By Jason Dorrier – Dec 13, 2020
Photovoltaic…as I said, it’s real and getting more real.——Why the Price of New Solar Electricity Fell an Incredible 89% in the Last Decade
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By Jason Dorrier – Dec 13, 2020
Category Archives: Manufacturing Technology
By Jason Dorrier – Dec 13, 2020
And it’ll never rust….
3D printing company Solid Concepts announced it has manufactured the world’s first 3D Printed Metal Gun using a laser sintering process and powdered metals.
The gun, a 1911 classic design, has already handled 50 rounds of successful firing. It is composed of 33 17-4 Stainless Steel and Inconel 625 components, and decked with a Selective Laser Sintered (SLS) carbon-fiber filled nylon hand grip.
at 3ders.org
Build your own device Motorola’s (Google’s) next cell phone play
Motorola Announces “Project Ara,” a modular phone hardware platform
Motorola has announced a free open hardware platform for smartphones called “Project Ara.” The goal is to create a modular smartphone that would allow users to swap hardware components at will. Motorola says it wants to “do for hardware what the Android platform has done for software: create a vibrant third-party developer ecosystem, lower the barriers to entry, increase the pace of innovation, and substantially compress development timelines.”
looks cool seems reasonable for the large geek, nerd, techie, metro, hip, individualist, contingents out there. Making it rugged and relatively ‘duh’ proof will be a challenge.
Spiders in Space! SpiderFab, a fabulous NASA initiative
3ders.org a great 3 D printing site has this up…..TUI, a space technology development company based in Bothell, WA is currently developing “SpiderFab” to provide order-of-magnitude packing- and mass- efficiency improvements over current deployable structures and enables construction of kilometer-scale apertures within current launch vehicle capabilities.
Trusselator
SpiderFab project (credit: Tethers.com)
Go NASA!
Here is the TUI SpiderFab site
And remember this, Lego for the MIT set
Nanotechnology steps up for the big screens
Tech Radar UK blog/magazine: The future of touchscreens revealed: bigger, cheaper, bendier
IN DEPTH Silver is becoming the gold standard for touchscreen technology
The mesh of tiny silver nanowires, head on and at an angle (very much magnified)
Because it’s flexible it can be roll to roll printed and the silver nanowire ink can be printed to final patern which will enable rapid cost reduction and new options. Cool stuff.
After the plastic has been sprayed with the nanowires and dried in an oven, the machine rolls it up again
Technology continues to advance on all fronts
Servo technology turns press design upside down
A view inside the press showing two of the connecting rods that pull down the press slide
Read more: The Engineer: Servo technology turns press design upside down
Better, Cheaper, Faster, More Efficient, More Capable….
Flex and Bend, Unbreakable cell phones on the horizon + more
@ TechRadar:IN DEPTH Will pliable displays ever take off? :Want to know when your phone will become your flexible friend?
Good survey of the oncoming tech…
3D printing antennas, is seen replacing conventional tech in production
According to Optomec, Aerosol Jet printing utilizes aerodynamic focusing to precisely deposit nanomaterials to produce fine feature circuitry and embedded components without the use of masks or patterns. The resulting functional electronics can have line widths and pattern features ranging from 10’s of microns to centimeters.
Read more at: http://www.3ders.org/articles/20130531-optomec-is-3d-printing-antennas.html
The combination of 3D printing and Materials Technology, particularly the ‘nanoscale’ materials or the materials we now understand at atomic scale, is changing the world more quickly than some see. It is not always obvious because in the end the devices are not that different than what came before, just better, smaller, longer lasting, stronger, etc. over a relatively short time it is amazing what small increments of change, multiplied by thousands of applications and dozens of iterations, can build up to.
Multi material 3D printing // The Engineer
Kinda creepy actually.
…multi-material 3D printing aims to address inefficiencies by reducing the number of manufacturing steps for one object. Compared with single material 3D printing, it allows a functional product to be created with different properties without the need to bring together components. It increases speed to market by allowing organisations to prototype increasingly complex parts and reduces waste products by using exactly the right amount of material required.
3rd Power Law, 0 Complexity premium, working memes for 3D Printing
A 3-D printed table … with holes and all. Photo: rosemarybeetle / Flickr
WIRED http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/05/an-insiders-view-of-the-hype-and-realities-of-3-d-printing/
3-D printing is indeed an important fabrication technology, because it has the marvelous ability to make anything regardless of the complexity of the form.
BUT
Everything from cost and time to amount of material increases exponentially: specifically, to the third power. So if we want something twice as big, it will cost 8 times as much and take 8 times as long to print. If we want something three times as big, it will cost about 27 times more and takes 27 times longer to print. And so on.
Love simplifying memes, these are two great ones that help the mind focus on the issues involved when ‘discussions’ dealing with potentials are taking place.
Also in the article:
The reminder that these are not replicators, not yet anyway.
AND
That many of the technologies enabling 3D printing are enabling CNC machining, laser-cutting, robotics and more, at DIY / hobbyist scale.
This World and Others 