My wife Alice quit her job a year ago to found Makies with some friends in London and Helsinki. Makies is a 3D printing startup. The company's mission is to create toys and dolls from "playful" digital environments (games, social systems, stuff like that). Essentially, the idea is that you create digital people, along with their clothes and accessories, and play with them online, and at the press of a button, you can order these things as physical objects that get custom produced by a local supplier and shipped straight to you. The idea is to build a business that inspires makers, hackers and crafters -- for example, the dolls' heads are designed to take an Arduino Lilypad, should you have such a notion.
After a lot of experimentation and design iteration, they've gotten to the point where they can reliably produce and ship 10-inch custom action dolls using suppliers here in London, and they want to alpha test it against the real world, so they're selling 100 of these dolls to see how the whole thing works. There are just a few left now -- Alice didn't want me to blog this until all the people who'd signed up for the mailing list and all the friends and family had had a crack at the inventory. You can also play with the doll creator without buying the actual doll. They've learned a ton in a just a few days, and they're looking for more of your feedback.
I created the skeleton of a skeletal Lepidoptera. The Death's Head Hawkmoth (Acherontia atropos), seen in The Silence of the Lambs, has a skull marking on its back. I made a full human-like bone structure for the moth, with the grinning skull protruding from its back. The model is very thin, yet sturdy and flexible. Detail level is fantastic, and the natural texture of the 3d printing process gives it a bone-like appearance that works wonders. Yes, moths don't have endoskeletons, that's the whole point...
You can buy one in white, black, or red, for $15. More photos below, including details that show off the creepy little skull.
Make is knocking out some fabulous "3D Printer Trading Cards (From the Future!)" -- lovely contractual design fictions from a world gone made for additive manufacturing.
I had a dream that I found a box of 3D Printer Trading cards from 2012 at the Seekonk Speedway Flea Market. When I awoke I realized that might be a good way to introduce some of the 3D printer makers who will be exhibiting at the Maker Faire Bay Area next week. I’ll be posting these all week in no particular order; collect them all!
Annelise sez, "This is an episode of MakerBot TV which is all about making DIY Robots with MakerBots!"
The MakerBot design team is building a Robot Petting Zoo to bring to this year's Maker Faire. In this video you'll get a behind-the-scenes look at how they conceptualized, designed and created these amazing DIY robots!
Chris sez, "I'm helping to arrange a conference on 3D printing/additive manufacturing in South Africa. We have some world-renowned professors on the subject coming and its being held in a game reserve so it should be fun!"
Rapid Prototyping remains a key technology in the Rapid Product Development suite of technologies. However, over the past decade we have experienced growing acceptance of this powerful technology in the manufacturing industry, not only as prototyping tool, but increasingly as niche manufacturing technology. The inherent ability of the technology to accommodate part complexity and customization, coupled with an ever-increasing range of materials, has provided industry with unprecedented flexibility in design and production. Resulting from this, Additive Manufacturing has replaced Rapid Prototyping as internationally accepted terminology for this technology. Also in South Africa the uptake of Additive Manufacturing by industry has been breathtaking.
In the calm and pristine environment of the South African Bushveld, the conference programme will offer a variety of opportunities for participants from industry, R&D institutions, academia and government to listen to presentations, engage in discussions, visit exhibitions and just interact informally during the three days of the event.
For the fans of the Portal games, this is the latest 3d-printed weirdness I made, a puzzle box. It was much harder than I expected, went through 2 prototypes to get it to work out, and I still had to fix a lot of things with a knife and sandpaper to get this model to work just right. Not for sale though, unless you wanna do the delicate carvings to fix it yourself :)
Cymon (AKA Joe) won the Tinkercad Chess Set Design contest with his design for Action #Chess, whose pieces can be assembled into a Chess Giant. He's documenting the 3D output of his darling on his MakerBot blog.
Andrew writes, "A new designer chair from Andrew Miller at mSurfaces.com uses soap bubble physics to unlock their unique structural advantages. While architects have used the shape of a soap film to provide canopy, as in the 1972 Olympic Stadium by Frei Otto, the chair will be the first built object to support a human's weight with the form. It is the equal distribution of curvature throughout a soap film that makes it so aesthetically pleasing to the eye. However, this formal quality also redistributes the structural forces. If you could harness this property, you could use lightweight and inexpensive materials instead of steel. Imagine multi-story tents able to support the weight of electrical and plumbing lines, swiftly deployable in the aftermath of natural disaster. This chair will demonstrate the proof of concept towards such real-world load-bearing applications. 3-D printed models and renderings of the chair are now available on their Kickstarter page."
The ShopBot is a low-cost CNC, or computer controlled router. Think of it as a large-scale milling machine. It is great for small-scale production runs of machine parts in wood or metal. A friend of mine used his ShopBot to cut the gears and mechanism (other than the chime) for a full-scale replica of a grandfather's Clock. ShopBots (and their kin) can also fabricate extremely detailed 3D contour maps (whole cities!), and other intricate 3D surfaces.
We have one at the design school I teach at. It can cut anything programmable like the hull plates for a full scale sailboat. On a big boat, each plate of the hull is different shape, but the ShopBot just follows its orders and spits them out ready to install. It is very accurate. Hey, you can even equip it with a pen or the like, which permits very intricate drawings. The cheapest Shopbot is the small Shop Bot Desktop for $5,000. They are getting cheaper every year, but if you only need one occasionally, you can buy time on one at shared workshops like Techshop.
Joaquin Baldwin, whose wonderful creative work we've featured on Boing Boing before, shares these photos of a lovely 3d-printed sculpture he's just created. You can purchase your very own, right here. Cat not included.
Joaquin explains:
I made a sculpture of 3d printed awesomeness and wanted to share it with you, I hope you like it. It is titled The Seed of Yggdrasil. The design is based on the classic Celtic-style knot symbol for the tree of life from Norse mythology, Yggdrasil.
Inside the leaves you can see a small sphere of blue. If you looked reaaally carefully, you would notice that the continents in the blue ball are in the shape of Pangea and not our current distribution. The texture is amazing, the little ridges from the 3D printing process give it a very natural and tactile feel, and the colors are really vibrant. And the cat didn't care at all.
A Nature Chemistry paper by researchers from the University of Glasgow describes a process for "printing" pharmaceutical compounds from various feedstocks, and supposes a future in which we have diagnosis/medication manufacturies at home. The process uses an off-the-shelf 3D printer technology to assemble pre-filled "vessels" in ways that create the desired chemical reaction in order to produce medicines. It's a scaled-down version of the industrial process used to manufacture drugs in bulk, and the paper's principal, Prof Lee Cronin, calls it "reactionware." From the BBC:
"We can fabricate these reactionware vessels using a 3D printer in a relatively short time. Even the most complicated vessels we've built have only take a few hours.
"By making the vessel itself part of the reaction process, the distinction between the reactor and the reaction becomes very hazy. It's a new way for chemists to think, and it gives us very specific control over reactions because we can continually refine the design of our vessels as required.
"For example, our initial reactionware designs allowed us to synthesize three previously unreported compounds and dictate the outcome of a fourth reaction solely by altering the chemical composition of the reactor."
...Prof Cronin added: "3D printers are becoming increasingly common and affordable. It's entirely possible that, in the future, we could see chemical engineering technology which is prohibitively expensive today filter down to laboratories and small commercial enterprises.
"Even more importantly, we could use 3D printers to revolutionise access to health care in the developing world, allowing diagnosis and treatment to happen in a much more efficient and economical way than is possible now.
"We could even see 3D printers reach into homes and become fabricators of domestic items, including medications. Perhaps with the introduction of carefully-controlled software 'apps', similar to the ones available from Apple, we could see consumers have access to a personal drug designer they could use at home to create the medication they need."
The final item from today's Shapeways rummage is Artfulshrapnel's "GOATSEarring," a goatse.cx tribute ear-plug: "The worst ear plug the internet has to offer."
I had a bit of a rummage on the Shapeways marketplace today and came up with some 3D printed gubbins that I'm intrigued by. First up is Stop4Stuff's "Twin Rail Mobius," a set of nested Möbius strips that can be loaded with ball-bearings.
A half shell and 3 rails form a bearing-like structure to encapsulate a train of 6mm balls in a mind-warping cage with a twisting, fascinating movement bringing to life the only pendent of its kind in the world.
Includes a 4mm loop for attaching to a necklace or leather cord.
See the photographs with retro-fitted 31 6mm chrome steel ball bearings... in the bottom photo, the balls have been heated until they 'blue'... check out the video to see how they move by clicking on the little icon below the camera above.
This electron microscope photograph, published by the Vienna University of Technology, shows a nano-scale model of a Formula One racing car, created using a 3D printing technique being developed there. The BBC has more on the new technique.
My wife Alice quit her job a year ago to found Makies with some friends in London and Helsinki. Makies is a 3D printing startup. The company's mission is to create toys and dolls from "playful" digital environments (games, social systems, stuff like that). Essentially, the idea is that you create digital people, along with their clothes and accessories, and play with them online, and at the press of a button, you can order these things as physical objects that get custom produced by a local supplier and shipped straight to you. The idea is to build a business that inspires makers, hackers and crafters -- for example, the dolls' heads are designed to take an Arduino Lilypad, should you have such a notion.
Rapid Prototyping remains a key technology in the Rapid Product Development suite of technologies. However, over the past decade we have experienced growing acceptance of this powerful technology in the manufacturing industry, not only as prototyping tool, but increasingly as niche manufacturing technology. The inherent ability of the technology to accommodate part complexity and customization, coupled with an ever-increasing range of materials, has provided industry with unprecedented flexibility in design and production. Resulting from this, Additive Manufacturing has replaced Rapid Prototyping as internationally accepted terminology for this technology. Also in South Africa the uptake of Additive Manufacturing by industry has been breathtaking.
"We can fabricate these reactionware vessels using a 3D printer in a relatively short time. Even the most complicated vessels we've built have only take a few hours.
