What Would You Do With a 3D Printer?

Most people probably aren't aware that these things exist. If you're not a tech-person, I'd still encourage you to try reading through this post because sprinkled in it are several little tidbits you might find interesting (or not...feel free to leave a comment discussing it...)

Generally speaking (from the perspective of the home market) the most familiar printing technology takes paper in a tray and deposits or layers some form of ink or plastic onto the paper to form images and words. Think laser printers and inkjet printers.

A second "printing" technology (using the term loosely) is used with CNC machines; most often today associated with Computer Aided Design, a computer creates a design that is then exported to devices that automate a series of actions on a material to produce an end product. For example, you create a cool logo and sent it to the CNC machine with a piece of wood which then uses a router to create the logo in the block of wood. On TV I've seen laser engravers and cutters that slice pieces of metal into components of motorcycles and such. The technology is actually far older than implied here but it wasn't until minicomputers became affordable that the automation of building tools became cheap enough and integrated enough that, say, your average high school shop could afford to integrate CNC-type devices into their computer aided design courses.

The third printing technology limping its way onto the scene is 3D printing. Instead of using inks or toner and paper, 3D printers use a polymer (plastic) goo that is extruded...pushed...through a grill of some sort and solidified using lasers or heat or some other technique and then builds, layer by layer, slice by slice, an object or component.

There are commercial 3D printers like those from ObJect. They even have a "desktop" printer called the Alaris 30. The drawback? You need $40,000 to get one. Ouch.

Why would someone get one? For the most part, the cost of getting one of these babies means they're limited to businesses that manufacture things so they can create mockups and product models for the most part.

The high price tag and sheer "cool factor" means that there is a growing homebrew market of people creating these things in their garages, like the RepRap made out of Erector Set parts. It's not as streamlined or as accurate as the printers that cost as much as a house, but still, cool stuff.

There's even a guy using a home-made 3D printer ("Fabber", for Fabricator) to create crazy 3D candy using sugar. You can see pictures of the CandyFab here and the article on the project is found here.

There's a Fab@Home wiki project that is dedicated to homebrewers working on making their own home-made 3D fabricators (printers).

The question is, what will happen when or if these things come to the home?

There is already work being done to retrofit inkjet printers so that instead of ink, you can print circuits, referred to as Printable Circuit Boards. Why would you want to do that? Because you can print things like cellphones. Yes, paper cellphones. You print it, fold it, use it, and when it wears out, you throw it away (just what we need...the ultimate in customer convenience trumping environmental waste...). Advances in flexible conductors and materials allow printing displays, ID systems, batteries, muscles...all sorts of neat things. Unfortunately these advances are so niche that I doubt you're going to see them in the home until there's a kind of convergence in the technology (and the price barrier is reduced substantially).

But none of these is quite like 3D Fabbing. Creating your own three dimensional sculptures? Or parts that you can assemble like a model, or your own radio control car? There is definitely a market for this type of device...imagine purchasing something from Amazon and instead of shipping it, you sit for half an hour and it pops out of your printer next to you.

My thought is that if homes get cheap 3D fabricating technology you're going to have a lot of people making pornographic scenes and sculptures for giggles. It fits...advances that made today's modern computer and graphics technology, as well as a significant driver in getting the Internet into the home, were video games and pornography (another article on this is here). I've heard it said that if Star Trek's Holodeck technology were to become reality it would be the end of civilization...no one would want reality when they can have indistinguishable virtual reality in which to, um...yeah.

What do you think? What would you do with a fabber/printer that creates 3D objects, even if it were limited to something like making objects out of sugar or plastic only, or couldn't be a precise high-resolution printer and couldn't create complex machines (can't print a computer out...but you could print parts out and assemble them)?