Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Imagine misplacing your house keys and then pulling out a 3D printer from your pocket to make new ones.
3D printing has made manufacturing more affordable, especially for low-volume production. However, 3D printers are often huge and heavy devices that need a stable platform to work properly — until now. MIT News reports that its researchers have worked closely with a team from the University of Texas at Austin to create a prototype 3D printer that is smaller than a coin.
This photonic chip focuses its beam into a resin well that rapidly cures when it’s hit by a particular wavelength of light emitted from the chip. The palm-sized 3D printer also saves space by eschewing moving parts — instead of using arms and motors to change the beam’s focal point, the prototype uses tiny optical antennas to move it around and create the desired shape.
If the team is successful in turning this concept into a viable product, it could change the face of instant manufacturing. The portability and speed of this palm-sized printer could allow anyone — engineers, doctors, or even first responders — to create solutions on the fly without needing to lug around a big and heavy device.
[...] These are just some of the exciting possibilities that this 3D printing concept brings to the table. According to MIT Professor Jelena Notaros, “This system is completely rethinking what a 3D printer is. It is no longer a big box sitting on a bench in a lab creating objects, but something that is handheld and portable. It is exciting to think about the new applications that could come out of this and how the field of 3D printing could change.”
(Score: 4, Interesting) by looorg on Thursday June 13 2024, @01:18PM (6 children)
A tiny little 3D-printer the size of a coin, or something that fits in the palm of your hand, is hardly in competition with an industrial scale 3D printer that is a stand-alone machine the size of a fridge. They are probably not even in competition with the once they sell to amateur home printers -- that are a box that sits on top a desk or shelf. Those are not very big, even if the case is fairly big or a lot bigger then the actual printer. But if they wanted to shrink it down they could. It might just not be very practical for what they, or the user, are doing with them. The big case is usually there to protect either the print object or the user from each other -- resin fumes, resin in general, keeping the temperature stable inside the box so the print doesn't fail etc etc.
I have used industrial scale 3D printers and a variety of the home 3D printers. I can't really see what I would use a coin sized 3D printer for at the moment. Anything I would want to print is usually larger then a coin so that printer would have to work overtime to make those things. Unless by the 3D printer they are just referring to the actual printer part and not the whole device. It's a bit unclear. So while they might not move the head or nozzle very much they then have to move the build plate quite a bit. I still think I'm better off getting the desk sized one that can print what I want without issues of moving the object it's printing around, or moving the head or nozzle around to much. Also price and speed. Where is the coin sized 3D printer getting the power from? The material from? The filament, powder or resin is going to be multiple times the size of the printer then.
There is a lack of pictures but is it the whole printer that is the size of a coin or is it just the "printer". In which case as noted you'll need a lot of other things that will take up more space then the palm of your hand. Also I don't want to hold resin in the palm of my hand or even breath in that stuff. Also afterwards they'll need to wash and cure that thing. We are talking about giant palms and hands now.
I'm sure a coin sized 3D printer could have some interesting applications. Perhaps medical applications. There are already a lot of printers in the dental industry. But those are big box machines. Still I don't want it to go all Fantastic Voyage on me and be insert.
Perhaps you could have an entire array of them connected so that you could splice up the object and have multiple printers in sync printing different parts and then fusing them together. That could speed things up perhaps.
How long would it take to print a house key? What materials can it print in? From my experience most resin is fairly brittle. There are some mixtures that are better then others or offer other properties but in general it's fairly brittle. It could probably survive being a key for a bit but eventually it would snap. So would the key even survive being turned inside the lock without snapping -- causing more issues. More then once? Or was that just a journalistic example and fantasy?
Also if you can 3D print a key to your house then so can other people. People that want to "break in" and steal all your stuff. After all it must be great to carry a little 3D printer around and not having to carry lockpicks or other burglary tools, which are very incriminating. You might not even have to make actual molds or prints of keys, it could probably be enough with a few pictures of it and some minor toolwork after that.
(Score: 3, Informative) by janrinok on Thursday June 13 2024, @01:42PM (2 children)
You have to read the full article to understand how it works - it is entirely different from the 3D printers that exist today. I know that you have read it but for others who might not have yet done so they have to get their head around the concept before it makes much sense. It is still very early days but the technology has been demonstrated and it uses a different kind of resin - one that is hardened by focused light beams and not by cooling after ejection through a heated nozzle.
The chip controls and focusses an external laser light source which is fed to the chip via an optical fibre, and appears to use a container of resin which only hardens or cures where the light beam is focused.
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Thursday June 13 2024, @02:03PM
My post might have been a bit long-winded and a bit of a rant but I did find it quite unclear from the article what they are actually talking about. It took a while to even notice that they are talking about resin printing. The most confusing thing is tho what they mean when they talk about "3D printer", if it's the whole device or it's it's just the light emitter etc. If everything fits into the palm of your hand or just that chip and/or the light emitter or what. I'm still not clear on that part after having read the MIT link, I didn't read the link to Toms due to it looking weird in my browser. So I do find it a bit unclear in regards as to what constitutes the 3D PRINTER in question here.
But that is already how resin printers work today, in general. A light beam or source of some kind focusing on the liquid resin to harden it. Then you have to cure it to harden it more, then clean it so you don't touch that horrible liquid goop. Compared then to FDM printers that extrude filament thru a heated nozzle. So that part shouldn't be all that new. I imagined here that it was the scale that was the break thru, but I do admit that I find it somewhat unclear as to what they are referring to.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Mykl on Thursday June 13 2024, @10:41PM
That may well be, but the headline breathlessly gushes over how small this printer is, not what type of technology it uses.
"Oh great, I can finally print tiny resin things while I'm out and about!" said no-one ever. I struggle to think of the practical application of this tool, and why (apart from being impressive) anyone would want a smaller printer over a bigger one.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Thursday June 13 2024, @02:06PM (2 children)
What else would you use to print the world smallest violin to lament the woes of your foes?
( got theme and punchline but can't come up with the right delivery and context... )
compiling...
(Score: 4, Funny) by looorg on Thursday June 13 2024, @02:22PM
If they are your foes you are better off feeding them the liquid resin. Then you will soon hear the lamentation of their women ...
(Score: 2) by VanessaE on Thursday June 13 2024, @04:21PM
Too late, that's already been done 🙂
https://gizmodo.com/nano-violin-has-strings-a-millionth-of-an-inch-thick-5650126 [gizmodo.com]
https://phys.org/news/2009-07-nano-violin-vibrating-carbon-nanotube.html [phys.org]
(I could wear there were better articles than these, though, but I can't find them)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by anotherblackhat on Thursday June 13 2024, @02:33PM (1 child)
When I think about problems 3D printers have, being too big isn't even on the list, much less near the top.
Cost, strength, durability (of the finished good), speed of printing … all of those are far more important to me than size of the printer.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Friday June 14 2024, @04:53AM
From skimming the article this printer isn't even going to be particularly small. It's a resin printer that uses a chip to emit lasers to cure the resin. It's not likely to be appreciably smaller than what we've got today as the stuff we have today is sized for whatever it is that we want to print.