liquidbuddha

This week I attended the Inside 3D Printing conference in San Jose where saw a terrific presentation from a representative of PARC, showing their progress in Printed Electronics. It was an inspiring presentation, showing how their R&D in conductive inks have yielded successes in additive manufactured transistors, coils, sensors, circuits, and batteries. One prototype showed a printed circuit, which included a temperature sensor, circuit, battery and display which would alter the display if a threshold temp was exceeded... imagine your frozen food with a embedded printed circuit in the packaging, alerting you if the temperature has risen above 35 degs... a 3Dprinted spoiler alert. From what I gathered at the conference, this is now primarily a material sciences game. With regard to FDM strategies, there will be and need to be advances in multi-head printing's soft-side [g-code generation, slicing algorithms, etc.] But IMHO, the next "wow" moments will be in conductive extrudable materials, allowing the creative plug-n-play integration of OTS components with printed parts. I imagine the open-source community is ripe for this realm of play and collaboration. On the commercial side of additive manufacturing, I expect we'll see a new class of units, leveraging advances such as those of PARC's conductive inks.. 3DPrinters with dozens of heads, able to dial in not just conductive pathways of preferred resistance, for example, but complete machines, ready to charge and boot... with sensors, memory, displays, transmitters and receivers. This reality is much closer than I though just a week ago. Where I'm most curious are advances in printing of energizable components... innovations in printed solar panels, for example, or passive inductive collectors.. or capacitors... the RepRap dream may soon be realized.