标签: printing

Happy Mother's Day to all of you and your family! This year I had one little more special gift to my mother, that was a small stuff printed by a 3D printer. My mother liked it quite much. Yeah! Fig. The small stuff for my mother before colouring The stuff was designed by myself, with Autodesk Inventor 2013 (Student Version). On the left side, there are four ducks... since the Rubber Duck is now visiting Hong Kong and is very hot these days~ Hehe... Fig. The Rubber Duck is visiting HK (Image courtesy: http://www.technontech.com/)   - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Actually mothers do not require us to give them presents or anything, though we cannot indeed 'return' the 'loves' in our life... Mother's love is valueless! Okay, due to my poor English, the meaning presented in the above words may not be so good... In short, 世上只有媽媽好! - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Recently I saw many people saying that 3D printing technology would be very popular. 1. Someone even had printed out a gun... as usual, technology could be good when we used them in a good way; but it could also be very harmful when used in bad ways... like the Internet, some bad guys could use them for illegal things. 2. Someone (not a person related to technology) said that, in future we may be able to buy some 3D drawings on the Internet and then print the items out - the style of buy and sell will be totally different! Will the above be real? I don't know...

EE Times Asia is going around asking engineers like yourself to talk about a technology or an application of a technology that you feel will affect us the most—the way we work, play and live our lives.   To get the ball rolling, I decided to first post my nomination and realized that it's not an easy task. If you get starry-eyed like me reading about the latest from the labs or pine for the newest gizmo, the job just gets tougher.   I've had to put aside a breakthrough in genetic engineering that's created the first coconut-flavoured pineapple. It's a game-changer for cocktails—it cuts the inventory required for making, say Piña Coladas, by a third! But the impact of this technology on engineers may not be desired by all.   I also had to reject my wife's suggestion of a robotic vacuum cleaner even though the algorithms they use are neat work—it's been around for some time and keeps getting better.   There are other worthy contenders, like FinFETs and in-memory computing to name a few, and I'm sure some of you may elect them as the key technologies for 2013. And indeed they will be important technologies this year. My favourite, however, is 3D printing.   The technology is currently at a stage where individuals and small-to-medium enterprises can use polymers to manufacture fairly complex designs. While there's a good choice for printing with various types of polymers, metal printing is also evolving and there's early research into tissue (yes, the human kind!) printing. The companies behind the printers are already targeting their products at consumer electronics, electric vehicle, medical, toy and repair/servicing segments.   Think rapid prototyping and just-in-time manufacturing. Think hospitals printing out not just custom prosthetics and hearing aids but implantable tissue. Think UAV parts for defence, and cellular phone cases and camera parts for the consumer. Think automotive parts… But those are not the only reasons this technology wins my vote. As 3D printing lowers the cost of prototyping and small-batch manufacturing, I believe it has the potential for lowering barriers to entrepreneurship in Asia. Think new products. Think empowering engineers.   Here's a smattering of companies, although there are many more in this field: 3D Systems Corp. , Stratasys Ltd (they acquired Objet last month; they have several companies, including the printing service provider, RedEye), Mcor Technologies , Solido3D and Asiga . There are also several companies that cater to 3D printing at a personal level, such as Afinia , 3D Systems' Cubify (above), Airwolf 3D , PP3DP , Makerbot and Printrbot . There are several printing service providers as well; a company called Shapeways even offers a community and a platform for you to sell your designs.   If you don't agree with my nomination, express your disagreement by sending in your own nomination at disruptiveengineering@gmail.com . Here are the rules of play:   1. Describe and justify your nomination in 300-500 words. You can write about a technology someone else has developed, but if you feel you have a winner in something you or your colleagues developed, go ahead and let everyone know about it. 2. Include citations, such as who developed the technology or is developing it, and source of market data if you are quoting any. 3. Tell us about yourself in about 50 words and include your full name, current job title, company name and a JPEG photo.   Oh! Do send your entries early. We are accepting entries until Feb.28, 2013.   If you do agree with my nomination, you can still participate: just let me know what you think in the comments section below.   Happy New Year!  

EE Times India is going around asking engineers like yourself to talk about a technology or an application of a technology that you feel will affect us the most—the way we work, play and live our lives.   To get the ball rolling, I decided to first post my nomination and realized that it's not an easy task. If you get starry-eyed like me reading about the latest from the labs or pine for the newest gizmo, the job just gets tougher.   I've had to put aside a breakthrough in genetic engineering that's created the first coconut-flavoured pineapple. It's a game-changer for cocktails—it cuts the inventory required for making, say Piña Coladas, by a third! But it just wouldn't cut it in a certain state.   I also had to reject my wife's suggestion of a robotic vacuum cleaner even though the algorithms they use are neat work—it's been around for some time and keeps getting better.   There are other worthy contenders, like FinFETs and in-memory computing to name a few, and I'm sure some of you may elect them as the key technologies for 2013. And indeed they will be important technologies this year. My favourite, however, is 3D printing.   The technology is currently at a stage where individuals and small-to-medium enterprises can use polymers to manufacture fairly complex designs. While there's a good choice for printing with various types of polymers, metal printing is also evolving and there's early research into tissue (yes, the human kind!) printing. The companies behind the printers are already targeting their products at consumer electronics, electric vehicle, medical, toy and repair/servicing segments.   Think rapid prototyping and just-in-time manufacturing. Think hospitals printing out not just custom prosthetics and hearing aids but implantable tissue. Think UAV parts for defence, and cellular phone cases and camera parts for the consumer. Think automotive parts… But those are not the only reasons this technology wins my vote. As 3D printing lowers the cost of prototyping and small-batch manufacturing, I believe it has the potential for lowering barriers to entrepreneurship in India and beyond. Think new products. Think empowering engineers.   Here's a smattering of companies, although there are many more in this field: 3D Systems Corp. , Stratasys Ltd (they acquired Objet last month; they have several companies, including the printing service provider, RedEye), Mcor Technologies , Solido3D and Asiga . There are also several companies that cater to 3D printing at a personal level, such as Afinia , 3D Systems' Cubify (above), Airwolf 3D , PP3DP , Makerbot and Printrbot . There are several printing service providers as well; a company called Shapeways even offers a community and a platform for you to sell your designs.   If you don't agree with my nomination, express your disagreement by sending in your own nomination at disruptiveengineering@gmail.com . Here are the rules of play:   1. Describe and justify your nomination in 300-500 words. You can write about a technology someone else has developed, but if you feel you have a winner in something you or your colleagues developed, go ahead and let everyone know about it. 2. Include citations, such as who developed the technology or is developing it, and source of market data if you are quoting any. 3. Tell us about yourself in about 50 words and include your full name, current job title, company name and a JPEG photo.   Oh! Do send your entries early. We are accepting entries until Feb.28, 2013.   If you do agree with my nomination, you can still participate: just let me know what you think in the comments section below.   Happy New Year!

I mentioned in my blog a few moths ago ( The incredible shrinking Max ) a website from where you can order a miniature replica of yourself. This is obviously quite handy to keep around in case you forget what you look like (I find it invaluable myself ). But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's start with the company, which is called Sculpteo . One of the things they offer is a 3D printing service, which you can use to create all sorts of things, from prototype enclosures for an electronic product (very useful if you are creating hobby projects) to ... well, just about anything really. For example, one of the services they offer is to create small 3D Avatars of people (check out the Avatar Introduction on their website). This is rather cool. You get a friend to take a couple of pictures of yourself – one face-forward and the other from the side. You upload these pictures to the Sculpteo website and their artists use them to create a 3D model, which is subsequently given a physical manifestation by means of a 3D printer. I've embedded a video from YouTube later in this blog showing the Avatar-generation process. Nick, my graphics artist / friend / expert / hero (I have to be nice to him because he keeps on helping me out on the graphics front) works in an office just down the corridor from mine. Nick used my camera to take a couple of pictures of yours truly, I sent them off to the folks at Sculpteo, and a few days later my very own Mini-Me arrived on my desk. I've just uploaded my own " Max Meets Mini-Max " video to YouTube. I actually think they did quite well considering how difficult it must be to capture the "Essence of Max" – those rugged good looks, that razor-sharp wit, the indiscernible sense of fashion... Nick kindly created a side-by-side image for me as shown above. I'm the one on the right (grin). Did you spot the fact that they've actually modeled my Hawaiian shirt? Personally I think the "Mini-Max" is really quite good, although I bet they could have created something that was almost photo-realistic if their artist had actually had the real me sitting in front of him or her. Does anyone really need one of these? Actually, I can think of all sorts of uses for them. For example, there's some TV news program called News Channel 10 that appears to have had Avatars made of all of their news and weather presenters, and they use these characters as part of their programs and in adverts for their program. Now, this is where I become a little confused, because there's also an incredibly powerful 3D sculpting program involved. Here are links to two tutorial videos ( video 1 and video 2 ). In these videos you see an artist manipulating what can only be described as a ball of "virtual clay" on the screen – pulling bits out, pushing bits in, stretching things, applying textures, applying colors, and ending up with an incredibly realistic crocodile-like reptilian head. The thing I'm confused about is who owns this software, where would one purchase a copy, and how much does it cost? The Sculpteo website is spectacularly uninformative on this point, with the result that I don't know if they created this software and are selling copies of it, or if they are using someone else's software, or ... well, I don't know. But whoever does own the software appears to have done a magnificent job. I would like to play with it myself, and I don't know anything about this sort of stuff. Also, I think that the folks at Sculpteo are doing a great job and they appear to be having a lot of fun at the same time, which is a really good trick if you can manage it!