However, all these 3D noobs blathering on about “wow! 3D printing is brand new!” and “star trek replicators are real!” is really becoming irritating.  The fact that hoax authority Snopes.com even felt a need to publish a “Not a hoax” article on 3D printing is kinda sad.

MIT developed powder bed 3D printing at least 20 years ago.  Patents date from the early to mid 90′s.  ZCorp (a nearly exclusive licensee of the MIT patents) has been in business shipping boutique machines (a 600 pound $45k printer isn’t exactly retail) for at least 10 years that I know of.

Yes, 3D printing is real, and has been implemented in a variety of different ways by a variety of vendors. (MakerBot polymer extrusion, electron beam sintering of metal powder, laser sintering of nylon powder, clay powder deposition for ceramic parts, etc)  These machines haven’t made much headway into the public awareness largely because most of them are hellaciously expensive and therefore marketed to very targeted high-end design and industrial clients. That hand-held 3D digitizing scanner shown in the ZCorp video, for example, will set you back about $25,000.  You’ll need $15,000 to get  a “cheap” bare bones small powder printer, or more like $45,000 to get a nice one with full color capability. And don’t forget the annual service contract!  It’s definitely not pennies per day.

The price of the machines has been coming down in recent years  (hmm.  Should we buy a new car or a 3D printer?), but the price of the materials / consumables has been going up.  Like inkjet printer makers, ZCorp almost certainly makes more on selling consumables (and service/maintenance contracts) than on selling the hardware itself.  ZCorp states costs for consumables run $2-$3 per rendered cubic inch for powder and binder. Binder fluid costs hundreds of dollars per gallon.  Setting up a new machine with powder and binder fluid will set you back nearly $2000. Gillette would be proud.

Any time you have a service or product demand that requires expensive hardware or expertise, service bureaus will pop up to harvest that demand. Shapeways has been  producing small objects for jewelry or decorative uses for a couple of years now. I’m quite surprised that the ZCorp videos appear to have had greater success in introducing 3D printing to the public than Shapeways products and business model. Perhaps people are more enchanted by the making than by the result?

The maker community has made great progress on figuring out and documenting how industrious individuals can build their own 3D printing aparatii for a less than a home mortgage.  The MakerShed store sells polymer extruder based kits with x/y gantry assemblies for under $1500. There are multiple open source initiatives in play, such as RepRap.org and FabAtHome. However, they still have a long way to go to catch up to the level of detail and service conveniences offered by ZCorp and other “big guys”. You get what you pay for.

Though 3D printing equipment and materials have improved greatly in recent years, 3D printing is still in its infancy as a technology. Even with a whizzy new ZCorp machine, it’s not quite as simple as the marketing video would lead you to believe.

However, I will admit that after fighting with clogged printheads ruining a build, destroying fragile parts while manually depowdering them, and spending hours infiltrating the piece with resin to make it strong enough for everyday handling, there is still enough joy left at the end of the process to call the whole experience magical.

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That’s kinda neat as gizmos go, but not really earth shattering. 

Then Ori worked on software to make that “carputer” mesh-aware, connecting to his mesh data in Live Mesh.  If he drops MP3s into a mesh folder on his PC at the office, it will show up in his playlist in his car, ready to play on the road.  While he’s driving, the GPS-enabled unit can write GPS tracks into a mesh object, which can be read by family or friends (whoever he’s given access to read that private mesh object) to see where he is or how late he’ll be arriving. 

Ok, that’s a bit more interesting.

Here’s the kicker:  While he did have to write some code for the carputer to move data between the devices built into the carputer and objects in his mesh using the Live Framework SDK, none of the code he wrote ever opens a network connection.  All the network data transfer is handled in the background by Live Mesh’s automatic data sync.  The code on the carputer reads and writes data in the local mesh running on the carputer, and the local mesh client handles synchronizing data changes to and from the cloud mesh whenever the car has a network connection via WiFi, WiMax, cellphone or whatever.

Now *that’s* cool. 

That’s what mesh is all about, and shows another example of why the local client is so important as a game-changing facilitator.  Your mesh-enabled web apps and mesh-aware desktop apps or cloud services don’t have to think in terms of dealing with network connections across unreliable or occasionally connected networks.  They just need to think in terms of data handling and change notifications.

Channel9 did a video segment with Ori about his meshmobile (“mesh-mo-beel”) project back in October.  There’s a lot of talking heads airtime through most of the video (which has some great info) but they finally get around to showing the goods at the end of the clip.  If you want to see the demo before investing time in the chitchat, skip ahead to about 18:30. 

Oh, and by the way - Ori Amiga is Principal Group Program Manager of the Live Developer Platform team (the developer side of Live Mesh).  It’s good to see the leadership having fun with the technology after hours.  Passion rocks.

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The inventor of this new system is Lonnie Johnson, who also happens to be the inventor of the “Super Soaker” squirt gun.  Johnson’s new focus on electromechanical systems appears to be underwritten by the success of the water toy.

At the core of Johnson’s Thermoelectric Energy Conversion System (JTEC) is a membrane covered with electrodes.  Under thermomechanical stress (heat), the electrodes manage to force hydrogen atoms through the membrane, stripping the electron off the hydrogen in the process.  Any time you can physically separate an electron from an atom, you have electrical current. If you can do it a lot and continuously, then you have a good chance of producing a lot of usable electrical current.

The cool part about Johnson’s engine is that it uses mechanical energy (heat oscillation) to rip the electron off the hydrogen.  The Discovery article also notes that while the system uses hydrogen, it does not “burn” or consume the hydrogen – it uses a fixed amount of hydrogen circulated in a continuous cycle of electron detachment and reattachment (circulating between anode and cathode and back, presumably).

Discovery notes that current solar panels convert sunlight into electricity at about 30% efficiency.  (In the lab, maybe.  High-end commercial PV panels run more in the 20% efficiency range, and mass-produced cheap panels are lucky reach 10%)  Johnson’s heat engine design could reach an efficiency as high as 60%, if the system can be built to handle higher operating temperatures – about 3 times higher than the current working prototype’s 392 degree F operating temperature.

Well done, Mr Johnson!  I look forward to hearing a lot more about this over the next year or so.

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The Nikon S51cquickly floated to the top of my wish list. It’s considerably bigger than the sweet little Casio, but they don’t make anything that small anymore. The Nikon has the new trend of right-angle optics buried inside the body which gives it focus and optical zoom capabilities without the risk of getting dirt or pocket lint jammed in the sliding sleeves of a traditional pop-out zoom lens. Lots of typical Nikon goodness in the feature set, including anti-vibration, but what grabbed me the most was the fact that the camera has built-in WiFi capability and can “upload photos to the Internet over an open WiFi network” and you can “upload to your Flickr albums”.

I actually stopped at a local megastore this weekend on the off chance that they might have an S51c in stock. Not only did they not have it in stock, they didn’t have any Nikon equipment at all. Perhaps Nikon already knows about this megastore’s difficulty with returns and customer care?

No matter. I’ll get it online. B&H Photo Video has everything photographic worth having.

Before my procrastinator got around to buying it online, though, a friend sent me this WiFiNetNews article about a WiFi SD card for cameras being developed by Eye-Fi. That’s neat, but the Nikon S51c already has WiFi support built in, right? Well, the article contains some statements that malign existing cameras with built-in WiFi, claiming that they don’t actually upload directly to Flickr, and they downsize and mangle the photo in the upload process, etc. This couldn’t be referring to the Nikon S51c, right? Perhaps they just aren’t aware of the S51c goodness.

The seed of doubt planted, I did some searching for Nikon S51c reviews. Not marketing material or press copy from the Nikon press kit, but real hands-on commentary. Thus I found this review on BenSeese.com. In a nutshell, it confirmed every ugly claim made by the WiFi SD company: The Nikon S51c cannot upload directly to Flickr, and when your photos do eventually get to your Flickr account (via the Nikon mypicturetown.com site), they have been downsized and all their wonderful EXIF data has been stripped away.

Ok, that’s a total deal breaker. The Nikon S51c’s WiFi story sucks. Full stop. I live and die by Exif metadata, particularly to sort photos by time taken. I don’t want my photos resized, and I don’t want to have to go indirect through Nikon’s consistently awful photo web sites to put my stuff in my Flickr albums!

Nikon makes fabulous cameras. Why can’t they get WiFi right? (sigh)

So, the top camera on my lust list is now the Nikon S51(non-WiFi) + the Eye-Fi WiFi SD card. Stay tuned.

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The interdisciplinary team of scientists solved a problem that has confounded engineers and scientists for decades: individual nano-size building blocks such as nanotubes, nanosheets and nanorods are ultrastrong, but larger materials made out of bonded nano-size building blocks were comparatively weak – until now. “When you tried to build something you can hold in your arms, scientists had difficulties transferring the strength of individual nanosheets or nanotubes to the entire material,” Engineering professor Nicholas Kotov said. “We’ve demonstrated that one can achieve almost ideal transfer of stress between nanosheets and a polymer matrix.” The researchers created this new composite plastic with a machine they developed that builds materials one nanoscale layer after another. The robotic machine consists of an arm that hovers over a wheel of vials of different liquids. In this case, the arm held a piece of glass about the size of a stick of gum on which it built the new material. The arm dipped the glass into the glue-like polymer solution and then into a liquid that was a dispersion of clay nanosheets. After those layers dried, the process repeated. It took 300 layers of each the glue-like polymer and the clay nanosheets to create a piece of this material as thick as a piece of plastic wrap.

For further info see the U-M website. There’s also an abstract of the article here and an informative discussion by Roland Piquepaille on the topic here.

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