Category Archives: 3D Printing

This 3D-Printing Pothole Repairing Robot

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Robert Flitsch, inventor of the Addibot, wants to fix potholes on city streets. In the near future, your local public works department might end up using this small, multi-wheeled robot to help repair those nasty holes your bikes and cars plop over, damaging your wheels and axles. It works by creating layer over layer, the same way desktop 3D printers works, and can steer itself or be driven via a remote control console. Popular Science reports,

“One of the main limitations with 3D printers is you typically have it printing inside this box, and you can really only print objects of the size of the workspace you’re printing in,” says the 22-year-old Flitsch, a mechanical engineer who graduated from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences last May. “If you take additive manufacturing implements and make them mobile, you can print objects of arbitrary size.”

What’s great about this invention is that it is designed to repair a variety of surfaces with its array of nozzles. The tar chemicals are kept on-board in a heated container, and could be powered by sunlight and/or battery.

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biomimicry and the search for new tech

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Biomimicry is the study of nature as inspiration for human designs in effort to fit  human technology into a more efficient and workable, sustainable model. Each organism alive today has the potential to teach humankind about the systems and rules it follows. Natural solutions aren’t just about having better materials.

They are about making products that might empower mankind against dwindling resources. Ecosystems aren’t just where we all live and consume resources but they are a resource of information as well. The ecosystem is self-replenishing and efficient and can be channeled and worked with in a way that has yet to be attempted. Potential new materials come with  side effects that warrant equal consideration. Biomimicry is a paradigm that fits many emerging techs. Take a look at spider venom’s effect on the drug industry, for example:

A peptide found in spider venom might lead to a safer class of painkillers. What other drugs, chemicals and designs are being inspired by biology and newly-studied species?

Biomimicry is a relatively young term, describing designs that derive inspiration by emulation of designs found in nature. The movement is focused on sustainable human endeavors and projects that will compliment the environment humans share with the rest of the natural world and thus better humanity’s chance for survival. Check out this video, the most recent by Janine Benyus, one of the idea’s most vocal proponents.

You might wonder why these chemicals are found in nature at all? There are many functions and motivations behind the diverse, unfound substances found in the Eco-system. Plants develop poison to discourage predators. some develop drugs to encourage other species to assist with seed dispersal. Evolution has provided the earth with highly diversified species of plants fungi and animals the vast majority of which have yet to be explored.

French researchers discovered a painkiller as powerful as morphine in the venom of e infamous African black mamba snake. Then there is a potential psoriasis treatment derived from the venom of the Caribbean sun anemone, undergoing testing in the U.S. might help sufferers with psoriasis, autoimmune disorders, multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis.gecko

Textures and surface patterns of geckos have been studied for stickiness. Skin textures of some animals have been proven to possess antimicrobial properties, in that bacterial colonies can’t find a way to attach to surfaces, making water currents and frequent rinsing enough to eliminate infective agents.

Artificial limb design and development has been greatly advanced by designs mimicking the weight-bearing capacity of other animals. New technologies are being developed to grant disabled people the ability to feel touch, as the natural mechanisms controlling pain, touch and movement are further understood.

 

In recent biomimetic news, we may see a mastery of understanding the human eye lead to a leap in ocular and immersive tech. MHOX is an Italian design firm who would like  synthetic replacement eyes.EYE to become an affordable, regular upgrade people opt for. Their work could restore sight to the blind and be the missing link to allow locative tech and a lot of web 2.0 concepts to become workable mainstream realities.

There is an initial shock in some people when these concepts are explained. Something about the current trends over the last few decades favoring straight, clean lines that are inspired by lifeless geometry over bio-inspired,  flowing shapes.

The drugs and prosthetics discussed, theorized and predicted in the biomimetics industries doesn’t have to turn humans into cyborgs, although some proponents wouldn’t be against that. It is likely that the public will be more inclined to accept these advancements as they are developed. Decades back people might have been less receptive to plastic hip replacements and artificial hearts, but the medical community has become very good at installing these prosthetics as minimally invasive, outpatient procedures.

 
Jonathan Howard
Jonathan is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn, NY

Carbon3D’s CLIP: Faster than Any Other 3D Printing System – and Cooler Looking!

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A picture is worth a thousand words with CLIP 3D’s laser-cured liquid printing.

3D printing is one of the best up and coming tech fields to follow. CLIP 3D Printing is the fastest device to date. Designers and engineers are starting to rely on 3D printing to stay competitive but the process is far from streamlined. Companies like Carbon3D are ahead of the pack with the coolest looking printing process that just happens to also be faster than anyone else out there. By rethinking the way the resin is cured, Carbon3D got their newest printer to produce 25-100 times faster than any other resin printing techniques, as of early 2015. It’s like they just couldn’t decide between fast an beautiful.

Peep the video at the bottom of this article~!

3Dprint.com broke the story, announcing Carbon3D’s Continuous Liquid Interface Production technique. CLIP built off of the most innovative ideas that have already been done with 3D printing  by utilizing photosensitive resin and an incredibly precise laser to cure the liquid into a solid from the bottom of a clear pan. Inspired by techniques which print and cure layer-by-layer, CLIP instead uses it’s laser to cure in conjunction with oxygen which inhibits the curing process allowing for variable ratios of viscosity. This allows the printer to print in 3 dimensions simultaneously.

DIAGRAM OF CLIP

You can see the liquid from the top in the promotional media but the action happens underneath the pool. The transparent window that holds the pool of liquid “ink” is also oxygen-permeable. This allows controlled amounts of oxygen and laser light to hit the bottom of the liquid layer.  Carbon3D  explains the process can leave uncured spots on the bottom layer as little as a few dozen microns thick. As the oxygenated areas of the resin are decided, the laser cures the unoxygenated areas, leaving a layer of solid that is attached to the layer above. This amazing GIF speaks for itself. DAYUM:

Carbon 3D has managed to keep a proprietary amount of this technique secret while still nailing down $41 million in funding from venture capital firms. It’s almost like they 3D printed themselves from liquid into the solid competitive start-up they are today.

As the fastest guys on the scene Carbon3D are the hottest new guys. The slow production speed is one of the biggest reasons 3D printing hasn’t become the manufacturing norm and CLIP printing is expected to change that moving forward from early 2015. Cosmoso.net is watching this fascinating development on the edge of our 3D printed seats.
Jonathan Howard
Jonathan is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn, NY

An Interview With 3D Printed Food Artist Chloe Rutzerveld

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Chloé shines in this interview about the future of food design and her upcoming year, including SXSW and developing 3D-printed prototypes into a culinary reality.

Eindhoven University of Technology Graduate, Chloé Rutzerveld, designed a food I don’t quite know how to categorize. I first saw pictures of her most recent work, Edible Growth, last week and immediately wrote to her. Her Edible Growth concept involves a bunch of hot topics in current scientific thought but the pictures don’t put the technology first – they just look great. In fact the pictures are currently the point of the project. There are tons of details that need to be worked out, and Rutzerveld is spending the upcoming year getting the funding, awareness and support to develop this project into a realistic restaurant menu item. 3d printing technology is a frontier she is willing to jump way into. Read more about Edible Growth on Rutzerveld’s website.

Chloé answered a ton of questions below

Sketches

The current concept art looks great. What was the initial idea behind these great looking confections?

The shape of the edible developed and changed throughout the design process, influenced by development in the technological and biotechnological parts of the project. For example, at first, I made drawings of Edible Growth in which the entire ball was filled with wholes. Which doesn’t make sense because cresses and mushrooms don’t grow down, only up 😉

3d printed food

Chloé’s initial, all-plastic design showed plants and mushrooms growing in all directions but the final design with real food had to accommodate gravity with a modified design.

Also, when the product is printed, you see straight lines, showing the technology part.. when the product matures these straight technological lines become invisible by the organic growth of the product. Showing the collaboration between technology and nature. Technology in this project is merely used as a means to enhance natural processes like photosynthesis and fermentation.

Chloe RutzerveldWhat inspired you? 

My skepticism towards printing food and the urge to find some way to use this new technology to create healthy, natural food with good a good taste and structure in which the printer would add something to the product, as well as the environment.

3d printen

A 3d printer arranges dough for the first step of an edible growth prototype.

Once you had the idea, how long did it take you to produce the prototypes and pastries we can see in the photos?

At first I made a lot of drawings and prototypes form clay. After that I started using nylon 3d-printed structures. When I gained more knowledge about 3d printing and the material composition inside the structure, the design of the product changed along with that. The mushrooms and cress inside the prototypes, as well as the savory pie dough is just a visualization, the final product might be totally different. It’s mend as inspiration and showing that we should think beyond printing sugar, chocolate and dough if we want to use this technology to create future ‘food’.

The prototyping process took about 2 months I think.. and multiple museums asked if they could exhibited it, I made non-food, food products that would last longer.

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What are you doing for a living? 

Haha great question, because as you probably understand, media attention is great but does not help me pay my bills unfortunately 😉 But it does make it easier to get assignments for the development of workshops, dinners etc.

Basically at this point, I give lectures, presentations, and organize events and dinners. One upcoming event I’m organizing is about my new project called “Digestive Food”. I will not say too much about it, but I’ll update my website soon;)

To have a more stable income, I started working for the Next Nature Network in February, to organize the Next Nature Fellow program! Next Nature explores the technosphere and the co-evolving relationship with technology

Edible GrowthHow did you find the project so far?

Well I personally think it looks beautiful and I’m quite proud that so many people are inspired and fascinated by it! It would be great if such a product would come on the market.

I wonder what the pastry and edible soil are made of. Can you talk about the ingredients? 

I don’t call it edible soil, but a breeding ground. Because everything must be edible (like a fully edible eco-system) we experimented with a lot of different materials. But in the end, we found that agar-agar is a very suitable breeding ground on which also certain species of fungi and cress (like the velvet-paw and watercress for example) can grow very easily within a few days without growing moldy!

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Agar-agar breeding ground turned out to be the right mix of versatility and food-safe materials to make Edible Growth go from plastic prototype to edible reality.

How do you feel about copyright and patented ideas?

I am not very interested in that part.. of course it’s good to get credits for the idea and the photo’s but I will not buy a patent. I don’t have the knowledge or employees to develop this concept into a reel product. So I actually hope someone steels the idea and starts developing it further :)! I’m often asked by big tech-companies or chefs if I wanted an investment to develop it… but to be honest.. I’ve many other ideas and things I would like to do.

Edible prototype - Copy

Do  you have secret ingredients?

Haha not in the product, but in my work it would be passion, creativity and a pinch of excessive work ethos 😉

What types of foods have you experimented with?

For Edible Growth? A dozen of cresses, and other seeds, dried fruits and vegetables for the breeding ground, agar-agar, gelatins, some spores..

But for my other projects also with mice, muskrat, organ meat, molecular enzymes etc.

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Who have you been working with? 

Waag Society (Open Wetlab, Amsterdam), Next Nature (Amsterdam), TNO (Eindhoven & Zeist), Eurest at the High Tech Campus (Eindhoven)

What is your studio environment like? 

I actually still live in a huge student-home which I share with 9 other people. But because I almost graduated one year ago I will need to move out. So I work a lot at home, in my 16m2 room, in the big-ass kitchen downstairs,  if I have appointments somewhere I afterwards work in a café or restaurant with wi-fi, or at flex work places, my parents house.. I’m very flexible and can work almost everywhere 🙂 Practical work I’ll do mostly at home obviously.

But I am looking for a nice studio in Eindhoven, that’s easier to receive guests or people from companies.

 What steps need to happen before we start seeing 3D printed food become commercially available? Development of software, hardware and material composition.

I noticed on your website you have other projects in the works. What are you doing currently? What are your upcoming plans and goals for 2015? 

Next week I’ll go to SXSW. In the summer I’m going to Matthew Kenney Culinary academy to learn more practical and theoretical things about food (and secretly just because I absolutely love to learn about plating and menu planing). I’m developing this event I told you about for the Museum Boerhaave in Leiden and the E&R platform. And when I return from Maine, I actually want to set up a temporary pop-up restaurant at the Ketelhuisplein during the Dutch Design Week 2015 about a social or cultural food issue.

Thanks again, Chloé~! This was fun!!!
Jonathan Howard
Jonathan is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn, NY

Man Helps Save Wife’s Sight by 3D Printing Her Tumor

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When Michael Balzer got into 3D printing in the summer of 2013, he had no idea it would be this pursuit that would literally save his wife’s life. After she had thyroid problems, Michael felt the need to stay updated on her overall health and eventually pushed her to have an MRI in the spirit of being thorough and, low and behold, a three-centimeter mass behind her left eye was discovered. The typical response from the doctors came in the “this is common and you should follow up in a year” variety, and this just wasn’t something Michael could live with, especially after the couple’s experience with the thyroid treatment which went from “we need to cut your throat open which will leave a huge scar” to “we can use robots to do things that human hands can’t which will not only be more effective but leave no scarring” simply because Michael and his wife Pamela Shavaun Scott had insisted on looking for alternatives. This experience taught the two of them that second and third opinions were not only necessary but mandatory for major health issues.

In a Makezine.com article, author Sara Breselor outlines just how far Michael Balzer went to help Pamela, but in the comments section Balzer speaks up under the moniker All Things 3D and gives the medical research credit to his wife, calling himself “the IT department” and his wife the real hero in this story. He also goes on to explain that he used four different machines to print the tumor and skull which includes the Makerbot Replicator 2, The Ultimaker 2, which he says was “one of the first off the assembly line”, MakerGear M2 for the skull, and a Kossel Clear for a smaller skull. “Each have their strengths and weaknesses. Many of these buying decisions were based on Make’s 3D printer shootouts,” he says.

One of the challenges Balzer faced during this process was the fact that DICOM files (the standard digital format for medical imaging data) is typically transferred between medical offices in CD or DVD hard copies which prompted him to, somewhat unwittingly, spearhead a movement in the medical community to begin using cloud servers to share records and imaging. You can read this full fascinating story at Makezine.com