3D models for shopping online

If you're buying something online, you know what might help? A digital 3D model file, to scale. That way, if you have questions about the dimensions of the object, you can measure it any way you like, inside the computer, as if you had the physical item with you, more or less. Or if you prefer physical objects to check, say, whether a particular toaster will sit on your kitchen bench easily (and you have access to a 3D printer) you could print out a model to test the fit in real space. I think this might easily be a feature of online shopping in the future, at least for some items.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Obviously it wouldn't work for clothes.
PPS - And a rough paper cutout model would be more accessible for most people.

3D printing out-of-production materials

Perhaps one of the big advantages for 3D printing technology as it becomes more common will be the ability to reproduce old things - materials and objects that have been destroyed or are no longer in production. For example, we had some yellow textured glass in our patio in the home where I grew up. About two decades after the house was built, someone threw a rock through two panels of that glass. We were unable to find an exact replacement and instead settled for a pretty close match. With more advanced manufacturing technology, we might have been able to have an exact match produced fairly easily. The same would go for tiles.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - For books produced these days, "out of print" is an absurd notion.
PPS - When that happens to physical objects, too, the world will quietly change again.

How 3D-printed toys will work

I have a feeling that domestic 3D printing is going to be a real breaking change to the toy industry. Rather than having mountains of plastic rubbish in the house that gets used for a few weeks, broken and discarded, a home 3D printing system (with plastic recycling) can print off any toy you like, then take it back to be turned into something new or just restored if it was particularly loved. The toys that pile up in the corners of the room and are never used any more can be shovelled into the recycler to be made into new toys when the need arises.

So how will the toy industry adapt? Well, one of the most obvious steps is to sell toy designs for 3D printers. Rather than printing Turtle Man 07b from some knock-off download, kids will value having genuine toy designs from the original source. Yes, it will matter to them. Think back to your own childhood and try to remember if it mattered that the label on your clothes was genuine, that you owned a real Nintendo console or even that you ate brand-name cereal for breakfast. It matters to kids.

Selling printers and branded feedstock might matter, though possibly not as much. Particularly sinister companies might sell printers that are designed to sit and monitor the TV, only unlocking or downloading exclusive printer models if it sees the right ads. Basically, you have to watch our cartoon and all the ads if you want the cool new spaceship model for the week.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It's going to be a different world.
PPS - But it's probably not going to be here for a while.

The problems 3D printing doesn't solve

If 3D printing successfully usurped every kind of manufacturing at every level what would the world look like? What tasks would take on greater importance? Well, even if you can just make anything in your own home in short order, you still need to know you're making the right thing, so you need the skill of requirements analysis. What job is this piece supposed to perform, and is it fit for purpose before I go and manufacture it? You also need the skills to install or assemble and maintain what you manufacture. How do you use what you've made? That's not included in manufacturing. Finally, if you can't find the exact ready-made design to fit your needs, you need the skills to produce it from the ground up, including the materials knowledge to decide from what it should be made. Is this a job for ceramics, or plastics, metals or something else?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - In short, even ubiquitous, all-encompassing 3D printing won't solve all our problems.
PPS - As with most technologies, it just shifts the problems higher, which can still be a good thing.

3D paper printing

Perhaps affordable home 3D printing will come from paper pulp. Feed your 3D printer from your paper shredder with a little glue and some inkjet colour cartridges and you might be able to build a really cheap-to-run 3D colour printer. It would be like automated paper mache, so not actually strong or detailed, but good enough for simple decorative models and disposable toys.

The advantages would be that the machine can run on paper waste, common household glue and ordinary inkjet cartridges, all readily available and cheap. That's assuming the whole idea works, of course.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - And is worthwhile.
PPS - It's probably a bit too narrow a niche to be useful.

Christmas light attachments

Every year, when we put up Christmas lights, we struggle to find a good way to attach them to bricks. Usually we use tac - sticky blobs of goop designed for temporary attachments - and every year they fall down. Tape doesn't stick long enough either. What I'd like to be able to do is 3D-print some custom brackets that snap onto my brickwork somehow and allow me to thread the light cables through. That way they should stay put, the lights work properly, there's no gunk on my bricks afterwards and I can reuse them next year. If I had the modelling software, I could probably order them straight from Shapeways or something.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - But then again, for the sake of easy attachment, it might be too expensive.
PPS - I haven't really looked into it.

Printing the perfect tiles

When we tiled our lounge, kitchen and dining rooms recently, there was a lot of cutting to do around the fiddly corners, and a lot of waste, too. That got me thinking: with the right precise measurements, you could "print" exactly the right tiles for a space, custom-made to fit perfectly. Or maybe you could use a robot that trundles around the room extruding and baking ceramics in specified shapes in-place. Either way, it should be possible to fit tiles perfectly to a floor with zero waste. The only question is whether it would be more economical that way.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I guess it depends how much more expensive custom-shaped tiles are.
PPS - And whether you accidentally break any.

Flexible factories

Once 3D printers become standard home appliances, what will be the needs filled by old-style factories? Well, for one thing, we'll need someone to produce all our 3D printers, so there's that. There will also be other things home printers can't do, like milled metal parts or electronics. And with home 3D printers commonplace, consumer demands could shift quickly. The world of tomorrow needs factories that can take any complicated design, including electronic components, metals, plastics, rubber, foam, glass, ceramics and countless other material needs, and produce the finished product on demand, whether you need a thousand of them or only one. Those factories need to be flexible enough to produce cars today, rubber duckies tomorrow and telephones the next day without skipping a beat. It will probably have a different name than "3D printing" by that point.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Probably something like "automated industrial manufacturing".
PPS - Or something cooler-sounding.

3D printing and design

We can easily keep improving on the technology behind 3D printing, with faster techniques, cheaper materials and so on, and websites like Thingiverse will be critical to spread printable designs so that anyone can make at home whatever they want. However, after 3D printers become affordable household appliances and the materials are cheap enough to use on a whim, the biggest barrier will be designing the thing you need to print. So if you really want everyone to get into creating 3D objects, you need great 3D modelling software, available for free and very easy to use.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Or a vast library of snap-together generic printable parts.
PPS - Like LEGO.

LEGO and 3D printers

I wonder if the LEGO company will collapse or adapt when we all have cheap, reliable 3D printers on our desks. After all, at that point it will become trivial to print new LEGO-compatible blocks from freely-downloadable templates. Charging lots for models and pieces will be much less sustainable as a business model in that world, and lots of people are willing to create their own designs and distribute them for free, too. The advantages I can see genuine LEGO retaining in that world are:

• Durability. Home-printed blocks are likely to be a little rougher and a little weaker than the moulded ones from LEGO.
• Colour. The home-printed blocks will probably be all the same shade of milky-white.
• Creativity. As long as LEGO has designers working on interesting new models, they'll probably still be able to sell sets.
• Electronics. 3D printers will only be producing plastic, which means electronic sets like Mindstorms will still have the vital electronic controller pieces and wired bits that crafty bricksters need for their more advanced projects.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - They've already lost a court case about producing LEGO-compatible bricks.
PPS - I think the only illegal thing would be distributing trademarked designs.

RepRap home 3D printing

I get carried away when I watch videos and read articles about 3D printing, and often fantasize about having my own 3D printer at home. Today I heard about the RepRap project, which aims to make a 3D printer that can print most of its own replacement parts, thereby allowing you to print printers. One of the first things that came to mind was updates.

With software, we have gotten used to the download-and-install process for handling updates, but with an ongoing hardware project, things get more complicated. Since RepRap printers make their own replacement parts and represent an ongoing project too, it would be possible to have them download updated specs from the internet and print out the new parts, but you would have to know how to attach them yourself. That's a bit more trouble than software patching.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm not sure exactly what percentage of its own parts a RepRap can print.
PPS - If it's just the plastic bits holding the metal together, it's not much.

3D printing as a service

Every time I see news about 3D printing, I get briefly interested. I would like to have figurines printed of, say, my City of Heroes avatars. I probably won't have 3D printing equipment in my home any time soon, and that's fine, but what if there was a shop I could go to with a 3D model on USB and have it printed for a few dollars?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I expect it would be available as an online service first.
PPS - But I also don't think there's much demand for it yet.

Potential home 3D printing applications

Just a few thoughts on practical home applications for 3D printing:

• Model building (ie planes, ships and cars)
• Miniature figurines (ie Warhammer)
• Board game pieces (eg chess, Monopoly)
• Artificial potplants
• Temporary replacement parts for home plumbing
• Single-use cutting boards
• Constructing extra plates, cups and utensils for entertaining
• Home jewellery making
• Download-and-print phone shells
• Toy making
• Perfect-fit glasses frames
• Extra storage containers

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The equipment must get cheaper first, though.
PPS - I think that's just a matter of time.

Print me a house

This is fascinating and brilliant to me. Robots to build houses, inspired by inkjet printers. I'm intrigued by it because I've been thinking a lot recently about 3D printing and rapid prototyping technology and how it could be implemented cheaply and effectively for small objects at home. It never occurred to me that it might work for building very large structures too.

Taking the concept further, how about bigger buildings created this way? Skyscrapers, ships, roads, power plants. We could send a robot like this to the moon to build a fully functional permanent installation ready for astronauts to inhabit. That last one, though, would probably be trumped by simpler designs like inflatable geodesic domes.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - But if we want to live there, we'll want sturdier structures.
PPS - And we don't want to pay bricklayers to wear spacesuits.