the glue gun-like extruders to build up the thin layers of plastic. Some printers rely on other technologies, many of which are rooted in the world of rapid prototyping, a category of fabrication that has been around for decades and used by companies like Boeing and Ford to created scale models of concepts. There are a surprising number of companies and organizations currently invested in the space, be it through pre-fabricated models, kits or open-source, downloadable plans. We pulled together a list of some of the most prominent, which you can check out after the break.
Kinect hack turns tourists into 3D souvenirs (video)
As souvenirs go, a miniature replica of yourself -- striking a pose of your choosing on Barcelona's La Rambla street -- is a far sight more original than a bullfights-and-senoritas snow globe. This past January, the hilariously titled BlablabLAB enlisted three Kinects and a RapMan 3.1 to snap passersby and render them into personalized tchotchkes, in a project called Be Your Own Souvenir. Subjects stood atop a small platform, mimicking the human statues on La Rambla, as the Kinects captured their likeness in full 360-degree glory. The resulting images were then processed as a mesh reconstruction, saved as a G-code file, and then fed through a 3D printer -- and voila, out popped the tiny statuettes. If you're a fan of flashy editing and Kinect-based street experiments, check out the video after the break.
RepRap prints transistors, but fabs have little to fear
Budding hobbyists almost have it too easy these days, what with all the ready-made components, Mindstorms and Arduino boards, but there's still a couple of folks out there kicking it old-school... and printing transistors at home. Yes, that's a RepRap 3D printer you see there, with a MakerBot Unicorn pen head, depositing tiny dots of silver ink to form intricate rows of tiny electrodes. Sadly, the printer doesn't currently automate the entire process, as you'll also need to separately apply a dielectric material and a host of chemicals to get a working field effect transistor from scratch, but once the basic process is perfected the possibilities, as they say, are endless. Now if you'll excuse us, we've got a hot date with some vacuum tubes. Find the basic formula for DIY transistors at our source link.
L'Artisan Electronique ushers in the era of the virtual pottery wheel (video)
Want to reenact Ghost but don't care for all the messy bits? Let lasers do the work for you. L'Artisan Electronique uses a laser scanner to detect your hand-sculpting gestures, transfers their gently urging instructions over to a computerized 3D model, and -- should your production exhibit sufficient creativity or je ne sais quoi -- prints it out using a 3D ceramic printer. This is part of a Design by Performance exhibition taking place over in Belgium and is seriously one of the cooler things you're going to come across today -- or any other day, for that matter. See it on video after the break.
