Tag: 3d printing
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When many people consider prosthetic limbs, they often seem to think of mechanisms that replace some of the functions of the original but don't seem to add anything new. Prosthetics limbs are not very common and they're almost always very expensive. To the best of my knowledge I don't know of anybody modifying a prosthetic in any substantial way (or any way, for that matter). That's what made this news article jump out at me: A student at the Atlanta Institute of Music and Media named Jason Barnes lost his right arm in an accident in the workplace. He wears …
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If you've never had one before migraine headaches are no picnic. Between the feeling like somebody's testing a sawmill with part of your skull, profound nausea brought about by something as innocuous as sunlight or the sound of a diesel engine, and vertigo that makes walking to the bathroom to retch a challenge, they're something that many of us would probably not wish on our worst enemies (I know I don't). There are few things that can arrest or lessen the severity of migraines once they start. Mostly, all you can do is get someplace dark and quiet and ride …
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When we think of 3D printing, we usually think of stuff on the macroscale, like automobile engines or replacement parts of some kind. Unless it's in another context, however, we rarely stop to consider the applications of this technology on a finer scale. A couple of weeks back a research team at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany announced a breakthrough: The Nanoscribe, a 3D printer which uses laser light to selectively harden liquid plastic in a successive deposition process. The Nanoscribe can fabricate objects the width of a human hair with amazing precision and a fair amount of …
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If you've been following my website for a while you've no doubt read me yammer on again and again about 3D printers that can only use low-melting point plastics as feedstock for manufacture. Usually ABS or PLA plastic, because they're cheap and relatively easy to acquire. Joshua Pearce and his research team at Michigan Tech announced late last year that they've developed an open source metal deposition printer for fabricating tools and components for which plastic isn't appropriate. Their printer lays down thin layers of metal instead of plastic to build up much stronger objects. The total cost to construct …
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There seem to be a couple of problems inherent in the tech field of prosthetic design. First and foremost of them is that comparatively few people need artificial limbs, so not enough of them are manufactured at once to bring the cost down. A second problem is that because so few people tend to need them, designs don't seem to improve very rapidly. When enough of anything are not constructed, there isn't enough pressure for bugs to be ironed out rapidly, nor for designs to evolve in positive directions so relatively simple advances may not appear soon. Business and industry …
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Last week there was a cluster of outbreaks of the future (thanks, Warren Ellis, for the term) in the field of 3D printing that caught me by surprise, not by their appearance but how they appeared in rapid succession to one another.
The first is an industrial grade 3D printer called the Objet1000, which is marketed for the production of full-scale prototypes and industrial models. It has a fabrication platform 39 inches by 31 inches in size (a little bigger, actually, but I'm deliberately dropping decimals today), and can print with any of 120 different substances, of which 14 at …
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More and more in the year 2012 of the common era, I find myself noticing what Warren Ellis once called 'outbreaks of the future'. Advances and developments in technology that were once the thoughts of the dreamers of science and are now the fruits of the labor of shapers and makers of novel things. Perhaps it's due to my lack of 3d modeling ability that I tend to focus on the field of 3D printing, which has fascinated me since I helped build a 3d printer several years ago. So it goes.
The first thing that I noticed was that …
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During the non-skippable antipiracy warnings on a lot of DVDs and BluRay disks these days, the MPAA often has an MTV-style juxtaposed and jump-cut commercial that includes the admonition "You wouldn't download a car, would you?" which has spawned a response in the form of an image macro that seems to have gotten a few of us thinking. Earlier this week the notorious BitTorrent tracker The Pirate Bay posted on their blog that they had created a new category of files that can be shared via their website, Physibles, or files that can be used to create actual, tangible objects …
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If you've been following my blog for a while you've no doubt picked up on my interest in 3D printing and the open source fabber called the RepRap. It seems that I'm not the only person who's been keeping a sharp eye on this particular technology. The Gada Prize (formerly the Kartik M. Gada Humanitarian Innovation Prize in Personal Manufacturing) has been announced to advance the state of the art in 3D printing and personal manufacture by putting up $20kus to the person or team whose project meets certain criteria by 31 December 2012. The prize appears to be aimed …
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