Solar Sinter Project: 3D Printing with Sunlight and Sand I’m absolutely amazed by Markus Kayser’s Solar Sinter Project, a 3D printer that uses the sun for power and sand as its raw material: In a world increasingly concerned with questions of energy production and raw material shortages, this project explores the potential of desert manufacturing, where energy and material occur in abundance. In this experiment sunlight and sand are used as raw energy and material to produce glass objects using a 3D printing process, that combines natural energy and material with high-tech production technology.Solar-sintering aims to raise questions about the future of manufacturing and trigger dreams of the full utilisation of the production potential of the world’s most efficient energy resource – the sun. Whilst not providing definitive answers this experiment aims to provide a point of departure for fresh thinking. [via @clothbot] Matt Richardson mattr@makezine.commattrichardson.com Related
This Mind-Controlled 3-D Printer Generates Creatures From Your Kid's Brainwaves When Bryan Salt, a creative director from the U.K., was a kid, he would dream "of a machine that could create real objects from thought alone: to imagine a thing and it would appear in front of me ready made." Salt is working to make that dream a reality with his Chile-based startup Thinker Thing, which is in the process of creating a system called the Monster Dreamer that can generate 3-D models of creatures built from children’s brainwave data via a sensor-equipped headset. From there, those objects are easily realized in plastic with a MakerBot. I caught up with Salt over Facebook chat, and he explained how exactly Thinker Thing is able to create 3-D models by reading brain waves. "It’s not that you imagine an object and it appears," he explains. "It’s very difficult to know you’re thinking of the color red, but it’s very easy to find out you prefer the color red." Instead, children put on a headset and are presented with a variety of creatures with different characteristics.
The audacious plan to end hunger with 3-D printed food - Quartz Uber is slavery…Uber will add to traffic congestion…Uber destroys the savings of cab drivers… Hold the litany. Is this the incumbency speaking? And my name isn’t Marie Antoinette. I might get in trouble for this, but I’d like to add a drop of customer experience into the boiling broth of opinions about Uber. After five decades of riding in taxis, both in my native Paris and my adopted Bay Area, I’ve had my share of interesting and sympathetic cabbies, most of whom are more than willing to share their life stories. Unfortunately, pleasant rides with charming drivers are rare exceptions in a succession of dirty Silicon Valley cabs with cracked windshields, duct taped seats, and noisy wheel bearings threatening to seize at any minute. Simply finding a cab can be an unpleasant, complicated experience. The memories must be deeply imprinted. The phrase “transforming experience” was first used, and then abused, in Hollywood when describing the requirements for a script.
3D Printing Technology Poised for New Industrial Revolution When the TV series Star Trek first brought the starship Enterprise into German living rooms, the concept of a replicator was pure science fiction, a fantastical utopian vision we might experience one day centuries in the future. Replicators, something of a mixture between computer and miniature factory, were capable of creating food and replacement parts from next to nothing. They were highly practical devices, since Captain Kirk couldn't exactly take along a lot of supplies for his journeys through outer space. That futuristic vision, though, has receded far into the past -- overtaken by the present. The real-world replicator-like technology poised to revolutionize the world is known as 3-D printing, though that term is misleading, since the process has little to do with printing. Many different technological routes can be taken to reach the same goal. A Slow Process The printing of electronic components is even in the works. Widespread Applications 'Unlimited Potential'
Why Does 3D Printing Matter? 3-D Printing Will Change the World To anyone who hasn’t seen it demonstrated, 3-D printing sounds futuristic—like the meals that materialized in the Jetsons’ oven at the touch of a keypad. But the technology is quite straightforward: It is a small evolutionary step from spraying toner on paper to putting down layers of something more substantial (such as plastic resin) until the layers add up to an object. And yet, by enabling a machine to produce objects of any shape, on the spot and as needed, 3-D printing really is ushering in a new era. As applications of the technology expand and prices drop, the first big implication is that more goods will be manufactured at or close to their point of purchase or consumption. Another implication is that goods will be infinitely more customized, because altering them won’t require retooling, only tweaking the instructions in the software. China won’t be a loser in the new era, but it will have to give up on being the world’s manufacturing powerhouse.
SolarSinter : markus kayser Solar Sinter 2011 In August 2010 I took my first solar machine - the Sun-Cutter - to the Egyptian desert in a suitcase. This was a solar-powered, semi-automated low-tech laser cutter, that used the power of the sun to drive it and directly harnessed its rays through a glass ball lens to ‘laser’ cut 2D components using a cam-guided system. The Sun-Cutter produced components in thin plywood with an aesthetic quality that was a curious hybrid of machine-made and “nature craft” due to the crudeness of its mechanism and cutting beam optics, alongside variations in solar intensity due to weather fluctuations. In the deserts of the world two elements dominate - sun and sand. The former offers a vast energy source of huge potential, the latter an almost unlimited supply of silica in the form of quartz.
Stereolithography: The Science behind 3D Printing Recreating entire 3D objects directly from the virtual space of a computer to real life is a reality made possible by a number of different technologies. This article will focus on the one 3D printing technology that enjoys the upsides of speed, precision, and thanks to breakthroughs in design, affordability. Stereolithography, or SLA in shorthand, is essentially what the industry calls an “additive manufacturing process” as opposed to traditional methods of “subtractive manufacturing”. The former creates products through adding layers of a material, while the latter creates products through removing parts of a material. Like other additive manufacturing processes, SLA uses only the barest of resources and produces items at a quick rate. The idea was invented and patented in 1986 by Charles W. SLA at Work The process of SLA differs from other 3D printing technologies by using an ultraviolet laser directed at a thick pool of photopolymer resin. Results of SLA The Future of SLA
3-D printing: Wave of the future 3-D printing: Wave of the future If you’ve been wondering about 3-D printing, it’s probably for the same reason we are. On May 17, we learned that surgeons had placed a life-saving support — built on a 3-D printer — into the airway of Kaiba Gionfriddo. Credit: The Why Files Alejandro Roldan of the University of Wisconsin-Madison holds a printed, 3-D model of a heart against its computer design, which was based on a patient’s MRI scan. The system, still under development, could be used to guide surgery to repair defective organs. Kaiba was an emergency case: Every day, his breathing stopped when his airway collapsed. That welcome news came just three days after Forbes reported widespread interest in a handgun printed with similar technology. A 3-D printer builds up objects layer by layer, using various methods to deposit and harden the “ink” where it is needed. On February 9, 2012, the splint was sewn around Kaiba’s airway to expand it and serve as a skeleton for proper growth. Summing up