Desktop manufacturing. (Printable Electronics)

Desktop manufacturing
Advances in 3-D printing and embedded electronics will revolutionize how everything from coffee makers to cellphones gets made.
By David Pescovitz

Nov. 30, 2005 | Imagine that your coffee maker breaks just before you're about to host a brunch. You go online and click on the model you want to buy. But you don't have to wait for it to be shipped; instead, a machine on your desk kicks into operation. Inside a glass chamber, a nozzle spits out the electronics, chassis, motor and other components, layer by layer. An hour later, you snap together a few parts and the brewing begins.

That machine would be the "Star Trek" replicator realized. Well, a beta version anyway. Already, several engineering threads are converging that may pull the replicator out of the far future and put it in our homes, or at least at Kinko's, in the next few decades. MIT's Neil Gershenfeld, director of the Center for Bits and Atoms, dubs the vision "personal fabrication." John Canny, a professor at UC-Berkeley's College of Engineering, where I'm a writer in residence, refers to the research field as "flexonics." Whatever the buzzword, it's not unlike desktop publishing, but for products instead of paper. Call it desktop manufacturing.

It starts with the physical object itself, the plastic chassis for the remote control that you stepped on, the body of the coffee maker. Product designers have literally been printing out objects for more than a decade. A digital design is loaded into a machine that drips out thin beads of plastic and glue, building up hair-thin layers until the whole form is complete. These kinds of three-dimensional printers are perhaps the coolest tool in the realm of rapid prototyping, technology that allows designers to quickly mock up models of new products. A designer can feel how the next-generation phone she's working on will fit in a shirt pocket.

While these 3-D printers are improving in quality and dropping in price, the devices they produce still have one problem: They don't actually work. That's where printable electronics come into play. Researchers at many corporate and university laboratories are brewing inks of semiconducting nanocrystals and using cannibalized inkjet printers to pattern the nanomaterials into circuits on plastic, paper and even cloth. Printable electronics is likely to hit the mainstream first in flexible displays that can be cranked out in rolls and then as UPC bar-code-killing RFID (radio frequency identification) tags stamped right on a product package.

While printable electronics are still far from delivering the reliability and performance of traditional circuitry, the printable-electronics technology could eventually be incorporated into a 3-D printer. For example, the printer would embed layers of electronics within the housing of the device it printed. Of course, that might mean that a hairline crack in your cellphone would be fatal.

http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2005/11/30/big_idea_tech_biggest/print.html

I suspect we have a way to go.

and was bigger than the cell phones of today. It could add, subtract, multiply and divide, AND do square roots!!!

Man, everyone thought they were so COOOOOOL...then, years later, my bank gave me a free one the size of a credit card that did more than that clunky thing.

The first cell phone I ever saw had a suitcase thing attached to it, and looked like an Army Field Radio!

The old journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step!!!

:-)

Whenever I jump on an idea too soon, it's a damn Edsel -- of course, if you keep that bad idea, it can become a kitschy rarity, like eight track tapes or BETA VCRs!!!!

Hopefully these sharp young farts will accomodate us before we're too old to have fun with the stuff!