Next In Printing? 3 Dimensional Output!

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Next In Printing? 3 Dimensional Output!
January 18, 2008
Clixy Plays

Printers have experienced massive innovations the last decade. Next is three dimensional printing. Printers facilitating this might soon be quite affordable.

It sounds too sci-fi to be believable, yet researchers of Cornell University have managed to develop an open source 3D inkjet printer that can manufacture just about anything you can think of.

The best part of it is that due to popular input in the design, the printer is going to be affordable. It's dubbed a fabbing system, in reference to the phrase Fab at Home. But who cares about the semantics? It is going to be your Christmas present about three years down the road, as the new price is set at around $2400.

The system uses a 3D inkjet printing process which, in stead of ink, deposits droplets of plastic.This way, layer by layer, it gradually manufactures an object of any shape.

The inventor, Hod Lipson, sort of casually invented the machine. He wasnÌt intent on designing the earth shattering piece of equipment that ordinary manufacturing designers will envy him for, but simply wanted to design a really cool robot, he says.

ÏOne that could ÏevolveÓ by reprogramming itself and would also produce its own hardwareÛa software brain, if you will, with the ability to create a bodyÓ, according to an article in Popular Mechanics.com.

Experimenting with the process, Lipson invented whatÌs known as a rapid-prototyping fabrication, or Ïfabber.Ó Nothing all that new, because fabbers have been around for two decades. Until Lipson set out to manufacture his device however, Fabbers had been notoriously expensive that would only be part of the furniture of high tech labs. None of them could use more than one single material.

LipsonÌs invention changed all of this. Not only the cost picture but also the technical capability of the machine. ÏTo really let this robotic evolutionary process reach its full potential we need a machine that can fabricate anything, not just complex geometry, but also wires and motors and sensors and actuators,Ó Lipson was quoted as saying in Popular Mechanics.

He and a few other grad students did the thing that you and I would also do in a similar situation; they crowdsourced the issue. The result is the Fab at Home. Apparently the machine is as weird as our ancestors would only have dared dream about; it uses virtually any ground material, including foodstuffs like Easy Cheese and chocolate, but also other materials including epoxy and metal-powder-impregnated silicones.