MetaFilter posts tagged with 3dprinting

No longer sci-fi: world's first 3D printed (almost) all-plastic firearm.

MoTLD — Tue, 07 May 2013 18:13:10 -0800

Defense Distributed, creators of the controversial printable AR-15 receiver, have now released CAD files and video of the first firing of the Liberator, a real plastic pistol capable of firing between one and 10 .380 calibre rounds before exploding. Andy Greenberg of Forbes was apparently invited to witness the historic moment. The device is named after the FP-45 Liberator experiment of World War II. Interestingly, to comply with the Undetectable Weapons Act, the creators inserted a non-functional steel cube into the frame because the only metal part, a hardware store nail used as a firing pin, wasn't enough to set off the average metal detector.

Cities Of The Future

homunculus — Thu, 02 May 2013 21:42:18 -0800

Cities Of The Future, Built By Drones, Bacteria, And 3-D Printers. [Via]

Creative Entomophagy

wolfdreams01 — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 09:11:21 -0800

With an incredible protein-to-weight ration, insects have often been promoted as a superfood that could cure world hunger. (Although eating live insects may not be advisable.) However, the "grossness" factor often stops people from trying this comestible. Enter the 3-D printer to change all this.

Triple Gear

escabeche — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 06:00:00 -0800

Mathematicians Henry Segerman and Saul Schleimer have produced a triple gear, three linked gears in space that can rotate together. A short writeup of the topology and geometry behind the triple gear on the arXiv.

Better, stronger, faster kidneys.

cthuljew — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 13:08:36 -0800

What do 3D printing, jelly, liver transplants, chainmail, dental fillings, ferrofluids, and the Six Million Dollar man have to tell us about our future? Materials scientist and engineer Mark Miodownik lets us know in this Royal Institution lecture.

123D Catch = My mind blown

spock — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 13:07:11 -0800

This is the story of an artist who was able to take numerous photos of a sculpture of a horse's head, "Head of a horse of Selene" now found in the British Museum - but originally from near the Acropolis in ancient Greece (circa 438-432 BC) - and who then fed the said photographs (taken from many different perspectives) to a revolutionary (free) software/app called 123D Catch (by AutoDesk, makers of AutoCAD), which then created the wireframes needed to print out exact replicas (in pieces that must then be assembled) on a 3D printer. The artist makes it available on Thingiverse, if you'd like to make one on your own on your 3D printer. If the demo video for 123D Catch doesn't blow your mind, your mind has probably already been blown. With apologies to Dr. Hook

"The project began with a mechanical hand"

the man of twists and turns — Sun, 03 Feb 2013 12:32:46 -0800

Robohand: How cheap 3D printers built a replacement hand for a five-year old boy coming up short handed (the Robohand blog):" Two men and their journey to find a solution – from 10,000 miles apart."

PRINTER IS JAMMED. OPEN DOOR, CLEAR FOOD, THEN PRESS OK.

Brandon Blatcher — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 09:06:16 -0800

Looking to print your own house, jewelry or dessert? Then check out Engadget's Consumer Guide to 3D printers.

Mixing Digital Sculpture with Real Objects

gwint — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 08:44:17 -0800

Mixing Digital Sculpture with Real Objects (SLVimeo)

Print Your Own Foetus

modernnomad — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 08:06:00 -0800

For US$1275, You Can Get a 3D Model of Your Foetus The result is a scale reproduction of your unborn baby, composed of an opaque white fetus encased in the mother’s clear, colorless abdomen. [via The Verge]

3D-Printed "Magic Arms"

Foci for Analysis — Fri, 03 Aug 2012 05:03:23 -0800

Two-year-old Emma wanted to play with blocks, but a condition called arthrogryposis meant she couldn't move her arms. So researchers at a Delaware hospital 3D printed a durable custom exoskeleton with the tiny, lightweight parts she needed.

Makers of All Things

Zarkonnen — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 03:26:30 -0800

3D printing can now make replacement jaws, thousands of user-designed widgets, electromechanical computers - but also ATM skimmer fronts, handcuff keys and gun parts. But can you own the shape of a thing? (Previously on the Blue.)

If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere

storybored — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 19:52:04 -0800

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!" Or skip the Thing-O-Matic, and try putting together the Cracker Box Guitar Amp Bundle. The Saga Banjo Kit.. Or the amazingMini-Rhinoceros Strandbeest!

The mathematical sculptures of Henry Segerman

Foci for Analysis — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 10:24:07 -0800

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 Segerman's work is available on Shapeways, a 3D printing market. Other cool stuff on Shapeways: Hyphae lamp, The Chrysanthemum Centrepiece, Lightpoem for LED candle, Steampunk Dice Set, Nocturnal Watch, Thugger 3.0, Nyan Pop Tart Cat. Previously about 3D Printing. Via.

Solar powered 3D printer creates glass objects out of sand

Kattullus — Sat, 25 Jun 2011 16:30:45 -0800

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.

Instructable: How to be Hard to Pigeonhole

richyoung — Wed, 25 May 2011 22:48:18 -0800

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. . . . What about that time he almost died while trying to sail from Florida to Cuba in a homemade outrigger canoe lashed together with used bicycle innertubes (previously)? Or his voyages among California's offshore Channel Islands (in the same canoe as the Cuba debacle, not to be confused with the even smaller one he sailed from Seattle to Alaska)? Or perhaps it's his conceptual art with painting robots, veggie darts and a faux-vivisectionist Skinner box, from his student days at MIT Media Lab? Or his contributions to solving the problem of water contamination in African diesel fuel supplies? Phew! Did I miss anything?

Your teacup is infringing on mine. Nu-uh, I remixed it.

Popular Ethics — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 22:14:40 -0800

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.

Spare Parts

richyoung — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 22:41:02 -0800

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. Earlier this year, a British engineer named Tal Golesworthy suffering from Marfan syndrome made headlines for building himself a life-saving custom aorta reinforcement patch using modern 3-D scanning and tissue printing techniques. Last month, National Geographic ran a show on biomedical engineering that featured the "skin cell gun" (previously - and I should mention it includes brief footage of burn injuries that might bother some folks), a device that deposits a patient's own cultured skin cells on burn wounds and heals severe burns within days, rather than months or years. Now, we have the recent TED talk by Dr. Anthony Atala about his team's work on organ replacement engineering, which is promising but not yet ready for therapeutic use. The talk is a real stunner, with Dr. Atala displaying a fresh-from-the-printer prototype kidney and introducing a young man who, ten years earlier, received a bioengineered bladder replacement. Simpler tissues have been in therapeutic use for some time, but more complex replacement organs are quite challenging to engineer, especially when it comes to matching up blood vessels. The kidney, with its massively complicated blood vessel structure, is the holy grail of made-to-order replacement organs, as kidneys are on the wish list of the vast majority of would-be organ recipients. To be clear, the on-stage demo was a proof-of-concept, not a functional kidney. There have been some misleading reports in the science media regarding this point. As I understand it, Dr. Atala is capable of generating kidney tissue and printing it to match the shape and size of the recipient's kidney, but they have not yet solved the blood vessel issue. This slice of the future has been brought to you by MRI, CAD, rapid prototyping (a cousin of the DIY 3-D printer), tissue engineering, and stem cells. And, of course, by a culture that values scientific research.

The Apple Core

brundlefly — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 17:38:27 -0800

Artists Johnny Kelly and Jethro Haynes used 3D printing to create this title sequence for the Dutch TV show Het Klokhuis. [via]

Has Skynet come online?

dersins — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 08:52:08 -0800

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....

CandyFab

exogenous — Wed, 09 May 2007 13:02:36 -0800

Sweet! Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories has made a 3D printer that forms objects out of sugar.

One life size copy of Britney please...

MintSauce — Wed, 06 Aug 2003 05:25:35 -0800

Printers produce copies in 3D. Z corporation demos 'low-cost' 3D printers at the SIGGRAPH CGI show.

Three-dimensional printing's a reality.

ed — Fri, 02 Mar 2001 02:33:33 -0800

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?