Gadgetory

finally 3d printing few candidates for next big thing status seem quite as much like magic or quite as unlikely as this one depending on your point of view here's a small example of how automakers move at a pace more like electronics using technologies like this 3d printer to rapid prototype ideas today not next week let me show you something now that 3d printer that we have here in the ERL made this whole this machine was made ready to go this wasn't assembled later same goes for this chain it came out this way that's amazing 3d printing isn't just for the super geeks and people making components for cars you can use it to make everyday objects like an iphone case this head deposits this plastic material down here this print surface prints up layer by layer until you get a solid object at the end of it so once you have the plan and load in the software it tells a printer to print out plastic in a series of layers building gradually up until you get a finished solid object this extruder head moves here along the x-axis as well as the z axis and then this build plate moves up and down for the y-axis so it's great about the replicator in particular is that it can print the tutor from color so it can either do that at the same time making one object comprised in two different colors or it can print say one object and white one object in black or can do those at the same time depending on the file and the layout and the very software settings yes we knew that 3d printers had arrived two years ago at the Consumer Electronics Show when suddenly the printers were all at or below two thousand dollars some quite a bit below and the makers of them were abandoning this idea that we were all going to go out and learn CAD software instead envisioning a sharing and buying market of pre-done design files bottom line is we are more a nation of buyers than makers that's not a condemnation it's just reality after a busy day week or month of commuting working parenting shopping and dealing with all your connected life few of us have the time or the inclination to come home and design the perfect soup ladle let alone produce the thing a great design is a talent anyway it's more than just a piece of hardware and software i watch instead for 3d printing to grow big in four areas above the average consumer but well below the large corporations who basically have already discovered and embraced it first prototyping this is where products can leave the realm of a paper presentation a PowerPoint of verbal discussion and move to being tangible that's a big jump that seems trivial but it's not early prototypes could make the difference between dying on the design page and making it into early production second is low volume products that are almost personal in their low volume imagine something as simple as a smart phone case that is printed out that fits the contours of your hand on up to a crown ready at the dentist the same day not a week later to a prosthetic that is perhaps created during a medical procedure for a perfect fit for the patient from the very beginning third simple software i mean so simple that it's almost like expression more than technology operation look at autodesk's 1 2 3 d catch object capture software for example or see what the folks behind the meta smart glasses are envisioning where you would just use augmented reality to shape your envisioned product in space and then hand that design to the printer forth more materials moving from today's mono color plastics to multicolored plastics metals and even biological materials from the DNA level all the way the printing synthetic