Check out these printed monolithic polyamide glasses designed by Ron Arad for pq, featured in Dezeen:
Milan 2013: London designer Ron Arad has created a range of 3D-printed spectacles and sunglasses for eyewear brand pq.
Speaking to Dezeen yesterday at the launch in Milan, Ron Arad explained: “The brand wanted to advertise the fact that it’s printed but I said let’s not go on about it. But it’s printed. It’s the first pair of glasses that I know about that is one piece of material; it’s monolithic. It’s polyamide.”
The frames are built entirely from nylon powder using selective laser sintering (SLS) technology, with hinges made by scores in the material rather than from additional metal parts. “It has a stem that’s flexible one way and stops the other,” said Arad.
Each style is name after a station on the London Underground’s Northern line, including Old Street, Kentish Town and Golders Green. The Angel shades have droplet-shaped lenses, the Colindale models come with round lenses and the Highgate and Archway designs both feature an exaggerated bridge.
All frames are available in a selection of colours and the sunglasses some with tinted lenses in various shades. Arad has also designed a range of glasses that can be adjusted to fit any face for the same company.
Arad was one of the first designers to work with 3D printing in 1999. “In 1999 we had our first outing with what in those days was called rapid prototyping,” he said. “We did vases, lights and jewellery. There was a lot of excitement in the technology then, it was obvious it was on the cards and would be embraced by lots of people.”
For small businesses that make things and for entrepreneurs who dream of doing the same, the greatest challenge is almost always the cost of technology for turning an idea into a tangible product.
Often, the chore of even creating a prototype is so daunting, great ideas are simply left on the table.
That common obstacle is exactly why 3D printing technology is a potential game changer for small business. While manufacturing was once a big money, big business proposition, these new gadgets can put the power of prototyping and one-off manufacturing into the hands of the little guy. With one machine and a digital design, 3D printers can build a three-dimensional object of virtually anything right on the spot.
The Advent of Affordability
One of the most surprising things about 3D printing — besides what they can do — is that the technology isn’t actually new; it’s just newly affordable.
According to Bloomberg Businessweek, the large, industrial versions of 3D printers are now as relatively inexpensive as $5,000, though some cost as much as $1 million depending on their capability, and can print in a variety of materials.
The market for 3D printers is currently at about $1.7 billion. Contributing to the affordability of the more basic models has been a consolidation of the industry, with mergers between rival 3D printing companies, as well as hardware, software, and design businesses.
“As so often happens with industrial-grade technologies,” writes Ashlee Vance for Businessweek, ”3D printing has flowed downstream to consumers.”
One example is a product by 3D Systems called the Cube, an inexpensive and pre-assembled 3D printer for beginners.
“For $1,299,” says Vance, “anyone can now buy a 3D printer, hook it up to a wi-fi network, and begin downloading files that will turn into real objects.”
Expanding Capability
What that means for small businesses is only limited by the imagination of each entrepreneur.
CNBC.com presents the example of London-based toy company Makielab, which has allowed customers to design and create their own real-life dolls with 3D printing technology.
“It is a big deal, especially for designers,” says Andrew Sissons of the Work Foundation to CNBC, highlighting the power of bypassing all of the middlemen normally standing between a designer and his or her end product. “These days you can just start websites, get a 3D printer, start making it, and start selling it to people.” …
Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!
Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!
The Adafruit Learning System has dozens of great tools to get you well on your way to creating incredible works of engineering, interactive art, and design with your 3D printer! If you’ve made a cool project that combines 3D printing and electronics, be sure to let us know, and we’ll feature it here!
Last week, I had the opportunity to stop by Formlabs’ office for the first Boston 3D Printing meetup. This week, the latest episode of The Innovators takes you inside the growing company’s Kickstarter success, marrying form and function, and the challenge of serving a number of “businesses” in an industry on the cutting edge.
Jonathan Bobrow shared with us his 3D project KeyBit that provides a simple metal keychain attachment for a MagSafe adapter for Mac computers — a project that puts the “rapid” back into rapid prototyping in an interesting way. This project moved at a lightning pace from an idea he sketched out as a 3D model, to a first print that worked right off the bat back from Shapeways, to an item hosted in a Shapeways store for customers to have produced for them in stainless steel, and now, riding the wave of the demand, right into a crowdfunding project.
An interesting case study for how design for 3D printing using a printing service like Shapeways can not only help you obtain a rapid prototype of a project in a difficult to work with material, but can also help you identify from customer interest if the idea is worth pursuing further as a business idea.
And check out the video below from his crowdsourcing campaign to learn more about the history of this project:
Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!
Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!
The Adafruit Learning System has dozens of great tools to get you well on your way to creating incredible works of engineering, interactive art, and design with your 3D printer! If you’ve made a cool project that combines 3D printing and electronics, be sure to let us know, and we’ll feature it here!
Check out the 3D printed “Computational Sculptures” created by Youngsuk Lee over the past few years — challenging designs, challenging to produce, that suggest interesting directions for where to take 3D printed/rapid prototyped artwork:
Staples, the world’s largest office products company and second largest e-commerce company, today became the first major U.S. retailer to announce the availability of 3D printers. The Cube® 3D Printer from 3D Systems, a leading global provider of 3D content-to-print solutions, is immediately available on Staples.com for $1299.99 and will be available in a limited number of Staples stores by the end of June.
Awhile ago we had thought FedEx/Kinkos would be the first to do this (offering 3D printing services, and then actual machines – Staples is first mover on stocking and selling units).
3D printing starts by designing objects on a computer and then printing them with thermoplastics (and in this case, lasers) in super-thin layers to create intricate finished objects.
Inside the oven a 30cm-deep basin of powder is heated to just below its melting point; then a laser heats specific points over a layer just 0.1mm deep, melting and fusing the powder. Repeat that 3,000 times – it runs overnight – and you end up with a solid object – glasses, a doll, an architect’s model – surrounded by powder. Wash the powder off, and you have the finished product, with detail as fine as you want. The spectacles’ hinges are held together by 0.5mm links, each just five layers of plastic.
Having got its start in making prototypes for aerospace and automotive companies, and latterly for surgeons looking to make preci
ICTP announces the release of a free, downloadable book on a new technology that has the potential to revolutionize science, education and sustainable development: three-dimensional (3D) printing. The book, titled “Low-cost 3D Printing for Science, Education and Sustainable Development”, offers a practical guide to this rapidly evolving technology, giving an overview of current research on the topic and its uses in science education. It was compiled and edited by ICTP’s Science Dissemination Unit (SDU) and can be downloaded free of cost from the website.
The affordable and easy-to-use technology is good news for developing countries, where 3D printing could open up exciting opportunities for research, education and humanitarian projects. As an institute dedicated to promoting sustainable science in the developing world, ICTP is prepared to advance the adoption of this technology in these regions. The book’s editors -Enrique Canessa, Carlo Fonda and Marco Zennaro- want readers to understand and explore the huge potential that 3D technology provides.
The book is divided into four main sections:
a detailed view on the technology with information on how to create a 3D printed object, the related open source hardware and software, the kits available in the market today, and a glimpse at future projects;
applications of 3D printing in scientific fields ranging from mathematics, physics to archaeology, space science, and medicine;
innovative ways for the technology to be used in education;
a glimpse of the immense potential the low-cost 3D technology can have on sustainable development including plastic recycling.
Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!
Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!
The Adafruit Learning System has dozens of great tools to get you well on your way to creating incredible works of engineering, interactive art, and design with your 3D printer! If you’ve made a cool project that combines 3D printing and electronics, be sure to let us know, and we’ll feature it here!
Check out the launch of Printrbot Simple, a new even lower-cost Printrbot printer that debuted to beta price of $249 (and promptly sold out).
While there are some printer companies that cut corners at the outset to deliver “introductory” 3D printers aimed at the casual consumer — leading to rather dismal, frustrating first print experiences and RMAs — Printrbot finds its way to affordable by the route of chiseling away at the parts count to deliver printers that while not expensive, are still well-though out 3D printers. Head over to Printrbot to meet their latest bot!
The Printrbot Simple is an exercise in 3d printing minimalism. It includes only what is needed to get started in the world of 3D printing. At $299, we think you will agree that it is both tiny…and a really big deal.
Features of the Printrbot Simple:
0.1mm resolution (and beyond)
100mm cube of printing volume (~3.5″ cube)
Printrboard electronics
PLA only (no heat bed)
Ubis 1.75mm Hotend
60lb. test fishing line act as X & Y belt
12v 6A laptop style power supply
Outer dimensions: 7″ x 8″ x 9″
5lb. 2oz. total weight
1/2 lb 1.75mm PLA filament
Here’s an interesting experiment into turning your 3D printer into an injection molder — while the results are a bit primitive to date, the idea is fascinating. Hope he continues with the experimentation! From LeftAngle on Thingiverse:
This is one of those “I wonder if it can be done” exercises you can do in about an hour. This is only a proof-of-concept experiment that opens up the possibility of further development if anyone is interested.
The part I made is a true molded piece having no deposited layers.
The vent sprue I drilled in the front of the upper mold half didn’t work as PLA was too thick to move through (you can see the tiny nub in the photos). When the die was filled, the plastic simply began to pile up around the extruder head, outside the die,.
The other issue I had was the extruder head was hot enough to deform the upper ABS die half. This didn’t effect the part, but it made removing it from the mold difficult. The heat allowed the ABS mold material and the PLA part material to be mixed, making extraction impossible without wrecking the upper half of the mold.
Here’s how I made this:
Print the stl file in ABS. When the print is complete, break off the upper half (the one with the opening) and place it on top of the lower half, which should still be adhered to the build plate.
Disengage the driver motors and move the PLA print head (or the same print head you used to built the die on a single extruder machine) Load PLA material into the extruder and raise the plate until the extruder head couples with the hollow on the top of the die. Turn the load function on. The PLA will flow, filling the cavity. When its full, the PLA will begin to squeeze out from around the extruder nozzle. That’s when you should shut the extruder off.
Let the plastic cool completely before cracking the die open with a screw driver. If all went well, the part will be sitting inside the die, looking like a pearl.
Have fun, experiment and let us know if you make something really cool.
Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!
Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!
The Adafruit Learning System has dozens of great tools to get you well on your way to creating incredible works of engineering, interactive art, and design with your 3D printer! If you’ve made a cool project that combines 3D printing and electronics, be sure to let us know, and we’ll feature it here!
It’s been an interesting few months for the commercialization of space.
The festivities kicked off last March, when the 3D modeling platform Sunglass and space company DIYRockets announced an incentive competition aimed at creating an “open-source 3D-printed rocket engine” capable of sending nano-satellites into orbit.
The challenge marks the first time an open source methodology has been applied to the commercial space industry. The hope is that these next wave rockets will democratize the growing low-Earth orbit small-payload delivery market and, ultimately, disrupt the entire space transportation space.
The idea that this will happen sooner rather than later is not even a stretch. Remember it took Chris Anderson and his cohorts at DIY Drones about a year’s worth of open source work to create an autonomous quadcopter that duplicated 90 percent of the military’s $250,000 Raven, except that they cost about $300 dollars.
Meanwhile, the 3D rocket contest announcement was followed a few weeks later by the next bit of space news: the April 19 launch of SpaceX’s Grasshopper rocket…
While we have shown several of these videos before here, there is a great round-up of jaw-dropping proof-of-concept videos for “4D Printing” from Skylar Tibbits’ Self-Assembly Lab at MIT over on the Washington Post Innovations Blog:
The two technological advances have become somewhat popular since MIT lecturer and TED Senior Fellow Skylar Tibbits introduced 4D printing in a February TED talk.
The technology involves 3D printing of a blended material developed by Stratesys Stratasys that, when submerged in water, transitions over time from one shape to another. Tibbits describes the process as “self-reconfiguration.”
“Our products and materials and systems that we interact in the future will adapt to how we use them or adapt to how the environment around them changes,” said Tibbits during a phone interview. Tibbits launched the Self-Assembly Lab at MIT.
Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!
Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!
The Adafruit Learning System has dozens of great tools to get you well on your way to creating incredible works of engineering, interactive art, and design with your 3D printer! If you’ve made a cool project that combines 3D printing and electronics, be sure to let us know, and we’ll feature it here!
The debut of Coney Island Scan-A-Rama at Westport Makerfaire on Saturday was a huge success! We had a continuous line of people waiting to be scanned all day, and managed to scan well over 100 people! I was a little nervous about how things would go, but things were very smooth and the scans all seem quite good. I’m getting file cleanup down to a science and am getting faster at processing them for printing. So far I’ve processes about a third of the files and will aim to get them all done and posted by next weekend. In the meantime I have a couple screenshots of some of the scans. Some of the family shots were quite touching. I even ran off one as a test print today and did an acetone polish on it. Looks great! I’m really excited about it.
3D printing technology is taking off in the medical science community, especially in emerging methods known as “bioprinting.” Instead of inks, plastics and other artificial materials, science and medical labs use a patient’s actual living human cells to replicate organs that the body can recognize and accept.
3D bioprinting has tremendous promise for medical professionals, but it could also forever change areas such as cosmetic surgery and food engineering (not to mention counterfeiting or spy disguises). Here are some of the latest innovations happening in 3D printing and 3D bioprinting.
Some bioprinting labs are using cells to print sheets of skin for skin grafting procedures.
Modern Meadow is a 3D bioprinting startup that aims to develop cell-based products to replace beef and leather. PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel is investing $350,000 in the company.
Scientists at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine have developed tissue aimed at replicating the outer ear using bioprinting.
The scientists at Wake Forest IRM are also using bioprinting to develop a replacement bladder.
Connecticut-based Oxford Performance Materials used 3D printing to replace bone and insert the material into an American patient’s skull in March 2013.
Photo: Yves Herman / Geoff Pugh
Eric Moger survived the removal of a large tumor under his face but lived for a period with an unsightly hole. Doctors used 3D printing to produce a fleshy prosthetic. Pictured also is a life-size model of a similar complex anaplastology case created by anaplastologist Jan De Cubber at the Belgian company Materialise, the biggest 3D printer in Europe.
Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!
Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!
The Adafruit Learning System has dozens of great tools to get you well on your way to creating incredible works of engineering, interactive art, and design with your 3D printer! If you’ve made a cool project that combines 3D printing and electronics, be sure to let us know, and we’ll feature it here!
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