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The Future of 3D Printing

Posted on November 27, 2017 by admin Posted in Hardware, Medical Leave a comment

What it is: 3D printing company Stratasys has launched BioMimics to create 3D models of lifelike anatomical structures for training physicians and medical testing.

3D printing was all the rage a few years ago because you could create all types of objects using plastic. The huge problem with 3D printers was that they were slow, error-prone, and ultimately not very useful to the average person. After all, what’s the average person going to do with creating plastic objects of cups or pencil holders that look drag in one color with a rough texture of plastic?

3D printing isn’t going to change the world of the ordinary person, but it can change niche markets. One 3D printing company, Stratasys, has targeted the medical profession by creating 3D printed objects that mimic anatomical structures for medical professionals to train on. The idea is to replace actual cadavers with plastic objects instead. Not only can this be reusable with less health concerns, but printing 3D objects of body parts is much simpler and cheaper than finding more cadavers to practice on.

The real market for 3D printers initially will be in niche markets because those markets will be profitable and welcoming. While the average person doesn’t need a 3D printer, niche markets can find a need for 3D printers even if the quality and speed of creating objects is relatively poor for now. As the quality and printing speed increases, then more average people will want to use 3D printers. Until that occurs, perhaps several years from the future, 3D printers will be an interesting technology that hasn’t quite matured yet.

What will help 3D printers will be 3D scanners on smartphones. If you see something you like, scan it with your smartphone and capture the image as a model that you can print in a 3D printer. That way you can create objects simply and quickly, which is another drawback of current 3D printers because you must either design a model yourself (not an easy task) or use an existing model that someone else has created. If you need a custom object, you’ll have to design it yourself, which isn’t easy.

Apple has been rumored to be experimenting with 3D printers but because the market is still weak for the average consumer, it’s likely we won’t see a 3D printer from Apple for years. However, watch the camera and sensors in the iPhone to get a clue on the future of 3D scanning. Already the iPhone X cameras can use facial recognition to identify a 3-dimensional image of a face. Those same sensors can later be used to scan 3D objects and save them as models for 3D printing later.

Technology moves in fits and starts, and 3D printing its one example of technology that’s still maturing. It will get there eventually, but it’s not here yet. Until then, keep watching the scanning abilities of the iPhone to get a clue how close 3D printing and scanning will be.

Microsoft’s 3D Emphasis

Posted on October 26, 2016 by admin Posted in Hardware, User Interface Leave a comment

What it is: Microsoft announced Windows 10 Creator’s Update coming in Spring 2017.

Microsoft held an event announcing some of the latest features of Windows 10 Creator’s Update coming next year. Perhaps the most important announcement was Microsoft’s push for 3D. First, Microsoft demonstrated how the Paint program will be updated to allow 3D manipulation. To get 3D images, you can now access Microsoft’s new community of shared 3D images.

Yet the most crucial announcement was the ability to scan 3D images. Microsoft quickly glossed over the details but demonstrated a Hewlett-Packard phone scanning a sand castle and turning that object into a 3D image. While the 3D scanning app was demonstrated on a Windows 10 Mobile device, there were no details on whether this 3D scanning app was going to be free or cost money, or whether it would run on iOS, Android, and Windows 10 Mobile. Ideally it should run on Android and iOS because those are the two most common mobile operating systems, but details are lacking.

This ability to scan real objects and convert them into 3D objects that you can manipulate in Paint 3D is crucial for one reason that Microsoft totally omitted: 3D printing. With easy 3D scanning and easy 3D manipulation, you should now be able to turn real world objects into 3D printed objects. So the real benefit of 3D scanning and 3D manipulation is the ability to make 3D printing more versatile.

In the past, you needed CAD skills to create 3D objects to print. Now you’ll be able to 3D scan anything in the real world (including your dog or car) and then print that object on a 3D printer. Why Microsoft omitted this revolutionary feature doesn’t make sense since that’s where all of their 3D efforts are heading anyway. Even earlier versions of Windows 10 included a 3D printing program so it’s obvious this could tie in with Paint 3D and the 3D scanning app.

To further promote their 3D efforts, Microsoft highlighted virtual reality headsets from third-party partners, starting at $299. Yet what Microsoft failed to demonstrate was a compelling business use for virtual reality. They demonstrated taking a chair image off a website and viewing it in 3D using HoloLens so you could see how an object would look in your actual home.

Technically, that’s interesting. Realistically, is that a compelling reason to buy a $299 virtual reality headset?

Ideally, Microsoft should show how virtual reality can solve a pressing problem that’s currently too difficult or impossible to do with current technology. Shopping for furniture is a trivial example and one not likely to motivate people to buy a $299 virtual reality headset that they’ll need to strap on their face to get this trivial feature.

The future of 3D isn’t just virtual reality but 3D printing as well, which Microsoft should have demonstrated. The latest 3D features help push computing towards the future, but Microsoft needs a clarify their vision for 3D for solving actual problems rather than simply demonstrating technological marvels. If you watched Microsoft’s event on October 26, just listen to the applause from the audience to gauge how excited people really are about certain features. The intensity and duration of the applause will let you know what other people think is actually important and what’s simply trivial.

3D Printed Arm Brace

Posted on February 5, 2016 by admin Posted in Hardware Leave a comment

What it is: 3D printing can create custom products with little waste.

The way most products are built is wasteful. Take a chunk of wood, carve away the chunks you don’t need and by the time you’re done, you have a piece of furniture. In the meantime, a good chunk off the wood is thrown away, suitable for burning and little else.

That’s not how 3D printing works. With a 3D printer, you constantly add new materials rather than subtract. This allows you to build items one layer at a time with no waste whatsoever. In the old days, you had to mass produce items to make it worth manufacturing. With 3D printers, you can afford to make a single item because making one item is no more expensive than making a thousand identical items.

If you’re watching the Super Bowl, look Thomas Davis of the Carolina Panthers. Thomas broke his arm so a company created a custom brace to protect his arm and allow him to play. Naturally they used a 3D printer to make the brace.

Scott Perone of 3D Elite, a manufacturer of 3D-printed braces and casts for athletes, collaborated with Whiteclouds on the project. “Thomas Davis is already the ‘bionic man’ in our book,” Perone said in a release. “This personalized 3D brace lined with Poron XRD makes him a bit more indestructible.” Poron XRD is a soft, flexible material designed to absorb shocks and protect from impacts.

While 3D printed braces work for athletes, they can also work for the ordinary citizen once costs come down further. Eventually a 3D printer will become a commonplace item in every home like a microwave oven or a freezer. When you need to make something, you can just make it yourself with your own 3D printer.

They already have 3D printers that can manufacture plastic items but soon they’ll have home 3D printers that can create items out of metal, wood, or a combination of different materials. This would allow a 3D printer to create a toy car where the body is plastic but the axles are metal. When a 3D printer can work flawlessly as an inkjet or laser printer of today, and mix different materials and colors, that’s when the 3D printer revolution will really start to take off and people will want one. The moment you start seeing 3D printers on sale in Costco or Wal-Mart, that’s when you know they’ll have become commonplace.

3D printers are the future so if you want to get ahead of technology, start learning more about 3D printers today. Start out with an inexpensive one and get used to how they work. Most likely tomorrow’s 3D printers will be vastly improved, but the more you know about 3D printers today, the better off you’ll be tomorrow in much the same way that people who knew about using dot-matrix printers had much less trouble using inkjet and laser printers when those came out.

Watch the Super Bowl and see how well Thomas Davis’s 3D printed brace protects his arm. You may be surprised that someone can play a physical game like football and not injure a broken arm.

Apple’s 3D Printer

Posted on January 23, 2016 by admin Posted in Hardware, Software Leave a comment

What it is: 3D printers use materials such as plastic to create three-dimensional objects.

Back in the early days of PCs, people had a choice of either using a noisy but inexpensive dot-matrix printer or an even noisier daisy-wheel printer. The dot-matrix printer could print graphics, but the resolution was poor. Daisy-wheel printers could print crisp-looking letters but no graphics whatsoever. Both types of printers could only print in black ink.

Nowadays you can see how far we’ve come with ordinary printers. Instead of dot-matrix or daisy-wheel printers, we have inkjet and laser printers that can print in color and print graphics in high resolution that’s nearly as good as a printed book or magazine. PC printers have gotten more versatile over time, but they had to go through a stage of limited capabilities to get there.

That’s where we’re at with 3D printers right now. In the old days, you had to get the right print driver to make your printer work with your PC’s software. You couldn’t always take a dot-matrix or daisywheel printer out of the box and get it to work right away. 3D printers are no different.

A 3D printer requires a cartridge of material such as plastic filament that you stuff inside a 3D printer. The color of your plastic filament is the color that your 3D objects will appear in. If you want multiple colors, tough.

That’s why Apple’s patent looks interesting. Instead of forcing people to use different color plastic filament, Apple’s patent includes two nozzles. One nozzle squirts out the plastic and a second nozzle paints that plastic. Now you can have multiple colored 3D objects without having to buy different color plastic filament and build your 3D object in stages. Just print the whole object out and let the 3D printer paint it.

Another drawback with today’s 3D printers is that it’s relatively easy to print something that someone else has designed, but unless you have CAD experience, designing your own objects is not as easy. That means you have learn CAD or hire someone to design your objects for you in a way that the 3D printer can recognize. That’s no different than the old days of hiring a printer to print out newsletters, menus, and flyers because your PC couldn’t do that with a dot-matrix or daisywheel printer.

So it’s likely that Apple is moving into 3D printers but first they have to advance the technology a major leap forward before releasing their 3D printer. First, Apple’s 3D printer must work right out of the box with no fiddling with settings and praying that it will work with your computer. Apple’s 3D printer should work flawlessly by plugging it into any Macintosh.

Second, Apple’s 3D printer must offer color. This will make 3D printing more versatile in the same way that color made paper printing more versatile.

Third, Apple’s 3D printer must include software that makes it easy for the average person to create simple 3D objects. Think of a desktop publishing program that lets you define the dimensions of text on a page. Apple’s 3D printer software will need to let you define the dimensions of a 3D object and shape it like molding clay. When it’s ready, you can tweak its dimensions and modify its shape before previewing it on the screen before printing it on a 3D printer.

Ease of use and versatility is what’s holding back 3D printers right now. Apple is just waiting for technology to catch up to the average person’s convenience and budget. When that happens, expect to see Apple release an amazing 3D printer that leapfrogs the competition because the competition is busy improving minor details and overlooking the major hassles of using a 3D printer such as getting it to work, printing objects only in one color, and making it difficult for most people to design objects.

3D printing is coming soon. Just don’t be surprised when it arrives and Apple makes it easy to use.

Color 3D Printing

Posted on December 3, 2015 by admin Posted in Hardware Leave a comment

What it is: 3D printing creates objects a layer at a time using materials such as plastic or metal.

Every company applies for patents every year where most of those patents never appear in practical applications. However, the latest trend these days is 3D printing where you create objects using material such as plastic or metal. Today’s home 3D printers use plastic but more sophisticated 3D printers use metal such as titanium or aluminum.

One of the major drawbacks of today’s 3D printers is that they can only create objects using a single material. For hobbyist 3D printers, that means using plastic filament. If you want to create a red object, you have to use red plastic filament. If you want to create a blue object, you h ave to yank out the red filament and replace it with a blue filament. If you want to create a red and blue object, tough; you can’t.

That’s why Apple’s latest patent might be interesting. Back in 2014, Apple filed a patent for a color 3D printer. Instead of creating objects in just one color, Apple’s patent would create objects in a single color and then paint that object different colors using a spray gun nozzle. Where today’s 3D printers use one nozzle to squirt the plastic out, Apple’s patent would use two nozzles where one nozzle squirts the plastic out and the second nozzle paints it a different color.

This would let you fill an Apple 3D printer with one type of filament (such as white) and then fill it up with different color ink cartridges. Just like an inkjet printer can create all types of colors on a page by mixing colors, so could Apple’s 3D printer create all types of colors on a 3D printed object.

Remember back in the days of early PCs when the monitor could only display green or orange? Remember back in the days when laser printers could only print in black and white? That’s where 3D printers are today in their limitation of creating objects of a single color because you can only feed in one color filament at a time. Apple’s 3D printer patent promises to bring color to 3D printers in the same way that color laser printers and inkjet printers brought color to printed pages.

Now instead of just making objects of one color, you could make objects of different colors. Mix the colors together and you could create artistic sculptures. Color can make 3D printers more attractive to home users, and if it’s easy to design and color 3D objects, then 3D printers will simply take off win popularity among home and business users.

Right now the only practical use for today’s 3D printers is to make toys, but you could use them to make practically anything such as smartphone cases, vases, pencil holders, or book holders. While this may seem trivial, tomorrow’s 3D printers will eventually be able to make more useful objects. Imagine the bumper of your car getting smashed. Rather than buy a new bumper, just make one with a 3D printer. Need a tape dispenser? Just buy replacement rolls of tape and use a 3D printer to make your own plastic tape dispenser. What if your blender handle breaks? Make a new one with a 3D printer.

Initially 3D printers will be used to make toys and trivial objects like chess pieces. Later 3D printers will be able to make replacement parts for household items. Eventually, 3D printers will be able to make entire objects such as lawn mowers or spare car parts.

The 3D printing revolution is coming faster than you might think. Yesterday 3D printer were clumsy and expensive. Today 3D printers are reasonably priced and used for creating trivial objects. Tomorrow 3D printers will be a handy convenience. In the future, 3D printers will be indispensable for making your own items instead of buying them.

Apple’s color 3D printer patent points the way towards a future of color and away from today’s monochrome 3D printer world. If you could get started on the ground floor of the PC revolution back when the IBM PC and MS-DOS first appeared, you could make a fortune. That opportunity is now available in the world of 3D printers, so start learning more about them now since 3D printers are the new PCs of the 80’s.

3D Printing is the Future

Posted on December 1, 2015 by admin Posted in Hardware Leave a comment

What it is: 3D printing, also known as additive printing, creates three-dimensional objects by creating them a layer at a time.

Anyone remember the early days of PCs when a typical MS-DOS PC cost between $1,500 to $3,000. That’s when most people couldn’t justify a PC for ordinary use, but might be able to justify getting a PC for business use. The early adopters to PCs gained valuable expertise in using, fixing, and making PCs so they could use their newfound knowledge to help others. The only drawback was to gain this valuable knowledge, you had to find a way to get a PC, which often meant investing a huge chunk of cash.

Yet that initial investment later paid off through PC skills that few people had. As PCs got cheaper and more common with home users, these early PC adopters were in much demand for consulting. The key was simply getting into the PC market as soon as possible because everyone knew it could only keep growing and getting better.

If you’re looking for a similar opportunity, you certainly don’t want to become a PC expert because practically everyone knows how to use a PC. Instead, look for the next expensive barrier to entry that keeps out most people because the technology may not be mature enough. Today, that opportunity lies with 3D printing.

The basic idea of a 3D printer is to create objects through multiple layers. Most home 3D printers use plastic while industrial strength 3D printers use metal or even wood. NASA even plans to use a 3D printer to make spare parts for the International Space Station and manned spacecraft heading towards Mars. That way astronauts can make their own tools and spare parts without the need to carry around an extra (and heavy) supply of spare parts and tools.

Many companies are even experimenting with 3D printers that create food. It’s obvious that 3D printers are the next hot category just like the early PCs of the 80’s, so if you’re willing to invest less than $1,000, you can get an inexpensive 3D printer and learn about the problems and successes of using a 3D printer.

One of the most interesting 3D printers is only $349 and sold by XYZ Printing called the da Vinci Jr. While the low price might be appealing, keep in mind that you need to buy special filament from XYZ so it’s like buying an inkjet printer that can only use the manufacturer’s ink cartridges. That means you won’t be able to buy inexpensive filament from other companies.

So there are plenty of minor problems with 3D printers just like there were minor problems with early PCs, but don’t let that stop you. Once you learn to deal with the hassles of 3D printers, you’ll have a valuable skill and knowledge that can continue to only improve over time. Just as PCs got better and less expensive over time, expect 3D printers to get better and less expensive over time.

If you want to learn about 3D printers, the time to start is now. Make that initial investment. You can already see how early PC adopters who made the initial expensive investment in a PC had huge opportunities ahead of them afterwards. The same will happen with people who understand and know how to use a 3D printer. 3D printing is the future. The only question is will you wait too long to gain knowledge about how to use them or will you be one of the early adopters who can profit from your knowledge for the next few decades?

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