AMAZING STUFF!! "3-D printers" and organic electronics...

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A GADGET GEEK’S DREAM COME TRUE: PUNCH ‘PRINT’ FOR ANYTHING YOU WANT
By David Pescovitz
Small Times Columnist

July 25, 2003 – Imagine your kitchen blender conks out the day you’re hosting a large cocktail party. You search an online catalog, decide on a model, and click the “buy” button. But instead of waiting three days for the appliance to be shipped to your door, a new kind of printer on your desk springs into action. Layer by layer, the miraculous machine squirts out various materials to form the chassis, the electronics, the motors – literally building the blender for you from the bottom up in a matter of hours.
Call it desktop manufacturing. For gadget geeks in need of instant gratification, it’s a miracle. For designers deep in the iterative prototyping process, it’s a revolution in product development. And thanks to small tech, it’s becoming a reality.

University of California, Berkeley engineering professor John Canny and his colleagues are building such a printer. They call the technology “polymer mechatronics” or, more simply, flexonics. The revolutionary approach to desktop manufacturing is enabled by recent advances in 3-D printers, organic electronics and polymer actuators.

Three-dimensional printers are commonly used to make prototypes of new product designs. For example, a designer may load a digital design into a Fused Deposition Modeling machine. The FDM then extrudes thin beads of ABS plastic in .01-inch layers, until you have a completed passive functional part or device. While the printers are dropping in price, the leap from producing passive to active devices is monumental. That’s where organic electronics come into play.

Organic electronics were born in the 1970s when researchers discovered that chemically doping organic polymers, or plastics, increases their electrical conductivity. Since then, researchers have worked to develop the most effective and inexpensive organic compounds that can be patterned on flexible substrates to create useful circuits. In the private sector, companies ranging from Bell Labs to IBM to UK startup Plastic Logic are also working to develop quality organic transistors that are fabricated far more cheaply than silicon circuits. Organic semiconductors will most likely first hit the market in the form of inexpensive radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags and flexible display screens.

Canny’s co-investigator in Berkeley’s flexonics effort, Vivek Subramanian, is one of many researchers harnessing the microfluidic precision of inkjet printing technology to deposit organic semiconductors in desired patterns. The key ingredient in Subramanian’s organic circuits is “liquid gold.” Synthesized in his laboratory, liquid gold consists of gold nanocrystals that are only 20 atoms across and melt at 100 degrees Celsius, 10 times lower than normal.

The gold nanocrystals are encapsulated in an organic shell of an alkanethiol (an organic molecule containing carbon, hydrogen and sulphur) and dissolved in ink. As the circuit is printed on plastic, paper or cloth using inkjet technology, the organic encapsulant is burned off, leaving the gold as a high-quality conductor.

Combining Subramanian’s circuit printing technology with a 3-D printer enables electronics to be embedded within the housing of the device being printed. The chassis and the electronics are fabricated as one single structure.

The next step is to add the actuators that provide electromechanical capabilities to the devices – for instance, a mechanism that causes the blender’s blades to spin when switched on. For this, Canny plans to fill inkjet cartridges with electroactive polymers that contract when zapped with a voltage, enabling components to flex in desired directions. Additionally, the polymers generate a voltage when compressed, so buttons and switches can also be embedded within the printed devices.

While Subramanian hones his organic semiconductors, Canny and his graduate student Jeremy Risner are designing a “vocabulary” of mechanical components – joints, grippers, transmission systems – suited for the 3-D printing process.

Flexonics is still in its infancy, but the technology’s potential raises questions about what it will mean to be a consumer in an era of devices-on-demand. You’d no longer pay for a product, Canny says, you’d pay for plans. I look forward then to a generation of do-it-yourself industrial designers, tinkerers who tweak commercial product designs to improve and customize them. How will I access the fruits of their labor? Peer-to-peer plan networks, of course, where designs for blenders and mobile phones and TV remote controls are swapped like so many MP3s.

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Sigh, I thought this was my idea. I was gonna photocopy automobiles and make a killing by eliminating the manufacturing...

Sigh.

Oh well, I shall continue my efforts to clone Angelina Jolie.

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Heeeheeheehee! Very Happy

Nice.

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She's being... difficult.

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Now dangit, someone stole my idea.....and the only one I told was Mr. Gates...he sold it I bet....@!$&#
Never answer the million dollar question in the microsoft interview...its all a scam.

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Bill Joy, cofounder and Chief Scientist of Sun Microsystems, was cochair of the presidential commission on the future of IT research, and is coauthor of The Java Language Specification. His essay Why The Future Doesn't Need Us is an influential classic (long but informative and fascinating).

In it he wrote:

"The 21st-century technologies - genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics (GNR) - are so powerful that they can spawn whole new classes of accidents and abuses. Most dangerously, for the first time, these accidents and abuses are widely within the reach of individuals or small groups. They will not require large facilities or rare raw materials. Knowledge alone will enable the use of them.
...
Given the incredible power of these new technologies, shouldn't we be asking how we can best coexist with them? And if our own extinction is a likely, or even possible, outcome of our technological development, shouldn't we proceed with great caution?
...
As Thoreau said, "We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us"; and this is what we must fight, in our time. The question is, indeed, Which is to be master? Will we survive our technologies?"

Flexonics is very similar to the genetics/nano/robotics problem. When anyone with determination can design a custom virus on their home computer, and for $50,000 create that virus using a machine in their closet ... how safe will we all be?

Is Flexonics really something that every person should have access to?

Or should we also be studying how to make people's lives fulfilling and happy, so these powerful tools don't become engines of destruction?

Just thinking and wondering...

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cost of 3-D printer (available in 2025): $5,000,000
being able to print sex toys in the privacy of your own home: priceless

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about a year ago i went to a fascinating demo of a sculpture programme on computer at Loughborough Uni - the operator used as sort of joystick and could change the material properties as she worked - so it could be soft and malleable to work one part and hard so that chisels had to be used in another - it could be extruded - all sorts, The finished result was put on cd and created by a machine rather like the one described earlier, that built it up layer by layer. It could create intricate interlocked 3d forms, shape within shape like Welsh love spoons. Amazing!

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AMAZING STUFF!! "3-D printers" and organic electronics...

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