3D printing has changed the way people approach hardware design, but most printers share a basic limitation: they essentially build objects layer by layer, generally from the bottom up. This new system from UC Berkeley, however, builds them all at once more or less by projecting a video through a jar of light-sensitive resin.
The device, which its creators call the replicator (but shouldn’t, because that’s a Makerbot trademark), is mechanically quite simple. It’s hard to explain it better than Berkeley’s Hayden Taylor, who led the research:
Basically, you’ve got an off-the-shelf video projector, which I literally brought in from home, and then you plug it into a laptop and use it to project a series of computed images, while a motor turns a cylinder that has a 3D-printing resin in it.
Obviously there are a lot of subtleties to it — how you formulate the resin, and, above all, how you compute the images that are going to be projected, but the barrier to creating a very simple version of this tool is not that high.
Using light to print isn’t new — many devices out there use lasers or other forms of emitted light to cause material to harden in desired …read more
Source:: TechCrunch Gadgets
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