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[ PRIVACY Forum ] Script of my national radio report yesterday on
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Tue Nov 5 12:19:12 2024
Date: Tue, 5 Nov 2024 09:08:42 -0800
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This is the script from my national radio tech report yesterday about
3D printing and the rather remarkable advances that have taken place
with these devices over the last couple of years. As always, there may
have been minor wording changes from this script as I presented this
report live on air.
- - -
So we talk a lot about tech problems but I thought for a change today
I'd discuss some pretty nifty tech that I don't think we've ever
really talked about in any detail before -- and that's the rather
remarkable recent developments in 3D printing.
Now of course in "Star Trek" starting really with "The Next
Generation", and even earlier on TV in an episode of the original
early 60s "Twilight Zone", there were devices that could instantly or
almost instantly create solid objects from stored data, stored
patterns. And 3D printing is actually a lot like that in significant
ways, just a whole lot slower than the sci-fi versions.
And there are many different kinds of 3D printing but there are two
that are most common in the consumer and prosumer realms. One of these
is resin printing, and this uses a liquid resin and light to create
solid objects. And I don't deal with that mainly because the resin can
be rather messy and needs to be handled quite carefully, so I'm
frankly not interested in that myself.
The other type which is probably what most people think of when they
hear the term 3D printing, uses spools of plastic filament, and the
filament is heated and melted and then deposited layer by layer to
create objects. Technically that's called FDM -- Fused Deposition
Modeling. And it's been around for quite a few years now. But
unfortunately many people who got involved with it early on were not
thrilled with the results.
And that includes me. I built this kind of 3D printer almost 10 years
ago or so, and it looked like the sort of prop in the original "Lost
in Space" TV series where Will, Dr. Smith and the Robot would find
some crazy looking derelict device and the Robot would yell "Danger,
danger do not tamper with alien equipment!", and they would anyway,
and a whole bunch of problems would result.
But part of the reason there was a lot of disappointment was that it
usually took so much time and work to keep these printers running and
to calibrate them so that prints would be created properly and not
just turn out as a tangle of filament spaghetti.
But this really has changed over the last couple of years in
particular, and there are now quite inexpensive FDM 3D printers that
have automated most if not all of the calibration and setup steps.
Tight calibration also can allow these printers to print in high
quality significantly faster than older units.
One of the leaders in this right now is Bambu Lab (that's B-A-M-B-U),
and they've got quite reasonably priced FDM 3D printers like their A1
or their A1 Combo -- the latter able to handle four colors of filament
at once. And while I wouldn't say they're as easy to use as a toaster,
they really are approaching "appliance" level automation. And even
though these are consumer machines, I've seen videos of print farms
full of A1s churning out not just fun items, but functional tools and
parts of all kinds pretty much 24/7.
And that's the key. Affordable FDM 3D printers are now available that
automatically handle so many aspects of printing that were in the past
so often show stoppers for non-experts. This includes all kinds of
possibilities for relatively easily doing a very wide variety of FDM
3D prints ranging from entertaining to prototyping to production.
So if you've ever been curious about this category of technology, or
if you looked at it or experimented with it years ago and were
disappointed, you might want to take another look at the advancements
that have been taking place, not just with the hardware but with the
associated software as well.
Yeah, they're not as fast as the replicators on the Enterprise, but
what some of these newer units ARE capable of, does give one the
feeling of sci-fi brought to reality -- and for a change in a very
positive way!
- - -
L
- - -
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein
lauren@vortex.com (https://www.vortex.com/lauren)
Lauren's Blog: https://lauren.vortex.com
Mastodon: https://mastodon.laurenweinstein.org/@lauren
Founder: Network Neutrality Squad: https://www.nnsquad.org
PRIVACY Forum: https://www.vortex.com/privacy-info
Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility
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