The amazing folks in the Tangible Media Group at MIT Media Lab have shared their research with creating the software to produce small hairs or Cilia from 150 to 50 micrometers to do things such as move, sense, adhere, or be aesthetically pleasing.
Looking into the Nature, hair has numerous functions such as to provide warmth, adhesion, locomotion, sensing, a sense of touch, as well as it’s well known aesthetic qualities. This work presents a computational method of 3D printing hair structures. It allows us to design and generate hair geometry at 50 micrometer resolution and assign various functionalities to the hair. The ability to fabricate customized hair structures enables us to create super fine surface texture; mechanical adhesion property; new passive actuators and touch sensors on a 3D printed artifact. We also present several applications to show how the 3D-printed hair can be used for designing everyday interactive objects.
Printing Your Own Hair
If you want to use your FDM printer to try out some hair-powered prints see the below projects.
Droolopp Tutorial Drooloop flowers are produced by purposefully printing out in the air and taking advantage of sagging filament as an aesthetic feature versus the normal dreaded print failure. Read the tutorial and try out some flowers for your loved one that will never die, create fascinating Jellyfish and in a little different technique create a bottle brush!
Liz Arum created this model to demonstrate, in a tangible way, how the core abstract math model can be clearly communicated. Read more about this model, it’s history, and how you can create your own.
ALFRED CLEBSCH Rudolf Friedrich Alfred Clebsch (19 January 1833—7 November 1872) was a German mathematician who worked with algebraic geometry and invariant theory. He collaborated with Paul Gordan on Clebsch—Gordan coefficients for spherical harmonics, which are now widely used in quantum mechanics.The Clebsch diagonal cubic surface, or Klein’s icosahedral cubic surface is a cubic surface is a well known form, all of whose 27 exceptional lines can be defined over the real numbers.
The production of food by machines is a fact of modern food production, from pasta, to Twinkies, to canned foods, raw ingredients are processed in factories all over the world. The only problem is each piece of food is identical, no customization or personalization is possible. Enter 3D Printing. If 3D Printing is considered being in infancy, then printing food is still in the womb. We now have so many tools at our disposal, open-source or not that it’s possible to print in sugar, chocolate, pasta, and more, just by replacing the standard toolhead with one that extrudes softer ingredient materials. Below are just a few of the projects that are growing in the food printing space with large photos to illustrate the yumminess of the prints…and failures! While it can seem like just a fun way to eat sweets on the surface, 3d printing food has ramifications that could help feed the worlds poor, provide elderly with nutrient-rich foods, or provide astronauts in space with a little more variety in a confined space than pouches of powder.
Follow each link below to learn more about buying or making your own 3D Food Printer!
Digital Food | Columbia Engineering
The above video shows what the folks at Columbia University in NYC’s School of Engineering, under the direction of Mechanical Engineering Professor Hod Lipson think about printing food, even going as far as creating a machine that also cooks the food after printing it. Make sure to watch the behind the scenes video for more!
CandyFab
The first 3D printer I ever saw was actually a machine designed to create models from sugar. It used heated air to fuse a sugar bed layer into wondrous geometric shapes. It ultimately was not mass manufactured but at a time when desktop 3d printing machines were coming online in 2009, it was surely a creative influence on many. Read more about the CandyFab machine!
PancakeBot
What’s not to love about Pancake bot? What started as a fun family Maker Faire project made out of Legos has turned into a full-fledge product that dispenses pancake batter in shapes that you load into their custom made software.
PrintrBot Printrbot, a well-respected 3d printer company, created a commercial paste extrusion system that can be added to their printers. This innovation has also lead to the below product collaborations, the Bocusini, and the Magic Candy Factory.
Bocusini Bocusini calls itself “…the world’s first Plug & Play Food Printing System” and hosts a myriad of recipes an ingredients in this turnkey system that comes with all the hardware and software you need to create your own edible art!
The Magic Candy Factory is indeed a magical place where people can not only buy candy but design and create their own custom piece of candy right in the store.
Discovery Extruder The Discovery Extruder is a very refined DIY paste extrusion system that can be retrofitted into any 3d printer, even as a second extruder. While is can indeed extrude exotic materials like silicone, it can also extrude materials like Nutella!
Ultimaker Syringe Extruder This printable open-source design gives you a paste extruder for things like nutella, peanut butter and chocolate. Like all of Joris’ designs it has a unique solution, it uses the filament itself as a cable to pull the stopper down and extrude whatever you load into the syringe.
Apparently, even a scale model of the world’s tallest skyscraper BURJ KHALIFA can be a tricky, challenging piece to fit into the build envelope of a desktop 3D printer.
Alan Kuhta’s excellent four-part version does an excellent job delivering the feel of the original building with a level of detail that desktop printers can comfortably reflect.
Hope he keeps his design file handy for this — in case this forever a work-in-progress supertall skyscraper again lengthens the crown to thwart competition from any other supertall skyscraper projects in the works!
Daniel Norée created this threaded set screw while testing the process of using co-polyester filament for making functional parts. Check out the video above for a few of his observations about his experience with ColorFabb nGen.
Printing in 3 dimensions
Non-planar FDM (Fused Deposition Modeling) describes a printing process where layers are not deposited in uniform layers but rather in smooth, curved layers that allow creating smooth curved surfaces or features instead of the characteristic start-stepping from current FDM processes. Read more about the author’s tests for smooth, curved-surfaces, strength of such parts, structured surfaces and his hands-on tests that you can try for yourself. His method involves post-processing gcode via Slic3r. (Read Full Article via Hackaday)
We’ve seen experiments like this before from Joris who also post-processed gcode to produce beautiful structures and cups with curved tops. See his uploads to YouMagine and a sample video of one of these pieces being printed below.
Sometimes you don’t need anything that fancy out of your printer to produce what your really need in the moment. ApacheXMD started with a length of vinyl gutter downspout and two mirrors. By printing this single printed part twice: a hardy periscope! Want one that is (much) longer? Cut the downspout to taste (and for what you can carry without falling over).
This is a periscope made out of two printed parts, a vinyl downspout from the hardware store, and two mirrors from the craft store. Print 2 copies of the included .stl file… It’s up to you how long of a periscope you want to make….”
CandyFab
PancakeBot
PrintrBot
