Do we all need a 3D Printer.. yet?

Internet DNA Podcast

The rise and… pan of 3d printing, but will it be the future? Will printing with organic material allow us to live a green life; it doesn’t matter if it wears out, or isn’t strong forever, as you just print another one. Imagine printing storage boxes at the moment you need them, or re-purposing whole rooms to become something else.. careful going out for the night the kids may have recycled and re-printed the furniture. We discuss the type of printers now and in the future, the type of applications they may fulfil, and spend too much time focusing on eggcups.. but no mention of Covid-19 we promise.

Transcription

(this transcription is written by robots… so don’t be surprised!)

Hello and welcome to this week's episode internet DNA with me, Abby. This week we're going to discuss three D printing. I was waiting for something a bit more on that. You're obviously quite underwhelmed. Maybe I should say do we need a three D printer in the home? That's more of my angle is that you shouldn't be underwhelmed. It's the future. As with everything else that we talk about. Okay. Will you explain to me why you believe that it's the future? That we have one in our house. I believe that every home will have a threeD printer and that it will be really useful. Well, yes, but what would be the environmental impact and also the cost impact of us printing it directly rather than having a larger factory developing them for us at a lower cost at the moment. Three D printing is really for manufacturing, isn't it? Yeah. Niche things like people that make models, people that do a bit of home engineering or DIY might have one for creating very particular little bits of bracket. I can understand that kind of use very niche and hobby, but I can't imagine in my life in the last two weeks I've not gone, Oh if only I could print a cup. I mean I don't even know what I would print. Yeah, you could print the cup, you could print a bookend, you could print the knob that's broken. You could print a holder for your eggs. You could print a snack bowl cause you hadn't done anything to put your Christmas in. You could print a Nutcracker cause you'd realize you didn't have a Nutcracker or even a garlic presser. All these things you're like, I haven't got one of those. A bottle opener cause someone stuffed it down the back of the sofa. Have you got a spatular? Yeah, I've got two spatulas. I've even got a cutting spatula, maybe three. Maybe I do need three, but the things that I would like to print are things like a TV remote because they're, the things I actually use that I actually want are much more complex than a spatular. An egg cup. I mean a deck cup would be great. I can imagine. I might print an egg cup, but for the cost of the printer, I could just walk to Sainsbury's and get some egg cups. This is my problem with them. How much do you think a home printer costs? 250 quid for a decent one? Yeah. Anything from a hundred to 800 pounds. I don't know how many eight cups you get through, but it soon it would cover its costs, but you know bowls for Chris, you never have to wash up ever again. See when you're printing single Terriel things, that's when I really can't. Now if you're going to say to me, ah, but in a hundred years you would literally be at design and spec your own computer or your own mobile phone and print it in 25 then like, do you know what? That could be quite interesting thoughts. Wow. Do I have to have some materials just lying around my house because we need a least the elements, I don't know where I'm going to get my bore on from. I don't know where I'm going to just, you know what I'm saying? I like the idea of three D printing and I can see it has some really useful applications for some very specific types of people. But everyone having one in their house because they run out of egg cups occasionally just seems a little bit out there. To me you could print a selfie stick and when it's someone's birthday and you've forgotten to get them a present, you could quickly bring them or present. Yeah, another cup. Hey you could be known as the egg cup man. And every time we go, Oh I've got a new material this week I'm going to print it in sparkly plastic. So I've got a friend who has got one of these things cause he's a modeler and what he does is he will take three D scans of usually accessories and just print loads of them. So he's not having to go out and buy for 10 quid man with knapsack with com and hat and he can just print. He's a Mugler. He makes models. Oh yeah. Okay. I was thinking of modeling house. Not man with knapsack. No cause he's one of these kinds of guys that makes the houses out of bits of wood and polystyrene. Why doesn't he make it out of the three D printer? I think because the substrate is quite expensive. It is. It's about 50 pounds a liter, maybe printing houses. It's cheaper just to make it out of the materials that he's used to making out of. But what is expensive in modeling is all the little accessories and all the bets and the little men and he can make the man posed in different shapes or he wants to make a headlight of a truck that was only in service in between 1942 and 1943 on the Western front, which not available on that model. I really understand that from his point of view, but that's quite a niche place to be. And I'm sure that there are people who do home engineering that also do that sort of thing. And I know that there are a lot of nerds who just like printing stuff and I can understand you as an artist. I think you know how potters and artists make quite strange, not particularly good clay [inaudible] and pots. You can't drink out of the things that are too fat. I thought that I could become one of those artists, but because I'm a digital artist so I could be a three D printing Potter. So that was quite a good idea. Now I see the point of that. I can see there's an application for you for me, I'm going to persuade you, but I just wanted to get back to the egg cups. Maybe my thing when I'm a top artist three D printing is I will to add cups and you can do this really cool thing and it's called tensegrity or tensional integrity. And because it's so strong you can use the tension of tiny strands of this stuff to hold up different parts of an egg cup or a table. So it looks like it's floating. Yeah. And the other good thing about three D printing, which is why you like it is it has some really good words. So that was a good read. And the other thing, you obviously need an STL file, which is the three D file that the printer prints from that we will come on through because obviously you've got to be able to make that, but that stands for stereo lithography, but some nerds don't like that, so they have decided that it's actually stands for a standard triangle language or standard tesselation language. Yeah. Do you know what tesselation means? I do because I'm into graphics cards and graphics cards are all about tesselation polygons and shading. Tell me what tesselation means then. Tesselation as far as I understand it is how many blocks or polygons you're using in order to describe a shape? Am I [inaudible] right? Yeah, it's fitting shapes snugly together. I thought that was a brilliant word. Tessellation. I quite liked it with the tens gritty, so there's a good reason to like three D printing obviously. I just find in the future you will be able to print clothes. You will be able to print food. I think the really good use will you be able to print food. This is the question that I keep asking myself, which is the problem with printers is that you need the raw materials. So when people go, Oh, you'll be able to print a mobile phone, I'm thinking, no, I don't think I will. I don't think I want a barrel of mercury just hanging out in my house. I don't think I will want all these rare earth metals just sitting in my house. Bearing in mind they're rare earth metals. So their bloody route, which to start with, is it really good that they're just sitting in a VAT in everybody's house? No, you can't print a mobile phone. You can print a mobile phone case just like you print a PS four controller, but can print a flowerpot that looks like a Pierce for controller and then you can give it to someone as a present. So in processes like microprocessors, like CPU is at sit-ins your computer. We're now down to what's the seven micro nanometer process. So they're actually literally printing seven nanometer wafers onto each other. That's how they build them up. Not with what we would call a home three D printer, but they are just layering these tiny layers on top of each other and if you look at a circuit board, it's much the same. They print a layer and then actually design in where the electricity flows across that board and they print it out. So it's not that you can't print these things, you can't print them in one go. You can't say, right, print me a PlayStation controller. But what you could do is say, print me the cover, print me the little stick, print me the buttons, print me that circuit board. Now you might have to buy certain bits because you won't have the materials, but you should be largely able to at least print the bits you need to fix your controller. You're playing fortnight, your friend calls you a new, you throw the controller at the wall, it cracked the shell and the little toggle, the bit falls off and breaks. You should be able to reprint the shell and the tug of the bed. It is very good photography beds, especially lids and knobs. Obviously it's really good for manufacturing. And that's been used now we have lived through a generation or a few generations of mass producing things. Everything we got, the way it got cheaper from the 50s was because they could do it in bulk. The lovely thing about this is we start to go customized and personalized again. So the small person can build great products. Again, we don't all have to have the same toast or the same spatula. They can start to look different. I quite like that. I think that that's interesting. So do I, but maybe there's more of a, um, let's say a business for a company called, I don't know Orinoco where you send your STL files, even if they're complex, multiple STL files and there's a company with some really huge printers or really high capacity printers and you get your product back the next day and then you get over the problem of your having to have all these weird materials just sitting in your house on the off chance that you might want to make an egg cup with a steel lip on it. It's a different types of material is important. The fact that you can print in more than just plastic is fascinating that you can print in metal, you can print it every sort of [inaudible] and you can print in graphene the strongest [inaudible] so you can make bicycles. That's why you need a three D printer. So you can print your bicycles. Yes, no. Okay. What is the difference between graphite and graphene? So carbon fiber and graphite is [inaudible] graphite soft graphene is a single layer, literally a single layer of graphite, so it's a thousand times thinner than a human hair. That's how thin it is. And it has an immense amount of strength, almost like a diamond. And you can obviously then print layers of this stuff together to create meant strengths. It was touted five years ago as the material of the future, but the technology is only now developing where we can actually manipulate this stuff in any sort of sense, but it's conductive so you can use it to make anything you want, like super thin electronics or super stiff bikes. So let's be honest, carbon is everywhere. So that as a material that you can say actually it can be applied to almost everything. There's one material to rule them all, which is quite a nice thought. And you can say Rao, if you could make graphing egg cups and they would never ever break. I was about to ask what about their cuts but is it quite poisonous? No, it's carbon. Okay. Just checking. [inaudible] fell down the side of the news. But if you really wanted your egg cup with human has with strand holding the top bit up tent style strengths too, how would that be that your egg is just floating in the air? Yeah. Yeah, it would be amazing. But I think the real solution is going to be a company like Orinoco where you send them in. I don't know. I just called it Orinoco cause it's like the Amazon rather than you ordering a product that's already made you say make me this product and send it to me tomorrow please. There are three D printing companies that you can do that or no, great name. Explain why you got the name. But it's a South American river, much like the Amazon also I had a pig called or an okay, here's a one boob [inaudible]. Now the thing that I think is good, three D printing is education. I mean this is a bit like the holograms and everything else that we've talked about, but being able to print atoms and planets and things and also to teach children's strengths. Like why is a triangle so strong? Why is everything basically building out our triangles that doesn't really teach straight through. If we're saying one hair strand can hold up the egg, you can use different materials, can't you? So you can say, right, we're going to print this in fairly ordinary plastic and we're going to see how thin we can make the struts of this before the bridge breaks. Or how long can we make the bridge before its structural integrity fails? Not because the triangles aren't strong enough, but because the pressure is coming across the entire bridge onto a single triangle. And that's a really good way of showing and teaching children and letting them print it and then test it. That's, I can totally understand. But yeah, again, that's not in our house. That's in a school which will have a three D printing room, which they already have most secondary schools and I think that's a brilliant way of doing it. So we should actually talk about the different types of three D printer because there is the one that we'd been talking about, which is a nozzle makes layers and yeah, it's glass. It looks like a sort of hamster's cage. I always say pet in it, but then there's the other one where it's liquid and the laser beams into it and what the laser hits goes hard and so it's only comes out of the liquid and this thing is made. So you don't hear that much. I guess it's much more industrial. Yes, and it's quite new as well, that process. So the, the original process was literally like printing. So you just print a liquid over and over again. Really thin layers. Now what they're saying, we can suspend this liquid and use lasers and it's much more accurate and much cleaner is even stronger. Yeah, pretty industrials. You find that you've got both running till you're laying down layers. That's how carbon fiber works. You put layers at different angles to each other and the different angles is where the strength is of that carbon fiber. You might want a piece of carbon fiber that is strong only in one direction and therefore you lay all the strips in that direction that you may want it to have strengths in two directions. Then you lay the strip in a different direction so you don't have cross layers but you want to print actually in the strips to first type of printer. Makes more sense and what you'll find is your get moles. He mowed printers which print different parts of it in different ways because different parts of the product required different properties and then you can get bigger as well. So you can start to print cartels, you can start to print houses. Yeah, smart houses that just build themselves and have the shell and then inside they know how to heat. They know when they're getting broken so they can mend themselves. If you're interested in that, you should watch. I think it's the first, it might be the second episode of the second series of abstract where there's this amazing Israeli NGO who builds houses out of things like Apple pectin. Yeah, no, it's the stuff on the side of apples, isn't it? The stuff in the seeds. That's awesome. Nick [inaudible] building after Boston. She's not building off snuck houses. She's feeling tight tin houses. But you should watch it because the houses are beautiful. That organically formed, they create a structure and then they grow stuff over it. It's unbelievable stuff. You should watch that. Anyway, abstract. Just in general. I've watched all of them with my kids. They are phenomenal. So that writes a lot about hackers and makers. And the future of three D printing is Cory Doctorow. There's one walk away and also another brilliant book that this guy Prince, a whole theme park to rival Disney. He has a thing against his D. no, it's called down and out in the magic kingdom. Both very good. Both taking three D printers to the extreme. It touches on as well, which is something that we should touch on medical printing. So obviously it's amazing that you can start to print hearing AIDS and things that fit exactly to your ear or or things that go under your feet if you've got problems with your legs, but to be able to start to print organs so that you print an organ that's net that your body's not going to reject because it's basically your organ. Although what I believe you do, and correct me if I'm wrong, is that you build the structure and then you grow the organ on it. I thought you could print skin from cells. You say what you do is [inaudible]. Yeah, you print out the substrate so you print out, I'm going to say like a cotton material which is imprinted with the cells and then you feed them and they grow like up gel. Oddly, your body would reject it if those weren't yourselves or at least can be recognized as your cells. Otherwise they have to put you on really horrible drugs that make your body not recognize that it's not yours. Which I think when you get things like hot trucks, parts and that sort of thing, you'd have to sit on these drugs for quite awhile. Just stop your body rejecting the heart. That's quite clearly not it's they print bits of bone basements, right? Yes. And maybe one day I will get my collarbone three D printed, which would be really nice. And then in the future maybe people will want to customize themselves so they will get collarbones printed slightly differently from other people's collarbones so you might have along it. Yeah, I worry about that because I look at post Malone and think that these people shouldn't really be allowed to draw on themselves at that age cause they might do stupid things. He's one of these pop story people who's drawn on himself with a pyro as far as I can tell, but all over himself. But anyway, you could augment yourself in your future so that you are not asked for juice. You are more customized and personalized. You never know. I mean people might get bored with tattooing like they have a bit with piercing. It's the next thing is another thing is also we could do it in VR and then it's not so real, but then we just get out and pudgy sitting in our seats looking at oil. Yeah, it's all very, well I was talking about three D printing, but someone has to design what is three D printed, so there's so many STL files, stereolithography files or standard tessellation language files out there that you can use and you have to talk about the laboratory gun because for some reason the moment three D printers were talked about, it was we can't have them cause we'll start printing guns. I think one person did actually print a gun and he did try and say, Oh I was just messing around, but he went to prison for it. You need CAD software, computer aided design that helps you create 3d structures and objects. I think Adobe have one dimensions. There's a SketchUp as free CAD and they're quite difficult to get to know how to use and that's what I was about to say hopefully will be the side effect of people doing this is they will become less complicated to use because they take some getting used to that three D view on a two D screen. If you had a monitor where you could project a hologram, they would be a damn site easier to use because you'd be working in the three day rather than in two D and trying to understand what that 3d representation is. I went on a three D printing course and I learned how to do the 3d designing skills and it's very counterintuitive. It's a bit like, you know when you try and do something in a mirror and your hand goes to the wrong place because it's a reflection so your brain gets completely confused or trying to Pat your head and start your tummy at the same time. It's a bit like that. It's somehow feels a bit back to friends and it is quite confusing but quite fun. But what I like and what I hope we'll get more so with your three D printer, a laser scanner, so you could be really lazy and as long as you've got the thing you just scan it so then your model guy can just scan humans doing all that and I think that's what he does is he has to scan them first and then he puts them into a three D modeling tool that he can then adapt. There are thousands and thousands of libraries of existing items. Once you've created that headlight for the 1942 only literally, then you probably put it into a library and other people use it at the moment. Three D printing is a very friendly place. Yeah, exactly. Obviously once everyone starts getting them, it will become a lot more commercialized and some people will start charging for their things because as you say, that software's quite awkward and if you can just find one, why would you spend hours building? Maybe you can then have a career as being an STL final crates on you create really weird objects that you sell. It's a whole new business that aren't there yet. Etsy will be flooded with weird plastic objects. That is one side that we haven't touched on is how green is it? If I'm saying right, the future is printing plastic, is it really bad for the environment? What's this carbon footprint like? Pretty bad. Well, if it's plastic, yes, anything that's oil-based we should be avoiding at some point. Then they talk about resins. You need to start using natural resins, but then they wouldn't be so strong, but then you can print another one. This is point, which is why if you can print them from naturally occurring resins or let's say you could grow a fungus or some sort of bacteria or some, so that's pretty much inexhaustible. Yeah, it's going to break after a year, but that's fine. You just print another one and then it can just biodegrade. That is a very clever insight into the whole three D printing. It doesn't need to last forever. That's the point. So let's use an actual raw materials that we haven't been using for the fact that we want them to last longer, which I always feel a bit confused about considering we live in such a disposable society now anyway. Can you print plastic? I bet you could print plastic bags but not plastic or plastic boxes. How many storage boxes do you often go? I could just do the storage box about yay. Bake with our little lid on it. See you found something could be all made from natural raw materials when you didn't need it anymore. Some might last for five years. Some might last for five weeks and you will choose which shop straight you're going to use for the different uses of it. I think what we need to stop doing is making the things that will last forever. Imagine people's lofts in hundreds of years to come. They've created all their things, they've created boxed and then they've gone up 10 years later and it's all disintegrated into a bowl of death. Yes, and that would be good because then you stop keeping things in your loft that you don't need anymore. Just get rid of them or recycle them. If they've sat in your loft for 10 years and disintegrated because you didn't care about them, maybe you should have recycled all those materials. Yeah. I'm sitting here with boxes full of wires that I will never use. Now, if there was a way I could take them to a electrical part, recycling place that I trusted would actually recycle them to the metal and the plastic, then I would be quite interested in doing it, but because I know that they just get thrown in a ship and ship somewhere else, but it's not really my idea of green. If things are all starting to be made from the same materials, then if you haven't got that resin that you need to make it, you could just go and melt down something else and recycle it, stick it in the top of the funnel and outcomes, the new thing that you want. Yeah. We're making it sound really simple. Imagine your children, you go out for the evening and you're uncertain of wants to build something and you see that they've just recycled tools. It's so far and the entire time. Okay. Yeah. All the wiring from the back of your computer cause they needed to build a PlayStation. But that offers some really interesting ideas where when resources get really rare, how do you manage that? And maybe the fact you can self recycle everything because it's all made from AB 20 different substrates and that's all you get. And they're all organic apart from metals. So I don't know how you can't find exciting. Anyway, I've got another final thing that I think is really gonna peak your enthusiasm, especially after what you said last week on the children are learning about money. You could print piggy banks, do they, I mean, and while I'm going to curb my enthusiasm for the piggy banks, I don't think my children really even know what a piggy bank is. Yeah. Because they've never really had cash beyond like 50 P which they are literally going to spend in five seconds time because they've all had cards since they were quite young. I can see almost at the same time we get into printing a cashless society because I see very little value in cash in many ways. Okay, so the piggy bank is going to be obsolete. We could print our own bank cards. Yes we could. They would obviously have to be some form of technology that allowed us to imprint in our bank details rather than some other dudes and bank details. Oh that's where you use the graphy. Yes. On a vast amount of encryption it starts to get very high tech and AI. It's when you combine the two, the three D printing with the smart technology. Yeah. So at the moment you run out of hard drive space on your computer. I mean no one does anymore, but imagine you could and in fact all you have is an organic drive which just grows. It gets to 80% of its capacity and it just grows. It just says, yeah, I need more. I need to be more space than I am now. So I will just grow some extra capacity. Then you can get into quite interesting things and that's why I quite like the idea of organics. That's slightly blow my mind. So space can grow into more space for you to fill up the space. That's too much for me. We're going to go back to one of my favorite authors, but there's a great scene in it where a spaceship starts converting all its living quarters into engine because it needs to go somewhere really quickly and it's just that idea that you could repurpose any part of you to do some other thing. I just thought it was really interesting. Papa's probably like Baba puffers. Are they the horrible elephant? No, that's Baba. These were blobs and the blobs could turn into whatever they needed to be at that moment. It might be a rowing boat, it might be a cricket bat, re-purposing world of barber, Papa's. That's what I want. Not the horror of it, Alison. So we're back into the reuse, recycle. That's the part that I think it becomes really interesting with printing or what ever is. I just don't think we're there yet. The reason why I'm not interested at the moment is because I think its application, there's very limited. It will increase. And you, as you say, it's the technology of the future. Well, yes, it may well be, but not in the terms of having a little hamster case that prints out some gray plastic stuff. Perhaps not. But you can buy 3d pens at the moment, which I'm not convinced they're very good because they're already 20 pounds, but it's what my children want for Christmas. Well, they sound fantastic president for 20 quid. Simpering it on, so you can start drawing on the wall and you could actually make a thing that came out the wall, like a little nasty thing to put your thing on or something in or so. Yeah, they sound interesting. You could draw in a cup. I think you're gonna need some damn patients. We can go on and go on that now. Time's up. People have given us lots of patients while listening. Yeah. People who've learned way too much about the possible future of three D printing. I don't know if it's something that can ever be too bad. No. I think there are certain subjects where you can just know too much about them. Maybe shoes. I think you can know too much of my shoes. That's interesting. I know someone that knows so much about shoes and it gets really, really interesting, but different types of materials and what it does and how you could use them and how that affects even your speed. These days. I've got a friend who does concrete and there's more about concrete than you'd ever want to know, but that's what I'm saying. For him, it's important for me. It's interesting to a point and then after a point it's just, you know what? I never going to need to know this about concrete. Okay. On that note, let's go. I look forward to speaking to you next week. Bye.

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Dan & Abi work, talk & dream in tech. If you would like to discuss any speaking opportunity contact us.