7 ms·

Manufacturing a Renaissance with 3D Printing

80 points by judegomila 14y ago

DVassallo 14y ago
> Extreme future 3D printers will print entire planets or create new suns for new colonies. I can understand the printing of rockets and jet engines, but can someone give me a hint into understanding the printing of planets and suns?
- paged90 14y ago
  There's more than a couple of things here I disagree with. I suppose the DNA origami is one. The leap from "folding DNA into shapes" to "making trees grow into a chair" is astounding in it's oversimplification.
  - kanzure 14y ago
    > The leap from "folding DNA into shapes" to "making trees grow into a chair" is astounding in it's oversimplification. Yep, agreed. Besides, you don't need to invoke DNA origami (nor the actual techniques you would use to achieve that, like typical genome manipulation) to get trees to grow into chairs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_shaping http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_shaping
- DigitalSea 14y ago
  I presume after the economy of scale kicks in, we'll be able to buy our own planets and suns from Walmart for next to nothing. A sun in every home. In all seriousness though, being able to print planets and suns, that is one of the craziest things I have ever heard.
  - evoxed 14y ago
    It's a silly idea but at the same time not totally unrealistic if you assume that one, it's not something we could necessarily start today, two, it isn't a task that could be completed in any 'worthwhile' timeframe, and three, that the raw material for such a venture existed and could be harvested in some at-least-minimally efficient way. Once we have some sort of solution to the materials problem, it sure would be fun to throw out a couple of linked, self-replicating devices into space and check up on them in, oh, a thousand years or so. Hell, bury our best AI somewhere in the core and maybe by the time it's discovered we'll have a created the next Big Thing. I wonder how long it will be before machines can 'meditate' (usefully of course, hibernate doesn't count)...
  - hugi 14y ago
    You don't think the Magratheans build their planets by hand, do you?
  - zanny 14y ago
    The end game for 3d printing is assembling things at the molecular level to our design. Kind of how Star Trek had its food fabricators, just have carbon and have the machine rearrage and orient it to make food, add some h2o and other trace molecules, and bang you got a chicken leg. Or some ultra-nutrient-calorie dense superfood. If you can do that, making a planet is easy. Doesn't even require a printer - just dump a ton of iron, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, etc into a tight area of space and let them collapse together gravitationally, or just throw it in concentrated orbit around a star so they coalesce. I almost want to recind my original statement, because the real end game is manipulation of the most discrete components of matter, space, or reality. Right now its fundamental particles but who knows what else we may find. In usability terms though, crafting molecules seems like it would have the most benefit.
- yk 14y ago
  Printing a star is quite simple. Just dump roughly 10^30 kg hydrogen into empty space. It will assemble itself into a spherical shape and start fusion. ( For best results, add a little bit of He and CNO into hydrogen.)
jayfuerstenberg 14y ago
I wonder if LEGO can stave off the doom 3D printing presents since blocks are the easiest the things to replicate. They do a lot of tie-in based LEGO sets that I believe are protected by copyright. However, their basic blocks lost their patent last year so it's open season for those! http://boingboing.net/2011/10/21/expired-patent-of-the-day-lego.html http://boingboing.net/2011/10/21/expired-patent-of-the-day-l...
- stevenrace 14y ago
  Part of the success and 'feel' of LEGO are due to the close tolerances - ~.01mm. This is an order of magnitude (or two) greater than my RepRap Mendelmax on it's best day. However, it will be a great boon to the LEGO community - as they will now have greater access to non-structural, unlicensed parts such as guns [1] and the ilk. [1] http://www.brickarms.com/ http://www.brickarms.com/
  - jayfuerstenberg 14y ago
    True. I read once that only 4 bricks in a million are defective. Who knows, LEGO's .01mm accuracy might become the mark by which 3D printing measures itself someday.
    - olefoo 14y ago
      I'd bet that day comes by the end of the decade.
- evoxed 14y ago
  Here's to hoping that Lego pivots into a foundation for educational, manufacturing, structural, (etc)... research while investing in 3d printing and bringing the tech up to and beyond their current spec. Optimism!
- jpdevereaux 14y ago
  Maybe they can start selling plastic and part plans?
- 14y ago
nakedrobot2 14y ago
I see the same breathless optimism here as in the dawn of the WWW in the laste nineties. People with little to no understanding of what 3d printing is or its limitations, making wild extrapolations that don't take much reality (especially the social, legal, and political implications) into account. The fact is, we do not have any idea where 3d printing will take us. The idea that we'll all have 3d printers in our home is possibly a bit silly. That said, I also have a huge optimism for the future of 3d printing. But these use cases thrown around by people often just sound silly to me.
- jayfuerstenberg 14y ago
  I remember when paper printers were the same. We have no idea but we can interpolate from the past. I can easily see myself owning a 3D printer to make all the various trinkets I would otherwise buy at IKEA or the dollar store. That is if the quality/price ratio increases.
- vecinu 14y ago
  I think these types of comments are always needed for people to ground themselves to reality. Of course everybody wants technology to get exponentially better in the future but like you mentioned, through different social, legal and political factors, it will be extremely hard.
- yardie 14y ago
  Yeah reminds me a bit of Back to the Future II. There was a fax machine in every room of the house. Also a lot of people barely know how to work with wood. I'd expect even fewer to understand the basics of material science to work with polymers and other compounds. If anything we're at the ImageWriter phase of 3D printing. You could print from home but to have anything worthwhile you'll probably want to take it to a shop who'll have better materials and someone knowledgable. That expert will tell you why you shouldn't use your creation to serve food on or that it dissolves when exposed to solvents.
  - evoxed 14y ago
    > There was a fax machine in every room of the house. /house/office and they predicted the future of Japan pretty darn well!
wdrevno 14y ago
IMO, we are still a ways away from 3D printing being as disruptive as a lot of people think (at least for home use). From owning a 3D printer and doing prints for friends in my engineering classes, I think people still greatly underestimate how high touch 3D printing is today. For example, look at the makerbot google group: https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/makerbot https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/makerbot Even looking at Shapeways (an online 3D printing company with really expensive machines), they still deal with quality control problems for the average model someone uploads.
yk 14y ago
There are three interesting blog posts in this one. I would suggest the titles 3D Printing @ home 3D Printing @ labs 3D Printing @ Star Trek ( Furthermore I think a symbol for 3D printing should be invented. The @ is slightly too 90s.)
majmun 14y ago
call me when 3d printers would be able to print itself from materials found in nature.
zeteo 14y ago
Pure hype. It's interesting how a technology that is in fact revolutionizing manufacturing (CNC milling) gets very little attention compared to one that will, by all reasonable accounts, only ever be useful for prototyping or very limited production runs of small objects. A CNC mill in every house would be much more disruptive than a 3D printer. It would give people the ability to make actually useful objects (door knobs, hinges, car engine parts etc.) out of materials (wood, metal etc.) that are far more abundant, strong and cheap than 3D printer substrates.
- leoedin 14y ago
  3D printing techniques are becoming more and more relevant to manufacturing. There's plenty of shapes that you simply cannot make with a CNC mill - RF wave guides, topology optimised brackets etc. Additionally, there's materials which are uneconomical to mill - principally titanium. The main issues with selective laser sintered titanium as a manufacturing process are speed and surface finish. Speed is increasing, and people are making progress with surface finish. CNC milling (which is an incredibly wasteful process) is just a small development from traditional manufacturing processes. 3D printing is the disruptive technology in the room. For very high scale components stamping and injection moulding will almost certainly remain the most cost effective manufacturing process. For lower scale stuff (especially weight concious things like aircraft parts) SLS 3D printing will almost certainly start to dominate the market in the next few decades.
  - briguy 14y ago
    I have extensive experience with both CNC milling and 3D printing. I feel that 3D printing is disrupting Product Design/Development vs. actual Manufacturing. Anyone with an idea can now make functional prototypes and proofs of concepts with the click of a button. As you wrote, in perhaps 10 years time, we will be able to get the size and surface finish from 3d printing required to make limited production parts that have certain characteristics (weight, shape, containing reentrant angles, etc) not feasible from CNC milling/turning, etc.

80 points by judegomila 14y ago

> Extreme future 3D printers will print entire planets or create new suns for new colonies. I can understand the printing of rockets and jet engines, but can someone give me a hint into understanding the printing of planets and suns?

paged90 14y ago
There's more than a couple of things here I disagree with. I suppose the DNA origami is one. The leap from "folding DNA into shapes" to "making trees grow into a chair" is astounding in it's oversimplification.
- kanzure 14y ago
  > The leap from "folding DNA into shapes" to "making trees grow into a chair" is astounding in it's oversimplification. Yep, agreed. Besides, you don't need to invoke DNA origami (nor the actual techniques you would use to achieve that, like typical genome manipulation) to get trees to grow into chairs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_shaping http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_shaping
DigitalSea 14y ago
I presume after the economy of scale kicks in, we'll be able to buy our own planets and suns from Walmart for next to nothing. A sun in every home. In all seriousness though, being able to print planets and suns, that is one of the craziest things I have ever heard.
- evoxed 14y ago
  It's a silly idea but at the same time not totally unrealistic if you assume that one, it's not something we could necessarily start today, two, it isn't a task that could be completed in any 'worthwhile' timeframe, and three, that the raw material for such a venture existed and could be harvested in some at-least-minimally efficient way. Once we have some sort of solution to the materials problem, it sure would be fun to throw out a couple of linked, self-replicating devices into space and check up on them in, oh, a thousand years or so. Hell, bury our best AI somewhere in the core and maybe by the time it's discovered we'll have a created the next Big Thing. I wonder how long it will be before machines can 'meditate' (usefully of course, hibernate doesn't count)...
- hugi 14y ago
  You don't think the Magratheans build their planets by hand, do you?
- zanny 14y ago
  The end game for 3d printing is assembling things at the molecular level to our design. Kind of how Star Trek had its food fabricators, just have carbon and have the machine rearrage and orient it to make food, add some h2o and other trace molecules, and bang you got a chicken leg. Or some ultra-nutrient-calorie dense superfood. If you can do that, making a planet is easy. Doesn't even require a printer - just dump a ton of iron, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, etc into a tight area of space and let them collapse together gravitationally, or just throw it in concentrated orbit around a star so they coalesce. I almost want to recind my original statement, because the real end game is manipulation of the most discrete components of matter, space, or reality. Right now its fundamental particles but who knows what else we may find. In usability terms though, crafting molecules seems like it would have the most benefit.
yk 14y ago
Printing a star is quite simple. Just dump roughly 10^30 kg hydrogen into empty space. It will assemble itself into a spherical shape and start fusion. ( For best results, add a little bit of He and CNO into hydrogen.)

jayfuerstenberg 14y ago

I wonder if LEGO can stave off the doom 3D printing presents since blocks are the easiest the things to replicate. They do a lot of tie-in based LEGO sets that I believe are protected by copyright. However, their basic blocks lost their patent last year so it's open season for those! http://boingboing.net/2011/10/21/expired-patent-of-the-day-lego.html http://boingboing.net/2011/10/21/expired-patent-of-the-day-l...

stevenrace 14y ago
Part of the success and 'feel' of LEGO are due to the close tolerances - ~.01mm. This is an order of magnitude (or two) greater than my RepRap Mendelmax on it's best day. However, it will be a great boon to the LEGO community - as they will now have greater access to non-structural, unlicensed parts such as guns [1] and the ilk. [1] http://www.brickarms.com/ http://www.brickarms.com/
- jayfuerstenberg 14y ago
  True. I read once that only 4 bricks in a million are defective. Who knows, LEGO's .01mm accuracy might become the mark by which 3D printing measures itself someday.
  - olefoo 14y ago
    I'd bet that day comes by the end of the decade.
evoxed 14y ago
Here's to hoping that Lego pivots into a foundation for educational, manufacturing, structural, (etc)... research while investing in 3d printing and bringing the tech up to and beyond their current spec. Optimism!
jpdevereaux 14y ago
Maybe they can start selling plastic and part plans?
14y ago

nakedrobot2 14y ago

I see the same breathless optimism here as in the dawn of the WWW in the laste nineties. People with little to no understanding of what 3d printing is or its limitations, making wild extrapolations that don't take much reality (especially the social, legal, and political implications) into account. The fact is, we do not have any idea where 3d printing will take us. The idea that we'll all have 3d printers in our home is possibly a bit silly. That said, I also have a huge optimism for the future of 3d printing. But these use cases thrown around by people often just sound silly to me.

jayfuerstenberg 14y ago
I remember when paper printers were the same. We have no idea but we can interpolate from the past. I can easily see myself owning a 3D printer to make all the various trinkets I would otherwise buy at IKEA or the dollar store. That is if the quality/price ratio increases.
vecinu 14y ago
I think these types of comments are always needed for people to ground themselves to reality. Of course everybody wants technology to get exponentially better in the future but like you mentioned, through different social, legal and political factors, it will be extremely hard.
yardie 14y ago
Yeah reminds me a bit of Back to the Future II. There was a fax machine in every room of the house. Also a lot of people barely know how to work with wood. I'd expect even fewer to understand the basics of material science to work with polymers and other compounds. If anything we're at the ImageWriter phase of 3D printing. You could print from home but to have anything worthwhile you'll probably want to take it to a shop who'll have better materials and someone knowledgable. That expert will tell you why you shouldn't use your creation to serve food on or that it dissolves when exposed to solvents.
- evoxed 14y ago
  > There was a fax machine in every room of the house. /house/office and they predicted the future of Japan pretty darn well!

wdrevno 14y ago

IMO, we are still a ways away from 3D printing being as disruptive as a lot of people think (at least for home use). From owning a 3D printer and doing prints for friends in my engineering classes, I think people still greatly underestimate how high touch 3D printing is today. For example, look at the makerbot google group: https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/makerbot https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/makerbot Even looking at Shapeways (an online 3D printing company with really expensive machines), they still deal with quality control problems for the average model someone uploads.

yk 14y ago

There are three interesting blog posts in this one. I would suggest the titles 3D Printing @ home 3D Printing @ labs 3D Printing @ Star Trek ( Furthermore I think a symbol for 3D printing should be invented. The @ is slightly too 90s.)

majmun 14y ago

call me when 3d printers would be able to print itself from materials found in nature.

zeteo 14y ago

Pure hype. It's interesting how a technology that is in fact revolutionizing manufacturing (CNC milling) gets very little attention compared to one that will, by all reasonable accounts, only ever be useful for prototyping or very limited production runs of small objects. A CNC mill in every house would be much more disruptive than a 3D printer. It would give people the ability to make actually useful objects (door knobs, hinges, car engine parts etc.) out of materials (wood, metal etc.) that are far more abundant, strong and cheap than 3D printer substrates.

leoedin 14y ago
3D printing techniques are becoming more and more relevant to manufacturing. There's plenty of shapes that you simply cannot make with a CNC mill - RF wave guides, topology optimised brackets etc. Additionally, there's materials which are uneconomical to mill - principally titanium. The main issues with selective laser sintered titanium as a manufacturing process are speed and surface finish. Speed is increasing, and people are making progress with surface finish. CNC milling (which is an incredibly wasteful process) is just a small development from traditional manufacturing processes. 3D printing is the disruptive technology in the room. For very high scale components stamping and injection moulding will almost certainly remain the most cost effective manufacturing process. For lower scale stuff (especially weight concious things like aircraft parts) SLS 3D printing will almost certainly start to dominate the market in the next few decades.
- briguy 14y ago
  I have extensive experience with both CNC milling and 3D printing. I feel that 3D printing is disrupting Product Design/Development vs. actual Manufacturing. Anyone with an idea can now make functional prototypes and proofs of concepts with the click of a button. As you wrote, in perhaps 10 years time, we will be able to get the size and surface finish from 3d printing required to make limited production parts that have certain characteristics (weight, shape, containing reentrant angles, etc) not feasible from CNC milling/turning, etc.