3D Archives - Itechment

This device can transform your smartphone into 3D printer A US-based company has designed a portable device that lets you turn any smartphone into a 3D printer using the light from the touchscreen to process your plastic creations, a media report said.

The gadget called OLO is designed to be simple to understand and operate, and is battery-operated and fully portable, weighing just 780 grams, ScienceAlert reported citing Kickstarter, the company which helped develop the creative device.

The device consists of three parts: A reservoir, which holds 400 cubic cm of printing volume; 100-gram bottles of coloured photopolymer resin to build your objects with; and a mechanised lid, under which the build plate and control electronics are tightly arranged.

First, you have to load a schematic of your object into the OLO mobile app (available for iOS, Android, and Windows) and then fit your smartphone into the base under the reservoir. A piece of polarised glass is installed into the base, which your phone’s touchscreen will be facing when set in place.

Once you place the lid on top and the printer starts going, the app makes your phone’s screen light up with a specific pattern. The polarised glass then takes all this light (which shines outwardly to give your phone a wider viewing angle) and redirects it so that all the photons are travelling straight upward.

So as your phone’s screen beams light up into the reservoir, the directed light causes a layer of resin to harden onto the build plate, which slowly moves upward as each new layer is created.

The gadget is priced at $99 and its first shipments are expected to start in September.

[Source:- Techradar]

InstantCAD Tool Promises to Make 3D Design Easier and Faster

To make computer-aided design (CAD) programmes process easier and faster, researchers have developed a new tool called “InstantCAD” that lets designers interactively edit, improve and optimise CAD models using a more streamlined workflow.

Developed by researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Columbia University, “InstantCAD” integrates with existing CAD programmes as a plug-in.

“From more ergonomic desks to higher-performance cars, this is really about creating better products in less time,” says Adriana Schulz, lead author of the study.

“We think this could be a real game changer for automakers and other companies that want to be able to test and improve complex designs in a matter of seconds to minutes, instead of hours to days,” Schulz said in a paper that will be presented at SIGGRAPH computer-graphics conference in Los Angeles this month.

With “InstantCAD”, the process of improving and optimising the design can be done in real-time, saving engineers days or weeks, the research said.

After an object is designed in a commercial CAD programme, it is sent to a cloud platform where multiple geometric evaluations and simulations are run at the same time.

Users can instantly improve and optimise the design in two ways with this precomputed data.

With “interactive exploration”, a user interface provides real-time feedback on how design changes will affect performance, like how the shape of a plane wing impacts air pressure distribution.

With “automatic optimisation”, users can simply tell the system to give a design with specific characteristics, like a drone that’s as light in weight as possible while still able to carry the

“‘InstantCAD’ could be particularly helpful for more intricate designs for objects like cars, planes, and robots, particularly for industries like car manufacturing that care a lot about squeezing every little bit of performance out of a product,” said Wojciech Matusik, Associate Professor at MIT.

[“Source-gadgets.ndtv”]

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