Tag Archives: LEGO
Top 10 Countdown: Most Popular 3D Printing Stories in June 2012
Here are the top 10 most popular stories On 3D Printing brought you in June 2012.
10. The Dutch combine 3D printing and textiles.
9. A review of 3D modeling software Tinkercad, SketchUp, and 123D.
8. People are wondering why Google sold 3D modeling business SketchUp.
7. Still popular: the Motley Fool reviews the 3D printing industry.
6. We exclusively covered 3D Systems’ Cubify at Google I/O 3D printing in San Francisco.
5. UP! 3D printer from China is a viable competitor to MakerBot and other.
4. You can be a superhero; your face 3D printed on a superhero action figure.
3. Facebook investor Peter Thiel backs 3D printing entrepreneur.
2. Why 3D printing will be more fun than LEGO thanks to Minecraft.
1. 3D printing stock are hot and up over 180%! So was this article.
Thanks for reading in June!
Peter Thiel photo by thekenyeung used under Creative Commons license.
NPR Interview: 3D Printing Without Limits, Body Parts, Sharing Culture
NPR held a special radio feature on 3D printing during their Science Friday program. Ira Flatow interviewed industry consultant Terry Wohlers, MakerBot CEO Bre Pettis, and Cornell Associate Professor Hod Lipson.
What if you needed a new toothbrush and all you had to do was hit print? What if doctors could print out transplantable organs and pastry chefs turned to a printer, not a kitchen, for their next creation? Ira Flatow and a panel of guests discuss 3D printing technology, how far it’s come and what a 3D-printed-future could look like.
Topics ranged from basic background information to detailed questions. Read the highlights below and then listen to the full radio program.
What is 3D printing? What is the MakerBot?
Terry Wohlers and Bre Pettis gave a nice overview of what 3D printing is. Here is Bre’s explanation of what the MakerBot does.
The MakerBot replicator uses one of two plastics. You can either make things in ABS plastic, which is what LEGO is made out of, or you can use PLA, which is the plastic that’s made from corn. And then you get your plastic on spools, and it kind of looks like a big spool of spaghetti.
And the spaghetti goes into the machine, and it draws a picture in plastic, and then it goes up a little bit, and layer after layer, it creates your model, and you can really create anything.
All the tools for designing things are becoming democratized. So 3D printing is getting democratized, the tools that make things are getting easier. You can use things like Tinkercad, which is free and online, and you’re off to the races and making things.
Will everyone have a 3D printer?
Comparisons were made to inkjets and microwaves. When first introduced into the market, these products were expensive and unfamiliar, but now they are common home appliances.
Even if, in the future, everyone does not have a 3D printer in the home, the experts suggested that people will have access to a 3D printer and will buy parts manufactured locally by a nearby 3D printer.
Can body parts be 3D printed?
It will happen in our lifetime. We are already 3D printing a replacement knee meniscus and have prototyped bone and organs.
Are there any limits to 3D printing?
For the first time in human history, making something complex with details that cannot be manufacturing through traditional processes is as simple as making a paperweight.
Current consumer machines are limited in size. MakerBot can print objects up to the size of a loaf of bread. But there are professional printers that can make much larger objects.
Hod Lipson’s team has a goal to print a robot, batteries included, that can walk off the printer.
The experts agreed that 3D printing will let us think about new breakthroughs in product design.
Culture of Sharing
The 3D printing community is very collaborative and are building off of each other’s successes. This allows for continuous innovation through a culture of sharing.
Via NPR.
Science museum photo by chooyutshing used under Creative Commons license.
Why 3D Printing Will Be More Fun Than LEGO: Minecraft Video
As humans, we attach more value to things we create than things created for us (See Dan Ariely’s research to understand what he calls “The Ikea Effect”).
This common psychological motivation is why personalized 3D printing will engender a new generation of toys that are not mass produced. Although toys like LEGO and Lincoln Logs let kids use building blocks to create their own structures, they are still limited to the granularity of the block.
The popularity of the game Minecraft has shown that kids are ready to go beyond centimeter-tall blocks, and want to build entire worlds. One 3D printing enthusiast has demonstrated how to export your Minecraft village and print a physical copy to play with.
In the video below, watch as he walks through his digital to 3D printed transformation.
We have reported about this before. This is just the beginning. The toy industry is soon to be turned upside down as 3D printing gains popularity.
3D Printing the Rosetta Stone for Kids Toys: Nerd Dad Triumph
Carnegie Mellon Professor Golan Levin has built the Rosetta Stone for kids toys. His Free Universal Construction Kit is a design for parts that enable interoperability between Legos, Tinkertoys, Lincoln Logs and several more popular toy brands. The catch? If you want these parts, you have to 3D print them yourself!
In what Forbes calls the “ultimate nerd dad triumph”, Levin and his former student Shawn Sims made sure these parts will fit:
Levin and Sims didn’t just make near replicas of the commercial toys, they used a measurement tool called an optical comparator to copy the toys’ dimensions to within 3 microns. And then they published those models on the Web. “Our lawyers were a bit concerned,” admits Levin, so much so that the pair initially planned to release the project anonymously.
Back in April, we highlighted the potential disruptive impact 3D printing could have on the toy industry.
With the price of toys so marked up, it’s within reason to think that kids will turn to generics or pirated designs to fill out their toy chest after parents tap out the budget at retail.
Look back at the music industry. The only way to buy music in the late 90s was to purchase the full album at retail. Then Napster and other P2P sharing software came along and allowed consumers to download individual mp3 songs, albeit pirated. When iTunes launched with individual song pricing and a more reliable service than the P2P networks, consumers flocked to the legal alternative. The retail music industry died but the digital music industry was born.
Perhaps in the next 5 years we’ll see the retail toy industry collapse and be replaced by a digital successor. The question is whether we will see a digital toy black market in the interim. In our view, that will be up to the toymakers and their willingness to disrupt their current model.
Has Levin truly liberated construction toys from working only with their own kind? Will this type of innovation improve or hurt sales and prices of popular toy brands?
See the full poster of toy compatibility at Slideshare.
The video below shows how the Free Universal Construction Kit works. Notice how the voiceover makes it feel like a proper 1980s advertisement.
Read the full story about Levin’s project at Forbes.
Will 3D Printing Disrupt the Lucrative Toy Industry?
LEGO Star Wars kits are currently selling on Amazon.com for hundreds of dollars. Even small components come with a hefty price, such as a V-wing Starfighter that measures 9″ when full assembled and costs $20.
Enter 3D printing and open-source design package LeoCAD. If kids could design their own LEGO-style building kits and print them out on their home 3D printer, why wouldn’t they? Hey, even LEGO is training kids how to design online with the LEGO Digital Designer.
With the price of toys so marked up, it’s within reason to think that kids will turn to generics or pirated designs to fill out their toy chest after parents tap out the budget at retail.
Look back at the music industry. The only way to buy music in the late 90s was to purchase the full album at retail. Then Napster and other P2P sharing software came along and allowed consumers to download individual mp3 songs, albeit pirated. When iTunes launched with individual song pricing and a more reliable service than the P2P networks, consumers flocked to the legal alternative. The retail music industry died but the digital music industry was born.
Perhaps in the next 5 years we’ll see the retail toy industry collapse and be replaced by a digital successor. The question is whether we will see a digital toy black market in the interim. In our view, that will be up to the toymakers and their willingness to disrupt their current model.
Some references are from MIT Technology Review.
