3D Printing Functional Robots
How futuristic do you need us to be, really? For months Hiro (our business development guy in Japan) has been working on an area that is very important to us here at i.materialise: using 3D printing to customize robots.
We think that in the coming years two technologies that are ripe for democratization are robots and 3D printing. To combine both of them into one service is irresistible to us. Because of this Hiro has been doing extensive research on what people that have robots at home need.
A few months ago robotics enthusiast news source Robots Dreams already posted a review of some of the parts we had made back then. Check it out below.
This gives you insight into one of the consumer robot areas that we are exploring. Our initial baby steps back then consisted of creating, together with a customer, some customized faceplates and other robot parts using SLS. This let the customer create a custom unique version of his Kondo robot. Last year I went on vacation to Japan an
3D print an entire coffee table in one piece
Check out the video to see how we 3D print an entire coffee table in one piece.
The Module by design label .MGX, designed by celebrated designers WertelOberfell–Platform is printed in one piece our Stratasys FDM (Fused Deposition Modeling) machines. The coffee table is based on fractal growth patterns in trees and designed specifically to minimize waste. Individual Module coffee tables can be intertwined in order to get just the size of table you need.
The machine used in the video is the Stratasys FDM Maxum, one of the largest 3D printers in existence with a build volume of 600 by 500 by 600 mm. I hope the video does the scale of the thing justice, I could sit in it if I dared.
Our parent company Materialise has the largest FDM capacity in the world outside Stratasys itself. We have over 20 FDM systems, the majority of them the huge Maxum machines. The FDM production people are also currently trying to be patient while they wait for capacity to increase yet again so t
Mind-blowing 3D printed fashion
ATTENTION: ATM skimming device
2010-09-08 09:45:42
How The Tripods come alive with 3D printing
Do you know ‘The Tripods’? Well, Martin – one of our German customers – surely does. As a long time fan of the BBC science fiction series, broadcasted in the 1980s, he has just printed his childhood dream through i.materialise. That dream was owning a model of a Tripod.
(more…)Top lamp designs for November 2009
Hello everyone, It’s been almost a month since we launched our beta. During this time, we have been astonished by some of the designs we have received and produced with our “Create your own” functionality. Here are some of the lamp models we produced in November for our customers. In 3rd place is the TulipK lamp. What makes the lamp so unique is the fact it can be unfolded, like a flower opens up. Not even our .MGX lamps do that! Yet :0,,) (more…)
The Creation lamp
And finally the third winner voted by the BlenderArtists community Xander Clerckx coming from Belgium with the Creation lamp shade, and indeed a great design. Just the lampshade without a lamp base looks astonishing. Some of the guys on the team thought it might be a good idea to build it in bronze, but transparency and bronze do not really go together. In the end we settled for polyamide. We had to do some additional adjustments to the model before we could put it into production. Our support handled those in cooperation with Xander, the result is an astonishing lamp with nice shadow effects. (more…)
Cappuccino lamp
A Cappuccino Lampshade by Andres Roppa coming all the way from Uruguay, check out his page @ www.andresroppa.com. The lamp was designed in Blender and turned out to be stunning. The design is actually an exploding cappuccino mug. Very original and one of our favorites so far! A great idea materialised. For this particular lampshade we decided to use translucent epoxy because we wanted to give it a brownish look and feel of cappuccino. Translucent Epoxy allowed us to paint the transparent shade with brownish colors making this shade a unique, one of a kind piece of art. The properties of material made it possible to make the shade semi transparent. I previously mentioned that we usually use polyamide as our preferred material for lampshades, but if we were to paint polyamide in brown, all transparency would have been lost. Translucent Epoxy is a more expensive material, and impregnating the printed model with color takes up additional time, but the achieved result is totally w
Clone lamp
We are happy to present the winners of the blenderartists.org lamp contest that we started several weeks ago. During the contest we have received a number of great submissions (you can view all of them on our Picasa album) and we are truly happy with the results. We greatly appreciate everyone’s participation, and as a thank you, we decided to make a discount on our service during the BETA starting November 9th. So, if you have a nice design in mind and want it to materialised, it might be just the right time! Once you upload your model the price will be generated automatically for you including the discount. Without further ado here is first winner of the contest: Clone lamp by Irwin Quemener from France. You can check out his website @ cloneproduction.net. This lampshade was built in polyamide, which is a strong and durable material. We usually use polyamide in our .MGX lamp shades because of its durability and strength. (more…)
