Hasta La Gadget!

3D printers are a dime-a-dozen these days, but every so often something special comes along. Like this thing: an industrial printer made by Arburg that can create products containing both hard and soft parts at the same time.

Read more…

We’ve been 3D printing in metal, gold, and even sugar for years now—so it seems only natural that we’d also be able to print in glow-in-the-dark plastic. This week, MakerBot announced a limited-edition run of PLA filament that glows in the dark, just in time for Halloween.

Read more…

Earlier this year word got out that NASA is funding mechanical engineer Anjan Contractor to develop a food printer, which the space agency hopes can be used to feed astronauts during long distance space travel, such as on a trip to Mars. At this month’s SXSW Eco Anjan showed off a prototype of his printer making simple and tiny approximations of pizza.

According to Texas news channel KXAN, the printer uses cartridges containing powdered ingredients that can be kept for years. I’m not sure how the powdered ingredients turn into liquid, but in the video below you can see the printer piling cheese and tomato sauce over a layer of dough. The heated plate adds the finishing touch to the cutting edge pizza. The prototype can make one of this… pizza-ish thing in 12 minutes. Skip to 0:46 in the video below to see the printer at work:

Contractor and his company have yet to earn the approval of the FDA, so it might be a while before Dominos starts offering instant in-home delivery from these things.

[via KXAN via WebProNews & Popular Science]

A couple of months ago we saw a 3D printer that prints in full color by breaking a 3D model into very thin slices, printing each slice on separate sheets of paper then cutting the slices out of the paper and gluing them together. Haddock Inventions’ Looking Glass prints are made using a similar process, but the company chooses to keep the slices stuck to the surface they were printed on. The resulting product appears frozen in mid-air.

As with many 3D printed objects, a Looking Glass print starts its life as a 3D file, a model. But instead of being printed layer by layer, the model is printed slice per slice on 0.3mm thick lucite sheets using an inkjet printer. But simply stacking those sheets wouldn’t give you a Looking Glass print. Light will refract as it passes through the air between the sheets and as you stack more slices the image only becomes blurred. To counteract this, Haddock Inventions pump silicon oil to the stack of slices to reduce the refraction.

The main advantage of Looking Glass over 3D printing is that it takes less than an hour to make a print, whereas it would take considerably longer with a 3D printer. Another perk of Looking Glass that 3D printed objects don’t have is the one I mentioned earlier: regardless of the size and height of the object you’re printing, it will remain frozen and fixed. In contrast, certain objects – whether because they’re too large or have a high center of mass – need to be 3D printed as separate parts then assembled afterwards.

You can order a Looking Glass print right now for $100 (USD), but why would you want one? Speaking with Fast Co. Design, Shawn Frayne of Haddock Inventions claims that “Purely visually, I think Looking Glass sort of crushes–it will crush–3-D object printing.” That’s debatable, to say the least.

If they can make it so you can remove and replace slices at will, Looking Glass prints may be helpful to people who need its form factor. Perhaps then it can be used to make really useful things like a 3D CT scan,  a tangible multilevel architectural blueprint, a 3D exploded diagram of the parts of an object and other things that people would want to zoom in and zoom out of. As it is, Looking Glass is an interesting medium of expression and preservation – a hybrid of a picture and a figurine.

[via Looking Glass Factory via Fast Co. Design]

There are many reasons the displays in all of your devices are as flat as a pancake, including the simple fact that curves result in distorted images that are hard to correct. But taking a design cue from nature, researchers at Disney have created a curved display that manages to avoid warping altogether.

Read more…