Dad 3D prints a $10 prosthetic for his boy

Prosthetic hand mod (Photo credit: atomic-kitteh)

If you did not think 3D printing, adaptive manufacturing, was going to change everything a special effects artist and father is proof that it is going to be incredibly disruptive.  A father built a prosthetic hand for his 12-year-old son using a 3-D printer. He was able to build a a $20000 prosthetic hand for around $10 worth of materials.

Paul McCarthy, from Marblehead Massachusetts, made the inexpensive yet functional prosthetic hand for his son Leon, who was born without fingers on one of his hands. The family had been told when Leon was very young that he needed to get used to using his hand without prosthetics and try to acquire a full range of abilities and motion, but a doctor recently said they should start looking at prosthetic options.

http://m.now.msn.com/paul-mccarthy-massachusetts-man-uses-3-d-printer-to-make-prosthetic-hand-for-his-son

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3D printing the “umbilical cord” for disaster relief

3D printing might not be in the mainstream limelight quite yet, but it’s clear that it has a definite future. To date, we’ve seen people design complex objects such as a music record and an exoskeleton, and simple things like a cup, a gear, or practice abstract art. Even in poor countries, provided with important tools, people can build some rather simple, but important objects.

Over at Makezine, Ashley Dara talks about introducing 3D printers to Haiti. Corrupt government aside, some people there are creating rather impressive things, such as the umbilical cord clamp as mentioned in this post’s title. We can easily take something like that for granted over here, but there? Supplies like those are not so prevalent.

http://makezine.com/2013/10/18/3d-printing-umbilical-cord-clamps-in-haiti/

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3D printing regardless of scale — New from MIT Alums

Rising designers and MIT alums Marcelo Coelho and Skyler Tibbits introduce hyper form, a way to print objects regardless of scale. 3-D printing has become the rallying cause for a rising generation of designers, engineers, and architects. There seems to be few limits to what the technology can do or what range of products it can spawn, from lampshades to lunar bases. Amid all the hype, however, it’s easy to neglect one key factor: Printing capabilities are directly wedded to the size of one’s printer. As home printers become more readily available, the size of their printing beds shrink. Any budding designer with a desktop 3-D printer can create an intricate scale model of the Millennium Falcon, but what about something as straightforward yet functional as a chair? It simply won’t fit inside the printing box.

MIT-based researchers and instructors Marcelo Coelho and Skylar Tibbitsteamed up to tackle this very problem. Working under a grant from Ars Electronica, the pair conceived of a whole new way to do 3-D printing. Hyperform is a new strategy for designing and printing large objects irrespective of a printer’s bed size. So not only can you print out that chair at home, you can also print a table, bed frame, and everything else you need to furnish a bedroom.

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-09/27/new-3d-printing-technique

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3D printing scales up and integrating

The Economist has a good article on the current state of 3D printing at 3D printing scales up.

Having been privileged to have watched several technologies evolve from early stage clunkiness to significant economic and cultural impact this seems like something to watch. It’s still very early days for 3D printing.

Looking at 3D printing in the context of a supply chain, it seems like it might impact three areas:

•      The labor invested in creating parts.
•      The quantity of parts that need to be inventoried.
•      The need to ship parts from one place to another.

This view does not address some of the other impacts that 3D printing may have such as the ability to create parts that are difficult any other way. With respect to the labor invested in creating parts, 3D printing is an automated manufacturing process like many other automated manufacturing processes (dedicated tooling, robots, etc.). It’s impact is really not very different than those. That being said increased automation reduces the cost of part manufacture by both reducing the quantity of required labor and the skills required. This in turn may have the impact of reducing wages involved in part manufacture due to the reduction in skills required. The demand on this labor pool may go up if the number of locations goes up as mentioned below.

http://www.economist.com/news/technology-quarterly/21584447-digital-manufacturing-there-lot-hype-around-3d-printing-it-fast

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3D printed architecture is here. 260 million surfaces in 1 month

3.2 meters tall 6.8 meters long by 3.2 meters wide room printed completely by a 3D printer. It has 260 million surfaces. Weights in at 11 tons of sandstone but amazingly it only took 1 month to print and a single day to assemble. Hansmeyer and Dillenburger, both computational architects at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology‘s architecture department in Zurich, wrote algorithms to completely design the complex geometry of the 16 square meter (170 sq ft) room . Dubbed “Digital Grotesque,” their modern take on a medieval grotto was made with a new type of 3D printed sandstone, infused with a hardening resin to increase its structural stability. To print out the sandstone parts that made the room, the duo used a massive Voxeljet 3D printer, about the size of a large room. “It can print a single piece that weighs 12 tons, yet at a layer resolution of 0.13 millimeters,” says Hansmeyer. “This combination of scale and resolution seemed unreal to us at first.”

The scale of machines, high material costs and the structural weakness of 3D printed materials is the reason why architects have up to now used 3D printing technology only to make prototypes or small scale models. The sand-printing technology the duo employed finds use in industrial applications, but with the addition of their innovative methods, it can now be used to create huge prefabricated sandstone bricks strong enough to build with.

The room with 260 million surfaces: 3D printed architecture is here.

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Size Comparison – Science Fiction spaceships

The world of sci-fi has brought us countless spaceships and other galaxy-hopping vessels, but no one’s ever brought them all together quite like this. Dirk Loechel has charted out a massive size comparison of ships from dozens of fictional worlds. As you’d expect, iconic franchises like Star Trek, Star Wars, and Battlestar Galactica are represented, but Loechel branches out to other sci-fi universes as well. You’ll see ships that have appeared in films like Independence Day, Alien vs. Predator and Wall-E. Video games aren’t left out, either; Eve Online, Halo, Dead Space, and Starcraft are also featured in the massive chart.

http://fav.me/d6lfgdf

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3D Printing “DRM” Aims to Stop Next-Gen Pirates

A startup called Authentise wants to skip the file-sharing Napster era and go straight to the legal, commercial streaming services. It developed a technology that works like a Spotify for “physibles”—a newly coined term for 3D-printed objects,MIT’s Technology Review reported via Motherboard.

http://torrentfreak.com/3d-printing-drm-aims-to-stop-next-gen-pirates-130827/

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2014 3D printing patents expire; Boom for new devices

The key patents covering a 3D printing technique called “laser sintering” are set to expire in the next year or two — there are a bunch of them, so they’ll trickle out — and this will radically reduce the price of printing and printers. Laser sintering involves melting a fine powder (usually plastic) in order to fuse it with the powder below and around it, and it’s a technique that produces a very smooth, even finish. The big 3D printer manufacturers, who control the laser sintering patents, have used patent law to lock up the market for devices, and to prevent device-owners from sourcing their powder from third parties. Patent expiry will also open new horizons to the world of hacker/maker printers, like the RepRap and its derivatives. These open-source hardware printers will likewise be able to integrate laser sintering, and to take advantage of a coming explosion in plastic powder suppliers.

http://mashable.com/2013/07/22/3d-printing-patents/

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3D print vinyl records from MP3s

The nostalgic return to vinyl LP records is endearing, in a way, but no one expects the digital music recording industry to start producing the large discs in mass quantities again. Music is as invisible as money these days, and by that, I mean we’re careless with it. I still bitterly mourn the death of my first MP3 player like a widower left with the debts of the deceased. But now one artist is using 3D printing and laser cutting as a way of immortalizing music in new and innovative ways. Amanda Ghassaei has not only found a positive use for a machine that, up to this point, has been best known for creating things that kill people, but she’s also managed to press Radiohead onto a wood record.

As Ghassaei writes on her website entry for the 3D Printed Record: ”In order to explore the current limits of 3D printing technology, I’ve created a program for converting digital audio into a 3D model of a record and printed some functional prototypes that play on ordinary record players.”

http://www.tonedeaf.com.au/news/international-news/306773/3d-print-mp3-vinyl-record.htm

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3D scan with a Kinect for 3D printing

Volumental on target to make 3D scanning mainstream. Scanning and 3D printing an object could become much simpler if 3D printing company Volumental is successful in crowdfunding the development of a web app which would allow users to scan and print 3D objects using nothing more than a Microsoft XBox Kinect sensor and a web browser.

Volumental on target to make 3D scanning mainstream | 3D printing, 3D TV, virtual reality, AR and Ultra HD news.

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