Rapid assembly using fabbed materials

3D Printing & Imaging

You printed some fabjects with your 3D printer, now what? Ph.D student Jon Hiller and professor Hod Lipson of the Cornell Computational Synthesis Laboratory created this concept for an automated voxel factory.

Imagine a desktop fabricator capable of making perfectly repeatable, arbitrary, multi material 3D objects with microscale precision. The objects would be composed of millions or even billions of small physical building blocks (voxels). Some building blocks could be hard, some could be soft. Some could be red, others green or blue. Some could be conductive and others could perform computation or store energy. Some could even be sensors and others actuators, and so on and so forth. With a relatively small repertoire of building block types and a rapid assembler, one could assemble a relatively large variety of machines at high resolution. How would that work?

[Via VoxelFab]

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My interests include writing, electronics, RPGs, scifi, hackers & hackerspaces, 3D printing, building sets & toys. @johnbaichtal nerdage.net

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