Of the 3-D printing machines sold, the low-cost category (those priced under $5,000 and where most of the DIY crowd is concentrated) accounted for almost $40 million in sales. That translates to 6.5 percent of the $617.5 million in 3-D printers sold.

Yes, the hobbyist market is a very new one, but the growth curve it has been riding for the past few years has slowed dramatically. From 2008 to 2011 the market in low-cost 3-D printers grew 346 percent a year, according to Wohlers. In 2012, growth slowed to 46 percent.

Read full article. Photo: Tony Buser/Flickr

Desktop 3-D printers are about to become available with higher-definition capabilities, with a new startup shipping its first model this month.

At $3,299, The Form 1 could expand the market for 3-D printing technology. It can produce much higher-fidelity plastic objects than the consumer desktop printers available today. But it is still cheap enough to be affordable to a wide swath of professional designers, engineers, and dedicated tinkerers. The Form 1 can, for example, create detailed functioning prototypes with mechanical parts, such as precise screw threads.

.. The company could face a big roadblock, however. Formlabs is in the middle of a court fight with 3-D Systems, which has accused it of patent infringement (Formlabs says that at least some of the patents have expired.

Read more.

Robohand is a mechanical 3D-printed hand that can be created using a MakerBot 3D printer.

The design files and assembly instructions for Robohand can be found on Thingiverse.

Read full article in PSFK.

A baby’s life has been saved in the US by using a device to help him breathe created by a 3D printer. The Independent reports.

Doctors working with Professor Scott Hollister, a biomedical engineer at the University of Michigan, used a 3D printer to make a device like a vacuum cleaner hose which was implanted into Kaiba’s chest to act as splint to hold his airway open.

Three weeks after the operation in February 2012 – which has only now been reported, in The New England Journal of Medicine – he was taken off the ventilator and has not had trouble breathing since.

Read more

Researchers at Australia's Victorian Organic Solar Cell Consortium (VICOSC) — a collaboration between the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), the University of Melbourne, Monash University and industry partners — have successfully printed an A3 sheet of photovoltaic cells.

[via Policymic]

Related: - How 3D printing could revolutionise the solar energy industry

These bullets are fairly simple and fast to make. In the video, Heeszel says it took about an hour to print the first slug he shoots. He made it on his friend Tony Griffy's $800 3D printer, Heeszel told Wired.

... Griffy doesn't plan to go into production of 3D weapons or sell them. "It’s really, honestly, just for fun.

Read full article and full interview of Jeff Heezel in Wired.

How does it work? As Culture Japan's Danny Choo discovered, the "cloning" process is fairly straightforward. Basically, the subject sits in a chair surrounded by digital SLR cameras and has his or her picture taken in a sequence. A digital map of the subject's head is rendered together by a technician, then printed into plaster.

Read more.

Anjan Contractor, a mechanical engineer with a background in 3D printing, envisions a much more mundane—and ultimately more important—use for the technology.

He sees a day when every kitchen has a 3D printer, and the earth’s 12 billion people feed themselves customized, nutritionally-appropriate meals synthesized one layer at a time, from cartridges of powder and oils they buy at the corner grocery store. Contractor’s vision would mean the end of food waste, because the powder his system will use is shelf-stable for up to 30 years, so that each cartridge, whether it contains sugars, complex carbohydrates, protein or some other basic building block, would be fully exhausted before being returned to the store.

... Contractor's initial grant from NASA, under its Small Business Innovation Research program, is for a system that can print food for astronauts on very long space missions. For example, all the way to Mars.

... Pizza is an obvious candidate for 3D printing because it can be printed in distinct layers, so it only requires the print head to extrude one substance at a time. Contractor’s “pizza printer” is still at the conceptual stage, and he will begin building it within two weeks. It works by first “printing” a layer of dough, which is baked at the same time it’s printed, by a heated plate at the bottom of the printer. Then it lays down a tomato base, “which is also stored in a powdered form, and then mixed with water and oil,” says Contractor.

Read full article.

Late last year, the organization held a designathon in London, below are some of the projects that came out of it:

-- For Paul Carter who co-directs a television production company , born without lower arms and legs, and is a heavy coffee drinker, using a 3-D printer, competitors created a prototype water-heating device that could be operated without hands and which could be manipulated using upper arms.

-- fingertip cacti are tabletop dining utensils that slip on users’ fingers. The cacti are designed for eaters with motor impairments and make handling food significantly easier. In the case of the finger cacti, a 3-D printer was used to quickly produce prototypes that users could test out at the designathon.

-- Playsettings, which are spill-resistant tea cups, were fabricated on 3-D printers and have already made it to market.

Read full article.

Aside from drones — which have already been printed — ammunition could potentially be produced with the machines, as the casings would be “relatively easy,” he writes. (The Pentagon would just have to find a way to produce the propellants.) Additive manufacturing also “offers a new way to think about building shelters or other structures on a beachhead or forward operating base.” The hope, as the theory goes, is that large-scale investments in 3-D printing could take a lot of strain off the supply lines modern military forces depend on to survive.

Read full article in Wired and in Armed Forces Journal: Print when ready, Gridley 3-D printing will streamline the Navy’s supply chain — and much more BY LT. CMDR. MICHAEL LLENZA]]> tag:www.textually.org,2013:/3DPrinting//8.31975 2013-05-17T17:33:20Z 2013-05-17T20:28:39Z

3D printing company MakersFactory, based in Santa Cruz, offers ongoing classes, clubs and summer camp for kids of all ages.

]]>

The visual evidence of Wilson's triumph, the greatest marketing tool he has, has been pulled by a claim from Warner Chappell, copyright holder for Patrick Cassidy's "Funeral March," which played over footage of him firing the Liberator.

... Wilson feels that the commotion caused by the Liberator and the YouTube takedown that's related to RIAA-related regulations shows the hand of politicians. "[T]hey're demonstrating to some of the people that know that they're reactionaries and that they would like to control and manage the future, and that's not what this technology means," he said specifically about 3D printing but which applies to his views regarding all technology.

... And that's the biggest effect technology, including 3D printing, may have on society. It's not in what it creates but in what it destroys: the false dichotomies propagated in U.S. politics. First Amendment versus Second Amendment, blue state versus red state, RIAA artists versus NRA members, all blown apart with a single-shot, 3D-printed gun.

Read full article. Image from Forbes.