How timely. I keep ending up in cutting edge fields by accident. I think there's a lot of untapped potential in 3D printing. People have been saying that for y

How timely. I keep ending up in cutting edge fields by accident. I think there's a lot of untapped potential in 3D printing. People have been saying that for years, but it might be different now, thanks to resin printers. I've been putting together my notes on how to get into this space, since I was bootstrapping myself from zero knowledge. But the cliff's notes are: bought a Form 3+ https://formlabs.com/3d-printers/form-3/ https://formlabs.com/3d-printers/form-3/ with 1 liter of clear resin. The price point for everything is around $5k, which is just beyond most hobby investments, but it's honestly not bad for what you get in return: repeatable, precise prints, with a variety of materials. What surprised me was that the dental industry has already been using this tech for over a decade in a bio-safe way. Formlabs has an entire dental offering that caters to the industry. One funny picture was an office with ~40 printers stacked on shelves. Realistically a dental office only needs one, since you can make an entire tray of dental inserts in (I think) a few hours. Materials are where things get interesting. As this article shows, there are an endless variety of materials that you can print. The reason people haven't gone beyond traditional 3D print projects is because normal 3D printer filament kind of sucks. It's not precise, it takes forever, and it jams. With resin printers, you can print out molds that you can fill with whatever material you want to use. (I'm not sure about putting questionable resin-type substances into your printer; Formlabs seems to want you to buy their official approved resins, but presuambly there must be some way to do what the article does. The difference between a resin printer and what MIT is doing doesn't seem huge.) ZBrush is nice because it costs $20 for students and comes with a 3D Print Hub plugin that exports your model to Preform, the software for Form 3. https://i.imgur.com/wfcMP3s.png https://i.imgur.com/wfcMP3s.png I also happen to have some ZBrush experience since my background is in gamedev. It's not too hard to pick up, but there's a learning curve; udemy courses are good. My current problem is that I know nothing about electronics, and I'm interested in printing toys. So today I'll be learning about haptics, motors, and how to assemble everything. (If anyone has any tips on where to start, I'd appreciate it. It seems like I'll want a lightweight battery, some kind of motor, and some kind of Arduino-something to drive it. But whatever it is, I'll find out and write about it somewhere.)