Category Archives: News
Top 3D Printing News Last Week: Hacking Keys, 3D Scanning, Patents, Robots, and More
3D Printing News
A roundup of the top 3D printing news from August 5 to August 11:
Monday, August 5
Tuesday, August 6
Thursday, August 8
Friday, August 9
Sunday, August 11
3D Printed Robot Moves Like an Inch Worm on Power Lines
3D Printed Robot Design Reduces Costs
Nick Morozovsky is a mechanical engineering graduate student at University of California San Diego, where he has designed a robot he calls SkySweeper that can traverse power lines to search for damages in the wire. The robot is a novel design because it only has a motor at the joint, and inexpensive because it uses off-the-shelf electronics in combination with 3D printed plastic parts. This makes Morozovsky’s robot an immediate competitor in the space.
“Current line inspection robots are large, complex, and expensive. Utility companies may also use manned or unmanned helicopters equipped with infrared imaging to inspect lines,” said Morozovsky in an interview with his school. “This is much simpler.”
Morozovsky plans to introduce the robot at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems in Tokyo in November, as part of a paper titled “A Low Degrees of Freedom, Dynamic High Wire Robot.”
The SkySweeper is competing in the Road to Maker Faire Challenge to win $2,500 to pay for expenses for the World Maker Faire in New York in September. If you like this robot, go vote for Skysweeper until August 13 at http://review.wizehive.com/
3D Scanning for 3D Printing: How Kickstarter is Changing the Game
3D Scanning Makes 3D Printing Possible
Last week, two 3D scanning projects were launched on Kickstarter, looking to raise crowdfunding.
- Fuel3D, which bills itself as “a handheld 3D scanner for less than $1000″ rocketed past its target of $75,000 and is now over $200,000 raised with 23 days to go.
- Volumental’s 3D Scan-to-Print Web App, on the other hand, is still short of its $20,000 goal (they’ve raised about $12,000 so far).
Let’s take a deeper look.
First, why is 3D scanning important?
While the popularity around 3D printing continues to rise, sourcing good designs to print remains a challenge. Sure, you can buy a MakerBot 3D printer and download some 3D designs from Thingiverse, but what if you wanted to capture something in your home or office? That’s where 3D scanning technology comes in.
New entrants to 3D scanning
On the high end, there is expensive software and equipment used by professionals. Fuel3D is directly competing in this area of the market with a much more affordable solution.
Hardware innovation blog HackThings wrote, “Fuel3D is a handheld 3D scanner that’s capable of capturing extremely high resolution mesh (250 microns) and color information of objects in 3D, for around $1000. According to the creators, that’s an order of magnitude less than today’s commercial solutions of comparable resolution.”
On the low end, there is free software such as Autodesk 123D Catch. And MakerBot has announced plans for real-world copy and paste technology. This is the area that Volumental is competing. The web-based software connects to a depth camera, like a Kinect, and builds a model on the fly.
HackThings wrote about this solution, “It works as a combination of inexpensive sensor hardware and sophisticated cloud-based software. Log in to their web service, plug in a $300 depth sensor via USB, walk around the object you want to scan, wait for processing and then click “print” to get a clone either via an online printing service or on your own 3D printer.”
Kickstarter campaigns comparison
It might seem surprising that the higher priced solution has raised more money to date on Kickstarter, but this side-by-side comparison gives us some insight into the mentality of crowdfunding. Supporters don’t want to fund things that are perceived to be free; instead, they want to pledge to campaigns that are changing the market. Fuel3D is reducing the cost of high end 3D scanners by an order of magnitude, while Volumental is competing with free.
If you want to back either campaign, or both, here are videos and links to each project.
Fuel3D: A handheld 3D scanner for less than $1000
The 3D Scan-to-Print Web App by Volumental
MIT Students Use 3D Printing to Duplicate Secure Schlage Keys
“Pirating keys is becoming like pirating movies.” — MIT Student David Lawrence
Two students at MIT have demonstrated how 3D printing can be used to duplicate some of the most secure keys in the industry. David Lawrence, 20, and Eric Van Albert, 21, demonstrated their technique in a presentation at security industry conference Defcon 21 in Las Vegas this past weekend.
The team used a flatbed scanner in combination with a 3D model template to develop an exact digital copy of a high security Schlage Primus key. This file, they explained, can be 3D printed in a material durable enough to open locks, for example, titanium from i.Materialise.
“If we show that mechanical locks are vulnerable to key duplication just by having a handful of numbers you can download off the internet, hopefully they ‘ll be phased out more quickly… Either that or make 3D printers illegal,” said Van Albert in an interview with Forbes.
Lawrence added, “In the past if you wanted a Primus key, you had to go through Schlage. Now you just need the information contained in the key, and somewhere to 3D-print it. You can take a high security ‘non-duplicatable’ key and basically take it to a virtual hardware store to get it copied.”
Read their full interview at Forbes.
Lawrence has also made available the 3D model templates on his website.
3D Printing Brings Classic Patents Back to Life
Finding Inspiration at the U.S. PTO
If you are looking for novel designs that can be 3D printed, New York-based intellectual property lawyer Martin Galese has lots of ideas, and none of them are his own.
Mr. Galese instead has a very creative approach for sourcing his designs; he finds them in detailed drawings from expired patents from the U.S. PTO.
Here, for example, is a cutting edge watch stand concept from 1979, U.S. Pat. No. 4,293,953, which claims, ”an improved watch stand so that a wrist watch can serve as a night table clock when no being worn on a wrist.”
And here is a self-measuring bottle from U.S. Pat. No. 836,466, dated 1906. It’s incredible that the original designer developed this concept without the support of CAD software, and now it can be brought to life through 3D printing.
Mr. Galese maintains the designs on his blog “Patent-able” and as a collection on Thingiverse.
His work was recently featured in the New York Times blog, including a chopstick holder from the 1960s and a portable chess set from the 1940s. He told the New York Times, “If you look at the figures in older patents, the 19th century patents are really beautiful. They’re really works of art.”
