3D Printing News

A roundup of the top 3D printing news from July 8 to July 14:

Monday, July 8

• 3D Printed Batteries Showcased as Future Energy Solution

Tuesday, July 9

• 3D Printed Spider is So Life-Like It’s Scary (Video)
• 3D Printing Startup Mixee Labs Launches Customizable 3D Printed Cufflinks

Wednesday, July 10

• MakerBot and Stratasys Take Center Stage at the Inside 3D Printing Chicago Keynote
• 3D Printing Sparks Innovations in Art – MGX by Materialise at Inside 3D Printing Chicago
• Microsoft Confirms Plans to Take 3D Printing to the Masses at Inside 3D Printing Chicago
• Top Photos from Inside 3D Printing Chicago Conference Day 1

Thursday, July 11

• Canadian Actress Ellen Page Tweets “No F ing way” About 3D Printing – Our Response
• Inside 3D Printing Conference Chicago: Day 1 Top Stories
• 3D Systems CEO Predicts Moore’s Law Will Hit 3D Printing Technology – Inside 3D Printing Chicago
• Simulation-Based Design for 3D Printing: Special Effects and the Store of the Future
• 3D Printed Fashion: From Fantasy Gowns to Accessible Couture – Inside 3D Printing Chicago

Friday, July 12

• Inside 3D Printing Conference Chicago: Day 2 Top Stories

 Saturday, July 13

• eBay Breaks into 3D Printing with iPhone App eBay Exact – Our Review

Mixee Labs Launches 3D Printed Cufflinks

Mixee Labs is the 3D printing startup behind customizable figurine platform Mixee Me and a customizable jewelry platform launched in June. Mixee Labs’ products were featured as Time Magazine’s Top 10 3D Printed Gifts of the year in 2012.

Now Mixee Labs has a new product: 3D printed cufflinks.

Using Mixee Labs, anybody can design their own cufflinks. You can select from a variety of different designs or even upload your own black and white graphic. Want cufflinks of your favorite team logo or your initials? Mixee Lab’s custom cufflink creator is perfect for you.

Mixee Labs manufactures each product on demand using 3D printed stainless steel (with optional gold or bronze plating) for $60, 3D printed sterling silver for $160, and 3D printed nylon plastic for $20.

3D printing is not limited to plastics, and Mixee Labs is taking full advantage of the wide variety of materials with this product. Each stainless steel or plastic pair will take about 2 weeks to print and ship; each silver pair will take about 3 weeks to ship.

Here’s a photo gallery to show how the creation process works and showcases some final cufflink designs.

We sat down with Nancy Yi Liang, co-founder of Mixee Labs for an interview.

On 3D Printing: First figurines, then jewelry, now cufflinks. Seems like you are building a full catalog of 3D printed goods. Tell us more about your expansion strategy.

Nancy Yi Liang: Eventually, we want to be a destination for customized, rapidly manufactured products. The cufflinks are built with our modeler’s platform (not yet released). The idea is you can upload a base model STL, like a cufflink, and specify a given surface for the user to add embellishments via extruded text or graphics. Unlike the Javascript platform we launched a while back, this platform doesn’t require a designer to know how to code.

On 3D Printing: These cufflinks are in stainless steel, right? What have you learned about working with that material?

Nancy Yi Liang: Stainless Steel is a great material–it has a real vintage-looking, raw quality to it. Moreover, you can coat it with gold and bronze, giving it some polish. A big part of designing for Stainless Steel is understanding structural strength. There’s a part of the 3d printing process (called the “greenstate”) where the model is not yet infused with bronze, and is actually quite fragile. During this stage, any thin parts of the model that is not well supported can break. In general, designing for 3d printing is very much about understanding the production process. “3d printing” actually covers a wide variety of production techniques (laser sintering, powder binding layer by layer with glue, jets extruding molten plastic). Each material employes different techniques and thus have different design restrictions. Shapeways provides excellent guides on designing for each material (hehe.. patting myself on the back a little since I wrote that section back when I was at Shapeways).

On 3D Printing: What’s been the biggest surprise about 3D printing jewelry and accessories?

Nancy Yi Liang: You know, sometimes people just want to put their names on things. I originally designed this with the mindset that people will want to upload all sorts of fancy graphics. But when I asked my friends who wear cufflinks, a lot of them got very excited when I told them that they can put their initials on the product. So ok, we added a custom text field to the cufflink creator. Right now, we are just beginning to venture into this space, so I’m sure there’s a lot more surprises coming down the road–we just need to keep our eyes and ears sharp!

Go to Mixee Labs to create your own custom cufflinks or other 3D printed jewelry.

Mixee Labs Adds Customizable 3D Printed Jewelry and Has Plans for More

In November, 3D printing startup Mixee Labs launched Mixee Me, a platform where you can design and 3D print your own likeness in a figurine. We reviewed our 3D printed mini-me in December. Within the first month of launch, Mixee Me was a top 5 shop on Shapeways, and in Time Magazine’s Top 10 3D Printed Gifts of the year.

Now Mixee Labs is expanding with the launch of a web platform where designers can create interactive models of their products for consumers to customize. With each web app, or “creator,” anybody will be able to create unique objects without knowing how to model, and watch them come to life without needing to buy a 3D printer.

Mixee Labs has extended its production partnership with Shapeways, using 3D printing to manufacture these personalized objects on-demand and ship directly to the customers.

As part of the launch, Mixee Labs is featuring Quark Jewelry by Stijn van der Linden, of the studio Virtox. Quark Jewelry’s innovative design draws on the intricate movements of subatomic particles. Stijn has been a leading figure in the 3D printing community. His designs have been featured in the Wired Store and the Today Show.

Below is a gallery of images for Quark Jewelry.

Here is a testimonial by designer Stijn van der Linden.

Ever since I first learned about subatomic particles and their spiral movements in magnetic fields, I could not help but be inspired. The different charges, masses and speeds determine the trajectories and create these astounding images in bubble chambers.

With the arrival of accessible 3d printing, I got to work to capture this beauty in jewelry.
I wrote a piece of software that would trace possible (and impossible) orbits and trajectories in 3 dimensions.
But I had a hard time choosing which models to actually try and print as the variations were endless.
Then a few months ago I got the urge to bring this project back to life and in search for a solution I stumbled upon Mixeelabs.

Mixeelabs was working on an online platform that allows designers to easily create web apps which are able to generate 3d printable models! We joined forces and are very proud to present “Quark Jewelry”.

Want to try it out? Here are some links.

Mixee Labs

Quark Jewelry (3D printed sub-atomic designed jewelry creator)

Mixee Me (3D printed figurine creator)

All Mixee Labs Creators

3D Printing is Now, Says Dad Entrepeneur

Australian entrepreneur, and dad, Steve Sammartino shared a great story on his startup blog about 3D printing a piece of jewelry for his 3-year-old daughter. The takeaway is that 3D printing will be ubiquitous in the future, so get started now on your 3D printing venture!

Steve was playing with his desktop 3D printer when his daughter entered the room, so he offered to 3D print her a piece of jewelry. When the 3D print was completed, Steve narrates: “She said “Thanks daddy” and then put it on her wrist and skipped away to get on with her 3 year old life.”

Steve’s insight:

3D printing to her is as ‘normal’ as cars, TV, airplanes, computers and microwave ovens. How can it not be, it was invented before she was born. It’s just another of the thousands of normal everyday thing she is seeing for the time. Nothing more or less special that the other technology in our lives.

But the really significant element is that by the time she is 13 years of age, yourself and every person we know will have a 3D printer. We’ll all be printing things in our homes on a daily basis. And if you think that isn’t possible, let me remind you that every social media channel you currently use today didn’t exist 10 years ago, and we already know how much that changed our social and economic landscape.

Via Start Up Blog.

CC image by jurvetson

3D Printing News

A roundup of the top 3D printing news from May 13 to May 18:

Monday, May 13

• 3D Printing Materials: From Plastic to Metal to Wood and Beyond
• Even Mega’s Kim Dotcom Doesn’t Want 3D Printed Guns

Wednesday, May 15

• Alliance Announces New 3D Printing Innovation Centers in China

Thursday, May 16

• Startup Launches Teleport It 3D to Revolutionize P2P 3D Printing

Friday, May 17

• Michigan Tech Launches 3D Printers for Peace Contest
• Startup Azavy Launches AirBnB Marketplace for 3D Printing

Saturday, May 18

• Michael Ian Black Tweets About 3D Printing – Our Response
• Tinkercad Acquired by Autodesk: Free 3D Design Software Lives On!

Photo by lizzk used under Creative Commons license.