3D printing meets robot design(eetimes.com)
eetimes.com
3D printing meets robot design
http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4231050/3D-printing-meets-robot-design-
2 comments
People have been printing text and photo's at home for a long time and it's still not cost competitive with mass production. IMO, the real test of 3d printing is when it's cheap enough that shipping something costs about as much as printing it at home.
Totally agree! Can you imagine being able to get your overseas family to print out all their own Christmas gifts? How awesome would that be instead of getting saddled with a $250 posting fee all the time. But price of printing does need to come down
Cool, good read!!
This is a great way to get one of these printers and have it pay its own way while you're paying it off. There was a company that paid for several of these machines by printing world of warcraft character models (not easy since the WoW guys didn't really take into account making these things for real)
The Z-machine uses a sintering process (bits a material are laid down and then flash heated into solidity) and has the feature that it can do basic colors.
Slowly but surely I think we'll find the materials and the technology to make this stuff generate things we need 'on demand' at a cost that is comparable to mass production.