Hasta La Ideas

We’ve seen plenty of projects from DIYer & digital fabricator Samuel Bernier before, from his Core77 Design Award honored Project RE_ to collaborative IKEA-hacking. He’s also very lucky to have his interests intersect with his day job at Le FabShop, where he is the Directeur Créatif. Here he shares their latest project, 3D Printer + Electric Car.

Last February, Bertier [Luyt], founder of le FabShop, was stuck in a traffic jam in Paris. He was driving an Autolib, one of these small electric cars you can rent directly from an automated station on the street (similar to bicycle-sharing). Since le FabShop is a booming company, Bertier is always traveling. Looking at “cigarette plug” inside the car, he realized that he could optimize his time on the road to be more productive (phone excluded).

People had already plugged in a objects such as TV, espresso machines, game consoles… why not a 3D printer? Bertier could build prototypes and samples for our clients while driving and save some trips to the office—he often stops by our studio just to pick some of my printed models.

The idea was on our very long To-Do list until we met some very nice people from Renault’s Creative lab who told us about their brand new electric car, Zoe. We made some tests with our own company car. It worked perfectly.

It went very fast from there. When the team came back from the NY MakerFaire, we moved our material close to Château de Versaille and filmed a little story while experimenting 3D printing in an electric car.

Our intern Tatiana created a number of storyboards—a plumber missing a “not so standard part”; a young man printing a gift for his girlfriend on the way home; a dad building sand tools for his children at the beach—but the architect and the last-minute model stood out.

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It’s crazy, when you think about it: You park your car in a hot parking lot. Come back later and the car interior is absolutely baking, thanks to the sun’s passive energy. So you then spend fossil fuel energy cranking up the A/C to get the interior back down to a habitable temperature. It would make more mathematical sense, and be more ecologically sound, if we intelligently used the sun’s energy to cancel itself out, by powering the car and the A/C.

That may be a long way off, but we’re getting closer to that ideal, as evidenced by Synthesis Design + Architecture’s Pure Tension, a collapsible pavilion designed to showcase Volvo’s V60 Hybrid Electric Diesel. SDA’s design was the winner of a Volvo design competition to create a pavilion to merely showcase the car at traveling events, but principal Alvin Huang and his team took things further: The crazily flowing shape of the Pure Tension is covered in fabric-embedded photovoltaic panels that absorb energy, from either the sun or artificial lighting indoors, which can then be transmitted to the car. In other words, it’s like a huge sunshade that you can plug the car into.

It also fits handily into the trunk when broken down. Yes, you still need a crew to assemble the thing, but this isn’t intended to be a practical, ready-to-buy solution; it’s a pure exploration of what’s possible using current technology and fabrication techniques. It also handily incorporates the “dynamic mesh relaxation” process—”a real-time digital form-finding process that utilizes computation to simulate physical forces in materials to discover form/force equilibrium” that SDA has been independently researching. It’s something like “tensegrity” on steroids, or what Buckminster Fuller could have done had he had access to CAD.

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The 3D-printing community is abuzz with news of an interesting development for the 4D printing movement: The U.S. Army Research Office has taken a keen interest in the possibilities of 4D printing. How keen? US $855,000 worth. That’s the size of the grant the USARO has awarded to researchers at three schools—Harvard’s School of Engineering & Applied Sciences, the University of Illinois, and the University of Pittsburgh Swanson School of Engineering—to further their research into 3D-printed objects that can transform themselves over time.

The selected grantee universities will not be working completely independently, but are instead expected to collaborate. And the research isn’t pie-in-the-sky, but intended to produce fairly focused results:

“Rather than construct a static material or one that simply changes its shape, we’re proposing the development of adaptive, biomimetic composites that reprogram their shape, properties or functionality on demand, based upon external stimuli,” says Anna C. Balazs, a professor of Chemical Engineering at UPSSE. “By integrating our abilities to print precise, three-dimensional, hierarchically-structured materials, synthesize stimuli-responsive components, and predict the temporal behavior of the system, we expect to build the foundation for the new field of 4D printing.”

Due to the source of the funding, initial applications will presumably be military in nature; a press release teases the notion of vehicle coatings that change structure in response to the immediate environment and soldiers’ uniforms that visually adjust their camouflage or physically adjust their protective measures against projectiles.

You’re undoubtedly wondering, as we were: Why was 4D printing pioneer Skylar Tibbits not among the grantees? We can only speculate that the USARO reckons Tibbits is already on track to make breakthroughs, with or without their money. Strange as it sounds, in the world of financed researched, perhaps it’s a silent vote of confidence.

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When you think about digitally fabricating metal, you probably picture steel powder or something unusual like Alumide, which is nylon laced with aluminum dust. But now Shapeways has added a simultaneously new and old-school flavor to their mix: Brass.

They’re offering the stuff in three finishes: Gold-Plated, for when bling is the thing; Polished, which has a slightly more-subdued-than-gold yellowish tint; and Raw, for that classy, rustic look. While Shapeways will actually have your Gold-Plated and Polished finishes hand-rubbed for smoothness, the Raw will be left alone, providing a rough-surfaced matte finish for those looking to create antique effects.

Unsurprisingly, this stuff doesn’t come out of the machine in one go:

[Our] Brass models are fabricated using a complex five-step process. First, the model is printed in wax using a specialized high-resolution 3D Printer. It is then put in a container where liquid plaster is poured in around it. Once the plaster sets, the wax is melted out in a furnace, and the remaining plaster becomes the mold. Molten brass is poured into this mold and set to harden. The plaster is broken away, revealing your new product. Raw Brass is briefly tumbled. Polished and Gold Plated Brass are carefully cleaned and hand polished. Gold Plated Brass goes through a final electroplating process for an outside coat of 22k gold. Please be aware that polishing and plating can wear down or fill in very fine details and edges.

Thanks to this tip from 3Ders.org, would-be brass orderers can enter the code “oc3mv” on Shapeways’ site to get a 10% discount on the Polished and Raw stuff. But hurry—the offer expires at 9pm (EST) on October 2nd.

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This little 85-cent white plastic thing you see below is called an Upper Sash Slide Latch, and it has caused me no end of trouble. It holds the top part of a tilt-for-cleaning window in place, and when this chintzy little part breaks, the window can swing down like a drawbridge—as an acquaintance of mine found out the hard way (he required stitches). After two of these latches failed in my studio and I looked to replace the part, I found it nearly impossible to search for online, as there were no manufacturer’s marks anywhere on the part or the window.

If I had a MakerBot, I would’ve broken out the calipers, created a CAD file of an unbroken example of the latch taken from another window, 3D-printed the thing and been done with it. But if the part was exceedingly complicated or organically shaped, I’d have been SOL. So MakerBot’s newly-announced Digitizer, a desktop 3D scanner, is sounding pretty cool.

The sleek-looking device has a small turntable on which you place your object, which then gets hit by a laser. Provided your object isn’t shiny, reflective or fuzzy, the software then spits out a “clean, watertight 3D model” ready for printing or tweaking. Here’s company founder Bre Pettis pitching the thing:

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