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richyoung (2)

Make Magazine has released its Ultimate Kit Guide which rates 175 DIY kits. Kits like the: 6-in-1 Solar Robot Kit, the Infrared Jammer Kit, the KaraKuri Somersault Doll kit, the Loud Objects Noise Toy Kit. But best of all you will find the astounding MakerBot Thing-O-Matic 3D printer. "The Thing-O-Matic is a breakthrough in 3D printing technology. The Thing-O-Matic prints thing after thing, it's completely automated! You hit print and the machine does all the work. Want to print 100 butterflies? Easy. Want to print an entire chess set? No problem. Buy it, assemble it, and enjoy being the first on your block to live in the cutting-edge personal manufacturing future of tomorrow!" [more inside]
posted by storybored on Dec 7, 2011 - 37 comments

Henry Segerman creates mathematical sculptures using 3D printing: Round Möbius Strip, Hopf Fibration, Half of a 120-cell, Rectified Tesseract, Tesseract and 16-cell, Hilbert Curve, Knotted Cogs, Round Klein Bottle [more inside]
posted by Foci for Analysis on Sep 10, 2011 - 12 comments

Markus Kayser has designed and built The Solar Sinter, a solar powered 3D printer which creates glass objects out sand. Needless to say, the ability to create objects out of sand using solar power will be welcome in deserts. He took his machine into the Sahara desert to test it. Previously in the Sahara Kayser tested a similiar machine, The Sun Cutter, which uses a ball lens to create a kind of laser cutter.
posted by Kattullus on Jun 25, 2011 - 40 comments

We all know Instructables, the crowd-sourced how-to site that brought us great tutorials like "Garbage Bag + Rice Cooker = Alcohol Still," and "Quick Sauerkraut with Caraway Seeds and a Baseball bat" - wait, what? Oh, you must be reading some of Tim Anderson's 200-plus Instructables. Tim's a curious fellow best known for co-founding 3-D printer manufacturer Z Corp (previous-Z) um, no, wait, maybe for writing the Heirloom Technology column in Make Magazine? No? Hmm, then what is he "best known for?" Well, there's a bunch of other stuff in here. . . . [more inside]
posted by richyoung on May 25, 2011 - 13 comments

Cheap 3D printing has the potential to change the way we produce and consume objects in the same way the cheap PCs and the internet changed the way we produce and consume information. Once again it is hobbyists and university labs who are democratizing the technology. They are looking forward to the day when anyone can make designer bath fixtures, functional appliances, custom surgical implants, or even business opportunities at the click of a button.

However some are warning that overly broad patents could derail the whole revolution. Even more worrisome is the prospect that existing IP law is completely unprepared for a future where the cost boundary between ideas and physical objects has crumbled. Will commercial interests demand a crack down on "pirated" printouts? Will Open Source manufacturing bring about a Star Trekian utopia? It's hard to predict what will happen when everything is commodified.
posted by Popular Ethics on Apr 16, 2011 - 98 comments

The printing of an engineered [non-functional model of a] replacement kidney on stage at a recent TED talk is just the latest in a spate of recent high-profile biomedical engineering headlines. [more inside]
posted by richyoung on Mar 11, 2011 - 17 comments

Artists Johnny Kelly and Jethro Haynes used 3D printing to create this title sequence for the Dutch TV show Het Klokhuis. [via]
posted by brundlefly on Jan 29, 2010 - 18 comments

RepRap is a self-replicating rapid prototype machine (3D printer) using fused deposition modelling. You can build one, although I'm not sure why you'd need to....
posted by dersins on Oct 17, 2007 - 17 comments

Sweet! Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories has made a 3D printer that forms objects out of sugar.
posted by exogenous on May 9, 2007 - 36 comments

Printers produce copies in 3D. Z corporation demos 'low-cost' 3D printers at the SIGGRAPH CGI show.
posted by MintSauce on Aug 6, 2003 - 17 comments

Three-dimensional printing's a reality. While this technology will certainly help out mass production, here's the big question: Who will be the first to exploit this technology for odious purposes? And how far are we away from the transporter?
posted by ed on Mar 2, 2001 - 17 comments