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Building a house completely by hand can be both time-consuming and expensive. A number of home-builders have chosen to automate part of the construction process (i.e. by printing the home's parts) instead. A new Ukrainian homebuilding startup called Passivdom uses a 3D-printing robot that can print parts for tiny houses. The machine can print the walls, roof, and floor of Passivdom's 380-square-foot model in about eight hours. The windows, doors, plumbing, and electrical systems are then added by a human worker. When complete, the homes are completely autonomous and mobile, meaning they don't need to connect to external electrical and...

Kniterate, the 3D printer for Knitwear, has taken Kickstarter by storm with its new crowd-funding campaign. The digital knitting machine, which first crossed our radar back in June 2016, has recently resurfaced, catching the eye of design bloggers, knitters, and knitwear enthusiasts alike. And all the buzz may be just what Kniterate needs to hit the market: with almost $250,000 already pledged, the Kickstarter campaign has more than doubled its initial goal of $100,000. What is Kniterate exactly? It’s a computerized knitting machine that, by “bringing an affordable and compact version of industrial knitting machines to your workshop,” promises to...

XYZprinting is one of the most prolific 3D printer manufacturers active in the market right now. The company has released so many products just in the last year, in fact, that youÂ’d be forgiven for having to stretch your memory to recall XYZprintingÂ’s beginnings. It all started with the da Vinci 1.0 Blue, also known as the da Vinci 1.0 or the da Vinci 1.0A, XYZÂ’s debut 3D printer that was an immediate hit at CES 2014. ItÂ’s hard to believe XYZprinting has been around for just a few years, considering the success theyÂ’ve had since then; a lot can...

We ate some weird s**t in 2016. A person born in the year 1000 AD definitely wouldn’t comprehend a Dorito. He certainly wouldn’t understand why kids love the taste of Cinnamon Toast Crunch, and if you showed him a Twinkie, he’d probably burn you at the stake. But the way things are headed, our food is bound to get a lot weirder. Scientific research doesn’t just bring us more convenient and cheaper food options, but the hope of overcoming sustainability issues, too. The meat industry plays a huge role in climate change—around 10 percent of America’s total greenhouse gas emissions...

The first house printed using mobile 3D printing technology has been built in Stupino town, Moscow region. The Apis Cor and PIK companies have successfully completed the project. How it was builtIn December 2016, the Apis Cor company in cooperation with PIK proceeded to print the building using a mobile 3D printer. Construction took place at the Apis Cor company's test facility in the town of Stupino, on the territory of the Stupino aerated concrete factory. Printing of self-bearing walls, partitions and building envelope were done in less than a day: pure machine time of printing amounted to 24 hours....

EVERY year about 120,000 organs, mostly kidneys, are transplanted from one human being to another. Sometimes the donor is a living volunteer. Usually, though, he or she is the victim of an accident, stroke, heart attack or similar sudden event that has terminated the life of an otherwise healthy individual. But a lack of suitable donors, particularly as cars get safer and first-aid becomes more effective, means the supply of such organs is limited. Many people therefore die waiting for a transplant. That has led researchers to study the question of how to build organs from scratch. One promising approach...

Today we can print human skin. Soon we may be able to print human organs. A new item has just been added to the list of things that can be 3D printed: human skin. This is what researchers from the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) in Spain have recently demonstrated. With a 3D printer that uses special ink composed of human cells, they were able to create human skin that looks and behaves like real skin — with a dermis and an epidermis, able to produce collagen and react like real skin does to tests done. This artificially created...

Through studying the geometry of strong structures, MIT researchers are now one step closer to 3D printing graphene. By comparison, 2D graphene is better at conducting electricity than copper wires, ten times stronger than steel, and lighter and certainly more transparent than both of them. The problem is that these properties as are all theoretical and scaling the nanomaterial has proved challenging. Furthermore, in order to compete with copper and steel, graphene has to be 3D. 3D graphene – here’s the deal The challenges of making a 3D structure out of a 2D material is that the material’s atomic structure,...

As 3D printing continues to develop and evolve, we’ve begun to see it branch off quite a bit from the typical image of a machine depositing layers onto a flat build platform. 3D printing has been adapted to print onto preexisting objects, onto fabric, and in multiple directions. Machines capable of doing these fancy tricks are still rare and expensive, though, and not quite accessible to the average maker, but that may not be the case forever. A group of UK researchers recently published a paper about their efforts to develop an affordable system that can 3D print onto uneven,...

The four mega-trends shaping the global auto industry over the next 15-odd years are undoubtedly vehicles with lower emissions, new powertrain technologies, autonomous automobiles and vehicle digitalization. Reflecting these mega-trends, one can anticipate more developments in lightweighting, drivetrain optimization, car computerization, infotainment and driverless transportation in 2017. Here PlasticsToday gives its take on some of the key developments expected in 2017. Staying connected, and entertained Rather than being interested in the size of the engine and the shape of the car, consumers are now more interested in “infotainment” systems, being connected, autonomous driving and diverse mobility, notes consultant McKinsey. Traditionally,...

As 3D printers shrink in size and price and make their way into more homes, they're starting to bring more of the higher-end functions, like the ability to print objects with multiple materials, down to the consumer level. German startup Next Dynamics has now unveiled the NexD1, a multi-color, multi-material 3D printer for the home that can use a conductive resin to create custom electronic circuit boards. Everything from paper sculptures to candies can be printed from devices small enough to fit on the counter at home, but the NexD1 (which the team pronounces like "next-one") does things a little...

Competition to produce the most effective method of 3D glass printing is running high as Israeli Micron3DP announce plans to deliver its 3D printer for alpha testing at the end of 2017. Technique old as time With over 5,000 years of history, glassmaking has been refined into countless styles all across the inhabited world. The process, however, even when it comes to naturally occurring obsidian glass, still remains much the same: sand and minerals are combined at high temperatures up to 1500°C, and, in manufacturing at least, it is either blown, e.g. for vases, or floated on top of metal,...

Meat could be used in 3D printing to produce a soft food with specific nutrients and suitable for people who have problems with chewing or swallowing. By using a meat extract as ink, layer-by-layer, a food could be created that is as soft as butter and like meat, packed with nutrients. Meat and Livestock Australia was alerted to the possibility of red meat three-dimensional printing after seeing it done with chicken meat in Germany. The research, development and marketing body has investigated a way to turn every last bit of meat from the bone into a high value product and...

Chris Kelsey is a high school dropout. He’s also a millionaire and a serial entrepreneur. “Growing up as a teenager, I didn’t have any money,” he tells Tech in Asia. “And when I started Appsitude, I finally did, and I was thinking, what is something that we can do to change the world?” Chris is the co-founder and CEO of Cazza, a construction automation company. Before that, he was the CEO of Appsitude, a mobile app development and marketing startup that he founded when he was 17. In October, Appsitude was acquired by Indian entrepreneur and investor Deepansh Jain, giving...

The demand for body organs to be used for transplantation is undoubtedly very high. In fact, US Department of Health and Human Services statistics show that in the U.S., there are currently 119,966 people that need an organ transplant to live. However, there only have been 11,777 organ donors as of October 2016. Another morbid fact that society faces today is that more and more evidence of organ trafficking is being exposed, with reports that some of these body organs like kidneys and livers sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars in the black market. There is a need obviously...

"[Three-dimensional] printing brings something to magnet design which we could previously only dream of," said researcher Dieter Süss. VIENNA, Oct. 25 (UPI) -- From a technological perspective, making a powerful magnet is no problem. Precisely controlling the shape of magnet's magnetic field, however, has proven difficult -- until now. Engineers at TU Wien have for the first time designed and produced magnets using a 3D printer. The method offers scientists newfound control over the size and shape of the magnetic field, allowing them to produce magnets that better meet the needs of a range of technologies. "The strength of a...

Remember the Trinus 3D printer? While 3D printing startups have previously been responsible for some huge crowdfunding successes on Kickstarter, Kodama and their Trinus 3D printer showed the world how it’s done by raising more than $1.64 million USD during their extremely successful campaign. That achievement grew out of the appeal of the all-metal Trinus 3D printer, the first all-metal 3D printer to dip below the $500 price point. In fact, early bird pledgers picked one up for just $199. While huge Kickstarter successes sometimes create equally huge logistic challenges, Kodama seems to have thought of everything and the first...

In 2014, a small start-up shook SOLIDWORKS World with a game-changing technology capable of reinforcing nylon 3D-printed parts with continuous carbon fiber. Markforged, out of Cambridge, Mass., demonstrated that for about $5,000, any machine shop, manufacturing facility or lab could produce carbon fiber–reinforced parts on-demand. The company has since upgraded its system with the Mark Two 3D printer and released a number of new materials, including Kevlar reinforcement and a chopped carbon fiber-nylon composite. Now, however, Markforged aims to change the 3D printing game once again with a new printer dubbed the Mark X. ENGINEERING.com spoke to Markforged CEO and...

For Perumal Gandhi and Ryan Pandya, the impetus to start their company in 2014 really came down to cheese. Gandhi, now 25, was trying to cut back on meat and dairy for sustainability and animal welfare reasons, but he desperately missed pizza. Pandya, 24, was experimenting with veganism but one incident in particular gave him pause: He bought a bagel slathered with dairy-free cream cheese that was so sad and soppy that it dripped all over his leg. “It’s asking a lot of someone to become vegan,” says Pandya. Cheese is only the beginning. As he puts it, “you have...

We recently reported on an alliance between four companies that has 3D printed heart structures in a weightless environment. As the first installment of our regular new feature where we put one big question to one really smart person, we asked Euguene D. Boland, the chief scientist of Techshot — one of the companies involved in the research — what the single biggest impediment is to having lab-grown organs available right now. The single biggest impediment is one familiar to many other engineers in their disciplines as well, it's transport. In our case, we are not moving people or cars...