This is a great presentation of the current and future state of 3D printing. He gives tons of information and mentions a lot of interesting web links.
Singularity University is an interesting sound place. It is based at the NASA Ames campus in Silicon Valley. Their mission statement is…
Singularity University is an interdisciplinary university whose mission is to assemble, educate and inspire leaders who strive to understand and facilitate the development of exponentially advancing technologies in order to address humanity’s grand challenges.
Neil Underwood over at the RepRap Log Phase blog has put together a good guide for the relative costs of the various open source and commercial 3D printers. These are limited to the thermoplastic extrusion types.
It includes basic starter kits, complete kits and fully assembled models. It includes laser cut, CNC machines and printed versions. There are also some rough ideas on complexity and reliability.
I was at the Detroit Maker Faire over the weekend. It was quite a drive from Chicago, but well worth it. The place was full of 3D printers. Most of them were MakerBots and the others were mostly RepRaps (Darwins and Mendels). It is great to see MakerBot Industries having success with an open source product. I almost missed the actual MakerBot “booth”. It was tucked behind a a few bigger displays. They had a couple MakerBots printing away. They were printing a lot of coin bottle openers. They have a slot for a coin that catches on the bottle cap. …quick to print and a crowd pleaser.
Thingiverse
I spent some time chatting with them about all of the DIY digital fabrication going on with printers, CNC machines, lasers, etc. They mentioned that they had a project started to design and build a 3D scanner. It makes a lot of sense because easily getting things into 3D format helps the whole movement along. Below is a scan and print of Bre Pettis, one of the founders of MakerBot and Thingiverse.
Thingiverse
Thingiverse
When I got home I started to look into the Makerscan and 3D scanners in general. Unfortunately the MakerBot people are just getting started. They have a links page, a Google Group and a decent sense of direction and that is about it right now. The links page has a lot of good stuff. I have heard of the David Scanner for a long time. They have a complete kit.
There is a new additive thermo plastic printer for sale at PP3D.com. They call it the UP! printer. They are selling the first 100 units for $1500 USD, then the price goes up to $2990 USD. They claim a 0.2mm resolution. The models do look quite good. There was a video, after the jump.
This looks like an interesting hack. There are not a lot of details, but apparently there is some good information at the Yahoo DIY 3D Printing and Fabrication Group and at CandyFab.org. It looks like a lot of work and the results are questionable, but if you’ve read any blogs here you know I never criticize people for showing early, but rough results.
It appears he uses paper sheets on the powdering tray to set the height of each pass. Remove at sheet and the level moved down. Great, simple, consistent idea.
