MIT Students Reveal PopFab, a 3D Printer That Fits Inside a Briefcase 49
cylonlover writes "There are plenty of different 3D printers to choose from these days, from the popular Makerbot Thing-O-Matic to the budget-priced Solidoodle. These all have one drawback, however, in that they aren't exactly portable. Most need to be disassembled to be moved, and even the fully-assembled Cubify printer isn't really built for travel. But now, two MIT students have developed the PopFab, a machine that does 3D printing and more, all while fitting inside a small suitcase. With different heads, the machine could also be used for milling, vinyl cutting, drawing, and much more, to create a wide variety of objects. The creators have also tested its portability by traveling with it as a carry-on suitcase to Saudi Arabia, Germany, and within the U.S."
I think Ben Heck beat them to it (Score:5, Interesting)
Pretty sure Ben had it first:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/259791/ben_heck_creates_portable_autonomous_3d_printer_makes_diy_community_jealous.html [pcworld.com]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfdrkHn1wqA [youtube.com]
Re:3D Printers (Score:5, Interesting)
Excuse the blatant advertising, but I for one am actually making a living from making and selling 3-d printed things.
What you may ask? Would you belive model train parts?
http://www.shapeways.com/shops/tebee?sort=newest [shapeways.com]
and selling them on the dreaded Ebay too http://stores.ebay.com/tbmod [ebay.com]
Visible Light Curable Resin (Score:5, Interesting)
Sorry, but we're about 6 months from near-UV / visible light curable resin destroying the FMD models. If you use an iPad Retina display as the light source, you only have mechanical jitter in the Z-axis (the boom / base you are raising) and a resolution of .078 mm (the best enthusiast FDM stuff is around .5 mm). You only need one stepper motor and mechanical assembly. You also reduce the amount of custom electronics to drive the head assembly and x & y axis stepper motors.
Currently, Junior Veloso [blogspot.com] is using DLP projectors to get the light intensity needed (and .05 mm resolution), but an LCD panel with closer to UV LEDs under it would be an even cheaper route. With filters removed on an LCD you have (arbitrarily assigned axes) X-axis at the dot pitch, Y-axis at 1/3 dot pitch, and Z-axis at your stepper motor / mechanical limit.
Lithographic techniques with light curable resins are vastly more scalable as well. Within the work area, there is no increase in time except for the Z-axis height. This means making dozens of duplicates in one pass for small objects or one large piece in the same time span. Further, the software process to turn the 3D model into 2D slices is exceptionally trivial compared with CAM type instructions to move 3 axes and run a pump head. Technically you could farm the object render with a LCD panel, laptop LCD, or tablet out to an auto-refresh webpage with black and white image slices with the stepper motor running on a timer synced with the page refresh...