3D Update: Try This at Home / Biomimicry edition…

Great tech innovations have a way of morphing from gee whiz wonder to part of the daily landscape in the blink of a cyber eye. Life before smart phones and tablets? Barely imaginable. Life before the Internet? Really? 

The current torrent of 3D printing breakthroughs is a little different. The gee whiz came with the realization that it could be done by almost anyone. Now it is about the riff and variation of what to print (houses? body parts? guns? tchotchkes?) and how to turn almost any material into a 3D “ink.” 

What’s amazing is that it is not surprising a rat skeleton can be printed from a scanned live rat: We have come to expect the miraculous, though still marvel at the detail. 

3D printing is a multi-disciplinary playground, where the outlandishly imaginative is applauded, experimentation encouraged and a sense of fun seems to permeate everything. Led, and perhaps liberated, by a joyous makers’ ethos that made a thriving Thingiverse possible, the 3D revolution is driven not by a tech elite, but rather the universal human need to create. 

The tools and software for 3D printing are getting simpler and cheaper all the time. Comparatively inexpensive laser scanners designed for home use, such as Makerbot’s Digitizer and Indiegogo favorite, the Photon 3, are just months away from market. Paired with open source software compatible with Mac, PC and Linux, these scanners will uncork yet another round of inventive genius.  

 (T)he Photon isn’t just for 3D Printers, it’s the best tool for 3D animators, designers, hobbyists, prototypers, engineers, or anyone in the business of 3D creation. It’s perfect for reverse engineering, prototype development, duplicating objects, modifying existing products, archiving, generating content for video games, experimenting and so much more. Scan models, tweak them or combine them. The options are endless.

—Indiegogo

Biomimicry

Biomimicry is the ultimate cheat sheet: mining eons-worth of evolution for a fast insights to design problems. Nothing iterates like nature. 

Strictly speaking, the printed rat skeleton was copied rather than bio-mimicked, but it is hard not to consider the potential in light of two other recent breakthroughs: printing cell-like material complete with pores that provide nervous system functionality; and self-assembling materials inspired by the ways proteins fold, create using “4D” printing (time is the fourth “D”).

Each technology is remarkable in its own right. Imagine a surgeon printing a scan of a patient’s organs and bones before an operation, or a doctor printing “cells” for artificial tissue to treat a burn victim. And with materials that self-assemble, it’s a hop, skip and jump to thoughts of the Singularity. 

What if you could combine them, using a Photon scanner and a Makerbot printer…at home? 

What would Yoda, Star Wars sage and resident Thingiverse poster geek, say? 

“Me real make! I live want to! Hmmmmmm.”

RELATED: 

• The Yoda-speak Generator
• Yoda Thingiverse page
• Biomimicry 3.8 / Janine Benyus’ web reference
• Self-Assembly Lab / website

— J.A. Ginsburg / @TrackerNews

The Fab Age: 3D Printing, Biomimicry, the Moon and More!

The hardest thing about 3D printing turns out to be keeping up with all the breakthroughs. Stories from just the past couple of weeks range from…

• the breathtaking (civilizations out of moondust!)

• to the commercial (3D at Staples)

• to the violent (build-a-gun)

• to the medical (printing cartilage)

• to the racy (sex toys)

• to the sparky (conductive printable feedstock)

• to the modular (build-a-chair)

We are at the dawn of the Age of Fabrication: The Fab Age. 

Ours is a synthetic era where the stars of Ages past—stone, wood, iron and steel—can be sinterized and tweaked into a printable materials.

Just as important as what you see on the surface is what you don’t see underneath. 3D printing opens up a new structural dimension to biomimicry, the use of nature as an inspirational cheat sheet for better design. Printed objects may look solid through and through, but most are not. Rather, they are supported by an interior latticework engineered to to deliver the most strength and/or flexibility for the least weight, just like bones. 

Neri Oxman, director of MIT’s Mediated Matter Lab, applies biomimicry to production as well. 

“Look at spiders,” Oxman says. “They use about eight different properties of silk for different functions. The spider is like a multimaterial 3D printer.”

Spiders turn out to be a theme of the lab: the Spiderbot project takes it cues from a spider’s web. It’s a 3D-printing gantry you can strap to your back and carry: four cables, each with a motor, attach to trees and can lift four tonnes between them, meaning the system can print over 3,370-metres cubed, even in challenging terrains. Oxman calls it the “largest 3D printer in the world”. If combined with the bone-inspired building project, it could print out architectural structures anywhere, on demand. Another project, CNSilk, investigates silk as a building material. “My ambition is to print a tent-sized silk cocoon within a year.”

—Wired

This is a real game changer, making it possible to build things that simply weren’t structurally imaginable before. Form and function literally merge when function can be designed—and printed—right into form. The possibilities are deliciously endless.

This morning, for example, as I look at my indoor garden and contemplate travel, I have been imagining a self irrigating flower pot. You would pour water into a slot in the rif of the pot and a network of channels would deliver the right amount to keep soil evenly moist. No more saucer puddles. Who knows whether this would actually work, but it is genuinely exciting to think in such a new way. Next up: a cup that keeps coffee the perfect degree of warm longer. (You can see where my priorities lie…) 

•••••••

The three main drivers of the Fab Age are breakthroughs in materials science, the expiration of patents and the DIY/Maker movement.

Following the lead 3D Pied Piper, Bre Pettis, whose Brooklyn-based hacker collective NYCResistor developed the Makerbot, there are now dozens of companies—many with strong connections to makerspaces—prototyping and selling comparatively low cost 3D printers for the consumer market. 

This past fall, Make magazine set up a three-day test lab, bringing together top techs from all over the country to put 15 of the most promising printers through their paces. Hundreds of people jumped into Google+ hangouts to watch online. The result: Make’s Ultimate Guide to 3D Printing.

•••••••

3D printer sales are still counted in the low tens of thousands, but are set to explode. In fact, sales in the five years between 2007 and 2011 grew by a hype-delirious 35,000%:

…Until recently, 3-D printing was limited to large companies that could afford the industrial machines. Daimler AG, Honda Motor Co. (7267), Boeing Co. (BA) and Lockheed Martin Corp. (LMT) all have used 3- D printers to fashion prototypes and make parts that go into final products.

“To me, this change is similar to the supercomputers of the 1970s that were only affordable to the major corporations, and now we’re in a period analogous to the 1980s, where the personal computer came about; now we have personal printing,” said Jeff Moe, founder of Aleph Objects Inc., a Loveland, Colorado-based maker of the less-expensive machines. “Not only does that mean that people can print in their homes, but also the engineers can even do it at companies as well.” …

— Bloomberg

What Gutenberg’s clever wine-press hack did for words, 3D printers are doing for things. Now you can print the bookshelves, too. 

— J. A. Ginsburg / @TrackerNews

RELATED

• Thingiverse: crowd-shared 3D design library

• The New MakerBot Replicator Might Just Change Your World / by Chris Anderson / Wired

The Age of 3D / Let’s Play!

3D printing just gets better, cheaper and funner. Whether it spreads as fast as tablet tech remains to be seen (JP Morgan predicts over 46 million iPads to ship in 2012 and close to 100 million tablet devices over all). But clearly, this is the Next Big Everybody-Wants-One Thing.

I certainly want one. Or access to one. Enter NY-based start-up Shapeways, a kind of Kinko’s-meets-Etsy mash-up of 3D services and sales. Whether you submit a design to be printed—in plastic, metal or ceramic—or adapt an existing design (create your own sake set!) or buy something ready-made through the online store, this site is a rabbit hole of endless mind-blowing possibilities.

It is not only the objects themselves that fascinate, but also the fact that many of them really couldn’t have been manufactured any other way.

Consider Gyro the Cube:

You don’t have to be terribly techie to play, either. For those who need a bit of guidance, you might be able to find a class through Skillshare, a service that connects people who teach just about anything with those who want to learn (although this class is in New York, Skillshare operates in dozens of cities).

                                             ••••••••••••••••••••••••

For those preferring to own the means of production, MakerBot Industries just unveiled its latest gizmo at the Consumer Electronics Show:  The Replicator The Replicator. With a hat tip to one of Star Trek’s most magical imagine-ventions (now trademarked), the new printer offers three notable improvements over v.1:

• comes assembled
• can print in 2 colors
• can print bigger things

The Cube, also launched at CES, offers a Thingiverse / Shapeways / RepRap-style “community” for sharing 3D designs.

Let’s play!

RELATED:

And You Can Print That, Too…  / J. A. Ginsburg / TrackerNews: Dot to Dot

— J. A. Ginsburg / @TrackerNews