The Most Horrifying Use Of 3D Printing

February 2, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 38 Comments

As anyone with a Facebook account that’s over the age of 25 will tell you, 3D ultrasounds of fetuses are all the rage these days, with ultrasound pictures of the unborn recently taking the leap from black and white blobs to 3D – and 4D – images. With the advent of 3D printers, the inevitable has happened. Now you can order a 3D print of your yet-to-be-born progeny.

The company behind this – 3D Babies – takes 3D ultrasound data from weeks 24-32 and turns it into a 3D model. The printed 3D models sell for $800 for the full size version, $400 for a half-size version, and $200 for a quarter size version. It appears the 3D ultrasound data is simply wrapped around a pre-defined mesh, so while the resulting print may come out looking like your spawn, it’s still not a physical copy of the 3D/4D ultrasound data.

Despite the ‘creepy’ factor of these little bundles of plastic, we’re wondering why we haven’t seen anything like this before. Are there any obstetricians/radiologists/ultrasound techs out there that have experience with importing 3D ultrasound data into an editor of some sort? Notwithstanding any HIPAA violations, it seems it would be rather easy to turn this sort of 3D data into a printed object. 3D printing CT scans models can’t be the only other instance of this type of thing.

Thanks [Will] for the nightmares

The FilaWinder

January 30, 2014 by Marsh 6 Comments

filawinder

The latest addition to the line of 3D printer accessories is the FilaWinder, a tool for winding your filament neatly onto a spool. If you’ve abandoned buying your filament by the reel in favor of making your own from cheaper pellets—such as the Lyman Extruder, the Filabot Wee, or other alternatives, including the winder’s companion product, the FilaStruder—then you’ve likely had to roll everything up by hand, perhaps after it flopped around on the floor first.

The FilaWinder spools for you while the filament extrudes, using a sensor to adjust the winding the speed to match extrusion rates as well as running it through some PTFE tube to gently coil it as it moves along. Perhaps most important, the FilaWinder provides a guide arm to direct the filament back and forth across the reel as it spools up, to keep it evenly distributed. Swing by their Thingaverse page for a list of printable pieces and their assembly guide can be found here, as well as on YouTube. You can see an overview video of the FilaWinder winding away after the break.

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Ask Hackaday: What’s Up With This Carbon Fiber Printer?

January 29, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 40 Comments

The Hackaday Tip Line has been ringing with submissions about the Mark Forg3D printer, purportedly the, “world’s first 3D printer that can print carbon fiber.”

Right off the bat, we’re going to call that claim a baldfaced lie. Here’s a Kickstarter from a few months ago that put carbon fiber in PLA filament, making every desktop 3D printer one that can print in carbon fiber.

But perhaps there’s something more here. The Mark Forged site gives little in the way of technical details, but from what we can gather from their promo video, here’s what we have: it’s a very impressive-looking aluminum chassis with a build area of 12″x6.25″x6.25″. There are dual extruders, with (I think) one dedicated to PLA and Nylon, and another to the carbon and fiberglass filaments. Layer height is 0.1mm for the PLA and Nylon, 0.2mm for the composites. Connectivity is through Wifi, USB, or an SD card, with a “cloud based” control interface. Here are the full specs, but you’re not going to get much more than the previous few sentences.

Oh, wait, it’s going to be priced at around $5000, which is, “affordable enough for average consumers to afford.” Try to contain your laughter as you click the ‘read more’ link.

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FaBrickation: Combining Lego And 3D Printing

January 28, 2014 by Eric Evenchick 29 Comments

While 3D printing gives you the ability to fabricate completely custom parts, it does have some drawbacks. One issue is the time and cost of printing large volumes. Often these structures are simple, and do not require completely custom design.

This is where the faBrickation system comes in. It allows you to combine 3D printed parts with off the shelf LEGO bricks. The CAD tool that lets you ‘Legofy’ a design. It creates directions on how to assemble the LEGO parts, and exports STL files for the parts to be 3D printed. These custom bricks snap into the LEGO structure.

In their demo, a head mounted display is built in 67 minutes. The same design would have taken over 14 hours to 3D print. As the design is changed, LEGO blocks are added and removed seamlessly.

Unfortunately, the tool doesn’t appear to be open source. It will appear for the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, so hopefully we will see more in the future. Until then, you can watch the demo after the break.

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3D Printed Netduino Remote Controlled Car

January 28, 2014 by Marsh 7 Comments

netduinocar

[Matt] lives in South Africa, where homes have smallish crawlspaces (some only 30cm high!) that he can’t quite squeeze himself into. Even if he could, he probably wouldn’t: they’re apparently vacation homes for the local rats. He did, however, want to explore these spaces to get a better idea what’s going on inside, so he built a Windows Phone-controlled car with a Netduino and 3D-printed parts.

Such a specialized application requires unique parts, so [Matt] designed and 3D-printed the wheels and frame from scratch. You’ve probably noticed that the wheels aren’t your typical cylinders. The terrain [Matt] faces is sand, so the spiked shape provides better grip. The body’s design required extra attention because it holds the motors, the Netduino, the motor driver, and the battery.

A Bluetooth module connects to the Netduino and allows [Matt] to drive the car with his Windows Phone, and an inexpensive 5V LED board provides some light for those dark corners. How does it see once inside the crawlspace? It looks like [Matt’s] getting to that part. His plan is to simply mount a second phone running Skype and watch the stream. Stick around after the break to see [Matt] use the car to both confuse and excite his dog.

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Copying Objects In 3D

January 26, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 8 Comments

photocopier

[Pulse 9] sent in a very interesting project he just finished up at an internship. It’s a 3D photocopier that scans an object and then mills said object into floral foam.

The copier is made out of material [Pulse] found sitting around – PVC, drawer slides for the X and Y axes, acrylic for the structure, and broken printer parts for the Z axis.

To scan an object, [Pulse] puts an object down on the bed and scans it with a laser and webcam. The images recorded on the camera are fed into MATLAB. The output from MATLAB is sent over serial to a custom board containing a PIC18F4620 that controls the axis motors. The spindle for this floral foam router is a simple drill; one layer at a time, the drill mills out the unneeded foam which can be sucked up by a vacuum when the object is complete.

Below you’ll find [Pulse]’s demo of his photocopier and a piece the local news did on the project. If anyone is willing to translate that story, feel free to do so in the comments.

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3D Printed Guitar

January 25, 2014 by Marsh 18 Comments

We’re not sure how we missed this one, but it definitely deserves a look. Professor of Mechtronics [Olaf Diegel’s] 3D printer must go to 12, because he’s printed these incredible electric guitar bodies. You probably won’t be making your own on your filament printer, however, because [Diegel] uses SLS (Selective Laser Sintering) to create the body out of nylon, then he dyes the resulting piece in a two-step process. You can read more about the construction specifics on his website.

And, they’re more than just eye-candy: the guitars sound brilliantly metallic. There are more than enough pictures and videos to keep you occupied on the site, where you can sift through all eight designs to your heart’s content. You’ll want to keep reading for a couple of videos embedded after the break, which feature some demonstrations of the guitar and comparisons to traditional electric guitars, as well as a brief history of its construction and build process.

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