openMaterials

This is great talk by Dominic Muren on the Digital Fabrication Ecosystem, given @ Dorkbot Seattle, Feb 3 2010. You can download the slides of the talk in PDF form here. Muren, a design professor at the University of Washington, runs the Humblefactory, a product development consultancy offering strategic and design consulting in open hardware, user-assisted [...]

Open3DP’s Recipes are a really nice resource for those interested in experimenting with different materials for 3D printing. There’s a little bit of everything in there, from glass to porcelain to sugar. Open3dp is a website hosted by the Solheim Rapid Prototyping Laboratory in the Mechanical Engineering Department on the University of Washington campus. [...]

More interesting news from Stanford University’s research on carbon nanotubes, via a Printed Electronics World article: Ordinary textiles could be transformed into batteries that hold up to three times more energy than a mobile phone battery, by simply dipping them into nanoparticle-infused ink. Conventional batteries are made by coating metallic foil in a particle slurry and [...]

There’s been a lot of buzz lately about homemade biodegradable plastic. I haven’t tried it myself, but thought it would be useful to gather here some resources relating to these experiments: :: Above is a video by Green Plastics, showing how to make your own bioplastic. :: Shapeways How-to :: Cooking & molding bioplastics at home: recipes, [...]

Unfold has started printing with ceramics on a modified rapman. First results look amazing: We took some time to play around and get used to the dynamics of the clay print process. It was also time to step up (or down?) the resolution from 1.9 to 0.8 mm using screw-on luer lock tips. We are also [...]

A talk by Bath University Professor Adrian Boyer, creator of the RepRap 3D Printer, given @ FOSDEM. (via Erik de Bruijn)