
The Carbon3D printer pulls complex shapes out of a dish of plastic - bootload
http://www.wired.com/2015/10/carbon3d/
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Negative1
The article slants like stereolithography is a difficult to achieve
("magical") tech and these guys are pioneering some new kind of revolutionary
product but I'm pretty sure outfits like Formlabs were doing this years ago
(and now many others; see kickstarter). I didn't see it on my skim through but
have they developed some revolutionary improvement to the old UV developer
resin and projector technique?

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Veedrac
See [http://carbon3d.com/](http://carbon3d.com/) for the slick presentation
and
[http://www.sciencemag.org/content/347/6228/1349.abstract](http://www.sciencemag.org/content/347/6228/1349.abstract)
for the juicy details.

The main innovation is allowing curing whilst submerged by using an oxygen
permeable membrane. This allows continuous curing, which creates really high
quality plastics - supposedly equivalent to injection moulds, really high
resolution models - high enough to generate smooth slants, and really fast
print times - over an order of magnitude improvement.

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monopolemagnet
The two current biggest issues with thermoplastic 3D printers are:

\- electricity usage: heating a baseplate, feed head and mechanical effort of
moving a massive apparatus bazillion^3 times.

\- speed (or lack thereof) of moving one or two heads those bz^3 times to get
anything made

We're still in the "horse-and-buggy"-days of distributed manufacturing, so one
approach or another will eventually find something scalable, Edison-style.
More inventions and approaches are definitely a good-thing.

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yincrash
This isn't a thermoplastic printer?

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monopolemagnet
Read the article: looks like a light-curing printer, which prints 2 dimensions
at a time instead of 1.

~~~
yincrash
I did read the article. I'm just confused about what the GGP comment about
thermoplastic printers was about for an article that isn't about thermoplastic
printers.

