Even your most advanced toaster won't ask that much of you these
days. No matter what you're browning, it all boils down to lowering that
lever and knowing that something is about to get toasty.
So, how do you make a complex piece of technology such as a 3D
printer easy enough for everyone to use, like a toaster? Well, to start,
you focus around a one-button design. There are 3D printers on the way
that want you to be able to start fabricating cool stuff just like that — just with one button. For the most part, it really can be that easy.
Here we preview 3D System's forthcoming Cube 3D printer, which is
looking toward a nearer-than-you-think future where 3D fabrication is
commonplace and something anyone can do.
Photo Credit: Kevin Hall/DVICE
With One Press Of This Button
If there really is a 3D printing at home revolution waiting to
happen, then 3D printers need to sort out two big barriers to entry: 1)
the steep learning curve one must overcome to use the technology and 2)
the capability of easily providing people with useful stuff to print.
While there are a number of options available
and on the way, the trailblazer for 3D printing at home was Makerbot's
Thing-O-Matic, followed up by the group's more versatile Replicator.
The Thing-O-Matic epitomizes the 3D printer as geared toward hobbyists:
it's industrial looking, requires technical know-how to get started and
— though you could buy them fully assembled — the Thing-O-Matic was
designed to be put together by someone who can solder. With the
Replicator, Makerbot hasn't left its hobbyists behind, offering a bigger
build space and two-color printing, but the platform now comes fully
assembled and tested, and Makerbot's robust and growing Thingiverse makes finding designs to print easy and free.
That same thinking — making 3D printing easier out of the box — is
shared by 3D Systems but taken along a little farther with the Cube. The
Cube comes in a box like any old gadget on a shelf. It also doesn't
look industrial and tinkery like other 3D printers, appearing a lot more
like a desktop PC or a sewing machine. Where the Replicator would be at
home in your workshop or garage, the Cube can sit on a kitchen counter
next to your toaster. The Cube also connects to your home network via
Wi-Fi, meaning you can use your PC to push new designs over to it,
although you don't need a PC to get it to work.
The Cube has a build space that's 5.5-inches all around (length,
width and height), which makes it perfect for action figures, cups,
jewelry and anything small. Larger objects can also be made, you just
need to print them out in smaller pieces and put them together. The Cube
will come paired with different apps and software to help you design
specific objects. For instance, one app we saw was like Build-A-Bear, but you were putting together your own robot instead.
In our video below, 3D Systems Social Media Manager Adam Reichental
walks us through just how easy it is to fire the Cube up.
Screencap: Cubify.com
If Apple's App Store Sold 3D Objects
The real difference between the Cube and its hobbyist competitors is
how you discover objects to print. For 3D printing enthusiasts,
Thingiverse represents the easiest go-to. Outside of Thingiverse and
Google-fishing for objects, you're really only left with the option of
making your own designs.
3D System's solution? Cubify, a Thingiverse-like site with some crucial differences.
Whereas objects on Thingiverse are free, on Cubify they aren't. Think
of Cubify as the Apple App Store of the 3D printing world — it's
curated. Designs uploaded to the site are checked out individually
before they're approved, and any obscene or copyright infringing
templates won't get through. This also allows 3D Systems to test the
designs and make sure they're ready to print with the Cube, taking out
some of the guesswork on your end.
You buy the 3D models you want to print, which range from a few bucks to this $155 oil rig design,
which is the most expensive model we could find. Cubify also lets folks
who don't own 3D printers buy objects, and 3D Systems will print it out
for them and mail it over. That service also starts out cheap, and goes
all the way up to this $8,799 table,
which would take quite a while to print out in small chunks using the
Cube; 3D Systems also operates an industrial printing arm for heavier
duty print jobs. One upside to charging for 3D objects: you support the
designers. Like app makers, 3D modelers will get a cut of the cash for
objects sold.
Using the Cube doesn't mean you have to use Cubify, however. Any
printable 3D model that conforms to the Cube's build area should work.
That said, paired up with Cubify, the Cube promises an experience that
is as easy as browsing for a design on your computer, sending it to the
Cube via Wi-Fi and then printing that object out with the touch of a
button.
How To Get One
The 3D Systems Cube 3D printer is available for a $1,299 pre-order now and starts shipping this Friday, May 25.
A paper-based touch pad on an alarmed cardboard box
detects the change in capacitance associated with the touch of a finger
to one of its buttons.
The keypad requires the appropriate sequence of
touches to disarm the system. Image credit: Mazzeo, et al.
The touch pads are made of metallized paper, which is paper coated in
aluminum and transparent polymer. The paper can function as a capacitor, and a laser can be used to cut several individual capacitors in the paper, each corresponding to a key on the touch pad.
When a person touches a key, the key’s capacitance is increased. Once
the keys are linked to external circuitry and a power source, the system
can detect when a key is touched by detecting the increased
capacitance.
According to lead researcher Aaron Mazzeo of Harvard University, the
next steps will be finding a power source and electronics that are
cheap, flexible, and disposable.
Among the applications, inexpensive touch pads could be used for
security purposes. The researchers have already developed a box with an
alarm and keypad that requires a code to allow authorized access.
Disposable touch pads could also be useful in sterile or contaminated
medical environments.
Green plants use photosynthesis to convert
water and sunlight into energy used to help the plant grow. Scientists
have created the first practical artificial leaf that mimics the natural
process and holds promise for sustainable green energy. The key to this
practical artificial leaf is that unlike earlier devices it doesn’t use
expensive components in its construction.
The new artificial leaf is made from inexpensive materials and uses
low-cost engineering and manufacturing processes making it much more
practical. The artificial leaf has an component to collect sunlight
sandwich between two films that generate oxygen and hydrogen gas. When
the artificial leaf is placed into a jar of water and placed in
sunlight, it bubbles, releasing hydrogen that can be used by fuel cells
to make electricity. Previous designs needed expensive materials like
platinum along with expensive manufacturing processes.
The new artificial leaf replaces the costly platinum with a less
expensive nickel-molybdenum-zinc compound. The opposite side of the leaf
has a cobalt film that generates oxygen gas. The hope is that this sort
of device can be used to generate electricity for remote places that
are off the electrical grid. The tech could also be used to power all
sorts of devices including phones and more.
“Considering that it is the 6 billion nonlegacy users
that are driving the enormous increase in energy demand by midcentury, a
research target of delivering solar energy to the poor with discoveries
such as the artificial leaf provides global society its most direct
path to a sustainable energy future,” he says.
According to reports from various industry
sources, the Chinese government has begun the process of picking a
national computer chip instruction set architecture (ISA). This ISA
would have to be used for any projects backed with government money —
which, in a communist country such as China, is a fairly long list of
public and private enterprises and institutions, including China Mobile,
the largest wireless carrier in the world. The primary reason for this
move is to lessen China’s reliance on western intellectual property.
There are at least five existing ISAs on the table for consideration — MIPS, Alpha, ARM, Power, and the homegrown UPU
— but the Chinese leadership has also mooted the idea of defining an
entirely new architecture. The first meeting to decide on a nationwide
ISA, attended by government officials and representatives from academic
groups and companies such as Huawei and ZTE, was held in March.
According to MIPS vice president Robert Bismuth, a final decision will be made in “a matter of months.”
China
has a long history with MIPS and Alpha. Loongson processors, which
power millions of Chinese school computers, use MIPS — and the ShenWei
processors (pictured right) found in China’s first homegrown
supercomputer, the Sunway Bluelight MPP,
are based on the Alpha ISA. MIPS Technologies (the company) hasn’t been
doing very well recently, and it’s rumored that the Sunnyvale-based
company could be up for sale — a purchase I’m sure the Chinese
government could afford.
According to EE Times, there are some 34
ARM licensees in China, but at $5 million for a single Cortex-A9 core
license, it’s unlikely that ARM will be China’s choice. The Power ISA is
cheaper, but lacks the software ecosystems that ARM and MIPS enjoy.
ShenWei/Alpha is also a possibility, but again it cannot compete with
MIPS’ installed base.
The other option, of course, is developing a
brand new ISA — a daunting task, considering you have to create an
entire software (compiler, developer, apps) and hardware (CPU, chipset,
motherboard) ecosystem from scratch. But, there are benefits to building
your own CPU architecture. China, for example, could design an ISA (or
microarchicture) with silicon-level monitoring and censorship — and, of
course, a ubiquitous, always-open backdoor that can be used by Chinese
intelligence agencies. The Great Firewall of China is fairly easy to
circumvent — but what if China built a DNS and IP address blacklist into
the hardware itself?
Taking a leaf out of South Korea’s hardcore
gaming scene, what if the Chinese government decided to implement a
hardware-level 10pm curfew for video games? Or some code that
automatically turns negative mentions of Hu Jintao (the Chinese
president) into positives, and inserts a few honorifics at the same
time. Or a latent botnet of hundreds of millions of computers that can
be activated upon the commencement of World War III. Or, or, or…
Soon you can get your hands on the Mobot modular
robot for a very reasonable $270 a module (pre-orders
available now). A number of connection plates and
attachments will also be available, and I
guess you can 3D print your own stuff.
Mobot by Barobo.com
I like the gripper that is powered and controlled by the
rotating faceplate. I am sure the same concept can be
used to 3D print some cool things in the future.
A connector would be an awesome thing and definitely
worth a price of some sort.
In general, it seems to be a very competent modular
robotics system. It uses a snap together connector,
making it simple and fast to use, but maybe not as
strong as a system that screws together.
There is a Graphical User Interface RobotController,
and you can program it with the C/C++ interpreter Ch
so everyone from beginner to hard core hacker should
be able to do some really cool stuff.
LG Display has launched a new, 6-inch flexible epaper
display that the company expects to show up in bendable products by the
beginning of next month. The panel, a 1024 x 768 monochrome sheet, can
be bent up to 40-degrees without breaking; in addition, because LG
Display has used a flexible plastic substrate rather than the more
traditional glass, it’s less than half the weight of a traditional
epaper panel.
That means lighter gadgets that are actually more durable since the
panels should be more resilient to drops or bumps. They can also be
thinner, too: the plastic panel is a third slimmer than glass
equivalents, at just 0.7mm thick.
LG Display says it can drop its new screen from 1.5m – the average
height a device is held when it’s being used for reading, apparently –
without any resulting damage. The company also hit the screen with a
plastic hammer, leaving no scratches or breaks, ETNews reports.
LG isn’t the only company to be working on flexible screens this
year. Samsung has already confirmed that it is looking at launching
devices using flexible AMOLED panels in
2012, though it’s unclear whether the screens will actually fold or
bend, or simply be used to wrap around smartphones for new types of UI.
The first products using the LG Display flexible panel are on track
for a release in the European market in early April, the company claims.
No word on what vendors will be offering them, nor how pricing will
compare to traditional glass-substrate epaper.
Asus’ Transformer (and Transformer Prime) seems to have resonated well with consumers, and now Microsoft
may be looking to create a similar concept in the future. A new patent
reveals Microsoft nurturing an idea that could see a tablet turning into
a full fledged laptop or desktop PC, complete with not one but two
separate processors.
How is that any different from the Transformer Prime, you ask? Unwired View
reports that Microsoft would be including a processor not only in the
tablet itself, but also the keyboard base unit. The processor in the
tablet would be optimized for low-power, pointing towards an ARM chip of
some kind, while the processor in the keyboard base unit would be
focused more on performance. That could mean either a speedier ARM chip,
or even an ULV Intel chip.
Right now with the Transformer Prime,
you hold the same amount of processing power whether or not you’re
docked with the keyboard, which only provides additional power.
Microsoft’s vision would see different performance scenarios depending
on your mobility requirements, which seems much more appealing.
Not only that, the operating system would adapt to the change.
Microsoft lay out in their patent that the device would switch between a
“resource-conserving computing environment” when in tablet mode, and a
“resource-intensive computing environment” when in laptop mode. This is
idle speculation, but that sounds ideal for Windows 8, switching to the
Metro interface when in tablet mode, and back to the traditional desktop
when in laptop mode.
Of all the things we saw at CES, Tobii's eye-tracking Gaze interface was one of the most memorable, even if the execution was a bit flawed.
Now the company's back with a next-gen sensor that fits on a single
board and is 75 percent smaller than the iteration we saw at CES -- a
milestone that will presumably allow it to accommodate a wider range of
devices. Tobii also says the IS-2S eye tracker consumes 40 percent less
power than its predecessor and will be cheaper to implement, though the
company doesn't specify how much it'll cost. It's also unclear which
Windows PC and tablet makers will take a chance on the technology,
though that won't necessarily stop us from getting an early demo at CeBIT this week.
If you’ve ever been inside a dormitory full of
computer science undergraduates, you know what horrors come of young men
free of responsibility. To help combat the lack of homemaking skills in
nerds everywhere, a group of them banded together to create MOTHER,
a combination of home automation, basic artificial intelligence and
gentle nagging designed to keep a domicile running at peak efficiency.
And also possibly kill an entire crew of space truckers if they should
come in contact with a xenomorphic alien – but that code module hasn’t
been installed yet.
The project comes from the LVL1 Hackerspace, a group of like-minded
programmers and engineers. The aim is to create an AI suited for a home
environment that detect issues and gets its users (i.e. the people living in
the home) to fix it. Through an array of digital sensors, MOTHER knows
when the trash needs to be taken out, when the door is left unlocked, et
cetera. If something isn’t done soon enough, she it can even
disable the Internet connection for individual computers. MOTHER can
notify users of tasks that need to be completed through a standard
computer, phones or email, or stock ticker-like displays. In addition,
MOTHER can use video and audio tools to recognize individual users,
adjust the lighting, video or audio to their tastes, and generally keep
users informed and creeped out at the same time.
MOTHER’s abilities are technically limitless – since it’s all based
on open source software, those with the skill, inclination and hardware
components can add functions at any time. Some of the more humorous
additions already in the project include an instant dubstep command. You
can build your own MOTHER (boy, there’s a sentence I never thought I’d
be writing) by reading through the official Wiki
and assembling the right software, sensors, servers and the like. Or
you could just invite your mom over and take your lumps. Your choice.
While the subject of online piracy is certainly nothing new, the recent protests against SOPA and the federal raid on Megaupload
have thrust the issue into mainstream media. More than ever, people are
discussing the controversial topic while content creators scramble to
find a way to try to either shut down or punish sites and individuals
that take part in the practice. Despite these efforts, online piracy
continues to be a thorn in Big Media’s side. With the digital media
arena all but conquered by piracy,
the infamous site The Pirate Bay (TPB) has begun looking to the next
frontier to be explored and exploited. According to a post on its blog,
TPB has declared that physical objects named “physibles” are the next
area to be traded and shared across global digital smuggling routes.
TPB
defines a physible as “data objects that are able (and feasible) to
become physical.” Namely, items that can be created using 3D scanning and printing technologies, both of which have become much cheaper for you to actually own in your home. At CES
this year, MakerBot Industries introduced its latest model which is
capable of printing objects in two colors and costs under $2,000. With
the price of such devices continuing to drop, 3D printing is going to be
part of everyday life
in the near future. Where piracy is going to come in is the exchange of
the files (3D models) necessary to create these objects.
A 3D
printer is essentially a “CAD-CAM” process. You use a computer-aided
design (CAD) program to design a physical object that you want made, and
then feed it into a computer-aided machining (CAM) device for creation.
The biggest difference is that traditional CAM setups, the process is
about milling an existing piece of metal, drilling holes and using water
jets to carve the piece into the desired configuration. In 3D printing
you use extrusion to actually create what is illustrated in the CAD
file. Those CAD files are the physibles that TPB is talking about, since
they are digital they are going to be as easily transferred as an MP3
or movie is right now.
It
isn’t too far outside the realm of possibility that once 3D printing
becomes a part of everyday life, companies will begin to sell the CAD
files and the rights to be able to print proprietary items. If the
technology continues to advance at the same rate, in 10 or 20 years you
might be printing a new pair of Nikes for your child’s basketball game
right in your home (kind of like the 3D printed sneakers pictured
above). Instead of going to the mall and paying $120 for a physical pair
of shoes in a retail outlet, you will pay Nike directly on the internet
and receive the file necessary to direct your printer to create the
sneakers. Of course, companies will do their level best to create DRM on
these objects so that you can’t freely just print pair after pair of
shoes, but like all digital media it will be broken be enterprising
individuals.
TPB has already created a physibles category on its site,
allowing you to download plans to be able to print out such things as
the famous Pirate Bay Ship and a 1970 Chevy hot rod. For now it’s going
to be filled with user-created content, but in the future you can count
on it being stocked with plans for DRM-protected objects.
