Open Design Stereolithography with sLAMPS
With over a week left to go, the indiegogo project to create a low cost Stereolithographic 3d printer has already exceeded its funding goals. Much like Kickstarter, indiegogo gives inventors access to crowdsourced funding. Justin Hawkins started the project to create an open design for a 3d stereolithographic resin printer.
3d Printing to a Vending Machine
Will everyone have a personal 3d printer in their home, or will they use service centers? Dreambox envisions people queuing prints to a local vending machine. You’d upload the design to the website or pick from a marketplace. Then your print would be queued to a local Dreambox machine. The service sends a text message when printing has completed, and you pick up your 3d print from the machine. The machines could be at Home Depots, inside an office supply store, or wherever else wants to provide the service to their customers.
Soluble Support Material with Dual Extruders – HIPS
A Rhode Island 3d printing meetup has been experimenting with printing dissolvable support structures on consumer grade 3d printers. They found that a material called High Impact Polystyrene (HIPS) can be dissolved in a chemical bath of Limonene, while leaving the ABS material intact.
3d Printed Meat CEO Interview on Reddit
Andras Forgacs, CEO of Modern Meadows just finished a “Ask Me Anything” session on Reddit with updates on their 3d printed meat research. We explored 3d printed meat back when Modern Meadows was just getting preliminary results, and they’ve now successfully created small pieces of 3d printed meat. When asked how the results taste, Forgacs wrote:
I cooked some pieces in olive oil and ate some with and without salt and pepper. Not bad. The taste is good but not yet fully like meat. We have yet to get the fat content right and other elements that influence taste.
The AMA is full of insight on the state of 3d printed meat, touching on potential costs – $30 to $100 a pound, how long it’ll be before it’s in supermarkets – around 10 years, and some of the gritty details on how they manufacture the meat.
It certainly doesn’t look like this yet
3d Print a New Skull
Patients with severe skull injuries can have their bone structure imaged and have a custom implant 3d printed that fits perfectly with their existing bone structure. The FDA has just approved the 3d printed skull implants from Oxford Performance Materials. The company uses a CT Scan or MRI to create a model of the patient’s skull, then designs an implant that fits any gaps. The implant is 3d printed with the special material that is biocompatible to reduce rejection. The surface should support cell attachment including bone cells. As the bone around it heals, the implant will become an integrated part of the patient’s bone structure.
Copyright and 3d Printing
With rumors that startup Fabulonia has technology to combat the problems of copyright in 3d printing, we wanted to define the central copyright issue of 3d printing. What are people most concerned about with copyright and 3d printing? What is the copyright issue that keeps big companies from entering 3d printing? Continue Reading →
Draw in the Air with 3Doodler
If you’ve decided you hate the precision of 3d printing and you want a shaky, hand drawn mess of plastic filament instead, the 3Doodler is for you. The 3Doodler is a bare extruder ripped from the typical 3d printer control system. It feeds in filament and extrudes at a constant rate, which then can be used to draw freehand.
3d Systems Teams with Creaform
3d Systems is following the path we predicted when they acquired Geomagic and announced a new design tool created in cooperation with Creaform called Go!Model. The design tool fills a gap in the market for entry level scanning software. Go!Model is powerful enough to be used to clean up scans to make 3d prints. Most likely, enterprise users will still want to turn to a Rapidform package for high detail level scans.
List of 3d Printing Stocks
If on January 1st you made a portfolio of the pure play 3d printing stocks, you would have had a 22% gain by now. In comparison, the S&P500 returned 4%. What qualifies as a 3d printing stock? Stocks with most of their income from 3d printers or 3d printing services. What stocks are 3d printing stocks? There are only five 3d printing companies with stock publicly available now: ARMAVF, DDD, ONVO, SSYS, and XONE. We compiled a full list of all public companies with links to 3d printing. Continue Reading →
Urbee 2 – Car With 3d Printed Body
What did you picture cars would look like when you were a kid? Streamlined, sleek, with futurist aerodynamic lines. The Urbee is that car. A two passenger hybrid car, designed for the future, and 3d printed. Continue Reading →