Collaborate Disseminate
Wood-infused filament has been around for awhile now, and while it can be used to create some fairly impressive pieces, the finished product won’t fool the astute observer. For one …read more Continue reading Sawdust Printer Goes Against the Grain By Working with Wood Waste
A 3D printer is really a specialized form of robot. Sure, it isn’t exactly Data from Star Trek, but it isn’t too far from many industrial robots. Researchers from Meiji …read more Continue reading 3D Printer as Robot: The Functograph
With the Mars 2020 mission now past the halfway point between Earth and its destination, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab recently released a couple of stories about the 3D-printed parts that made it aboard the Perseverance rover. Tucked into its aeroshell and ready for its high-stakes ride to the Martian surface, …read more
Continue reading Sending 3D Printed Parts to Mars: A Look Inside JPL’s Additive Manufacturing Center
Over the past decades, additive manufacturing (AM, also known as 3D printing) has become increasingly common in manufacturing processes. While immensely helpful in the prototyping of new products by allowing for rapid turn-around times between design and testing, these days additive manufacturing is used more and more often in the …read more
Continue reading 3D Printing Nuclear Reactors For Fun And Profit
The global trade crisis is a setback, but also an opportunity for logistics startups to show the value of digital platforms in an analog industry. Continue reading Startups are transforming global trade in the COVID-19 era
The first scramjet, an airbreathing jet engine capable of pushing an aircraft beyond Mach 5, was successfully flown in the early 1990s. But while pretty much any other technology you could imagine has progressed by leaps and bounds in the nearly 30 years that have passed, the state-of-the-art in hypersonic …read more
Continue reading 3D Printing May be the Key to Practical Scramjets
It’s been fifty years since man first landed on the Moon, but despite all the incredible advancements in technology since Armstrong made that iconic first small step, we’ve yet to reach any farther into deep space than we did during the Apollo program. The giant leap that many assumed would …read more
Continue reading Why Spacecraft of the Future will be Extruded
[LudwigLabs] is creating PCBs using copper foil and a cutting plotter (vinyl cutter). In this approach, it’s an additive process where instead of removing copper from a copper-clad board, the traces are cut out of copper foil and transferred to a solid backing surface (cardboard, fiberglass, etc.).
While similar to the use of copper tape laid out by hand, as covered by us last year, the big advantage of using a cutting plotter is that it allows one to create much more complicated traces similar to those you would expect to see on a factory-made PCB. Since cutting plotters translate …read more