Turning The Makerbot Into A Tattoo Machine

April 3, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 24 Comments

tattoo

ENSCI les Ateliers, the famous design school in Paris, had a “Public Domain Remix” and hackathon recently, with teams splitting up to remix public domain and other free-to-use IP in projects. Most of the teams came up with similar ideas, but one team went above and beyond the call of duty; they turned a 3D printer into a tattoo machine, capable of inking a real, live human test subject.

The build began by plotting a circle with a pen onto a piece of paper. This evolved into printing a tool holder for a tattoo machine graciously provided by an amateur tattoo artist. Tests with “artificial skin” (any one care to hazard a guess at what that is?) were promising, and the team moved on to a human guinea pig.

The biggest problem the team faced is that humans aren’t flat. They tried a few tricks to tighten the skin around the area to be tattooed – metal rings, elastics, and finally the inner tube from a scooter. In the end, the team was able to tattoo a small circle on the forearm of the test subject.

It’s an extremely simple and small tattoo, and scaling this build up to a sleeve would be difficult. A better solution would be to create a point cloud of an arm before going for a much larger tattoo.

Continue reading “Turning The Makerbot Into A Tattoo Machine” →

3D Printed Splint Saves Baby’s Life

April 2, 2014 by James Hobson 31 Comments

3D-printed-breathing-device-2a

Here’s another heartwarming story about how 3D printers are continuing to make a real difference in the medical world. [Garrett] is just a baby whose bronchi collapse when breathing — he’s been on a ventilator for most of his life — Until now.

[Scott Hollister] is a professor of Biomedical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering, as well as being an associate professor of surgery at the University of Michigan. Between him and [Doctor Glen Green], an associate professor of Pediatric Otolaryngology, they have created a bioresorbable device that could save little [Garrett’s] life.

By taking CT scans of [Garrett’s] bronchi and trachea, they were able to create a 3D model and design a “splint” to help support the bronchi from collapsing during normal breathing. If all goes well, within 3 years, the splint will dissolve in his body and he will be able to breath normally for good. The material in question is a biopolymer called polycaprolactone, which they were actually granted emergency clearance from the FDA to use for [Garrett]. They used an EOS SLS based 3D printer.

The surgery was successful, and [Garrett] is now on the road to recovery. Stick around for a few videos showing of the printing process and surgery.

Continue reading “3D Printed Splint Saves Baby’s Life” →

Dispensing Solder Paste With A 3D Printer

April 2, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 37 Comments

There’s a strange middle ground in PCB production when it comes to making a few boards. Dispensing solder paste onto one board is easy enough with a syringe or toothpick, but when pasting up even a handful of boards, this method gets tiresome. Solder paste stencils speed up the process when you’re doing dozens or hundreds of boards, but making a stencil for just a few boards is a waste. The solution for this strange middle ground is, of course, to retrofit a 3D printer to dispense solder paste.

This project was a collaboration between [Jake] and [hzeller] to transform KiCAD files to G Code for dispensing solder paste directly onto a board. The machine they used was a Type A Machines printer with a solder paste dispenser in place of an extruder. The dispenser is hooked up to the fan output of the controller board, and from the looks of the video, they’re getting pretty good results for something that’s still very experimental.

All the code to turn KiCAD files into G Code are up on [hzeller]’s github. If you’re wondering, the board they’re pasting up is a stepper driver board for the BeagleBone named Bumps.

Videos below.

Continue reading “Dispensing Solder Paste With A 3D Printer” →

3D Printed Instrument Roundup

March 29, 2014 by James Hobson 13 Comments

3d printed instruments

We just stumbled upon a great repository of all musical things that are 3D printed. It’s a wiki dedicated to sharing and recording these 3D printed instruments to help encourage further ideas and projects.

The people maintaining the site find different projects and share them, adding descriptions which would go great into a database search. They explain the type of instrument, it’s history, a picture or video of it and the method of manufacture used to create, whether it be traditional 3D printing, laser cutting, or another process.

Some of our favorites include the 3D printed guitar bodies, the strange looking multi-horn trumpet (that’s the weird one, bottom right) by the MIT Media Lab, and of course the humongous bass recorder (top right).

Stick around after the break for a few videos of these ~~different~~ unconventional, unorthodox instruments!

Continue reading “3D Printed Instrument Roundup” →

Recycling Plastic With Liquid Nitrogen

March 29, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 26 Comments

Ln2

Recycling 3D printer filament isn’t a new idea, and in fact there are quite a few devices out there that will take chunks ABS, PLA, or just about any other thermoplastic and turn them into printer filament. The problem comes when someone mentions recycling plastic parts and turning them into filament ready to be used again. Plastics can only be recycled so many times, and there’s also the problem of grinding up your octopodes and companion cubes into something a filament extruder will accept.

The solution, it appears, is to freeze the plastic parts to be recycled before grinding them up. Chopping up plastic parts at room temperature imparts a lot of energy into the plastic before breaking. Freezing the parts to below their brittle transition temperature means the resulting chips will have clean cuts, something much more amenable to the mechanics of filament extruders.

The setup for this experiment consisted of cooling PLA plastic with liquid nitrogen and putting the frozen parts in a cheap, As Seen On TV blender. The resulting chips were smaller than the plastic pellets found in injection molding manufacturing plants, but will feed into the extruder well enough.

Liquid nitrogen might be overkill in this case; the goal is to cool the plastic down below its brittle transition temperature, which for most plastics is about -40° (420° R). Dry ice will do the job just as well, and is also available at most Walmarts.

Successful 3D Printed Cranium Implant

March 28, 2014 by James Hobson 43 Comments

implant-1

What an age we live in. If the image above looks like the entire top of a skull — it’s because it is. Surgeons successfully replaced a 22 year old woman’s cranium with this plastic copy.

We’ve seen small 3D printed transplants before, but nothing as big as this. A 22 year old woman suffered from a very rare disorder in which her skull never stopped growing. While normal skulls are about 1.5cm thick, hers was almost 5cm thick by the time of the surgery. If they left it any longer, the continued bone growth would have eventually killed her.

Until now this surgery has required a hand-made concrete-like implant to replace the removed bone. As you can imagine, it’s hardly an ideal solution. Thanks to continually advancing 3D printing technology, surgeons at the University of Utrecht UMC were able to create an exact copy in a durable and lightweight clear plastic, which also has a better rate of brain function recovery than the old way of doing it.

The 23 hour surgery took place last December and was a huge success with the patient making a full recovery — if you’re not too squeamish around exposed brains, check out the following video. Wow.

Continue reading “Successful 3D Printed Cranium Implant” →

3D Printering: Custom RC Camera Mount Takes To The Sky

March 26, 2014 by Rich Bremer 4 Comments

3D Printers are only good for printing trinkets and doodads, right? Not really. Although, I do print the occasional useless object, most of my prints are used for projects I’m working on or to meet a need that I have. These needs are the project’s design requirements and I’d like to share the process and techniques I use when creating a functional 3D object.

My pal [Toshi] has RC Airplanes and flies often. I have an Action Camera that I never use. Why not combine the two and have some fun? The only thing standing in our way was a method to mount the camera to the airplane. 3D printing makes it easy. If you have a popular vehicle or application, there may be something already available on a 3D model repository like Thingiverse. Our situation was fairly unique I decided to design and print my own mount.

Continue reading “3D Printering: Custom RC Camera Mount Takes To The Sky” →