Graduate designer Mugi Yamamoto has designed an inkjet printer that sits on top of a stack of paper and eats its way down through the pile (+ slideshow).
The compact Stack printer by industrial designer Mugi Yamamoto is simply placed on top of a pile of A4 paper, rather than loading paper into the device in batches. The sheets are fed through rollers underneath the machine and exit on the top.
Yamamoto told Dezeen that his intention was to reduce the space taken up by a printer. “Thanks to this new way of printing it is possible to remove the paper tray, the bulkiest element in common printers,” said Yamamoto. “This concept allows a very light appearance and avoids frequent reloading.”
The designer looked at commercial printers and modified existing mechanisms to create the working prototype.
The printed paper creates a new pile on top of the machine. “It’s not endless – it might go up to maybe 200 sheets of paper,” Yamamoto told Dezeen.
Yamamoto completed the project while studying industrial and product design at Ecole Cantonale d’Art de Lausanne (ECAL) in Switzerland. He was also selected as one of ten young designers to exhibit at this year’s Design Parade 8 at Villa Hoailles in Hyeres, France.
The designer was born in Tokyo and is currently undertaking a design internship in Nürnberg, Germany.
This clever gadget, called Activ, makes it possible to harness the kinetic energy created by your own body! The personal electricity generator was designed to be worn on the knee- with each step, it juices up the battery a little more. After it’s full, just attach a USB cord directly to Activ to power your cell phone or other device. Instead of plugging into the wall… plug into you!
– Yanko Design Timeless Designs – Explore wonderful concepts from around the world! Shop CKIE – We are more than just concepts. See what’s hot at the CKIE store by Yanko Design! (The Power of YOU was originally posted on Yanko Design)
Réalisée par JL Design et KORB pour l’identité visuelle de la chaîne CCTV, « Human Movement » est une série de 4 vidéos proposant de traduire le mouvement humain en diverses matières telles que l’acier, le bois ou encore l’eau. Une réalisation d’une incroyable beauté à découvrir en vidéo dans la suite.
One of my least favourite tasks is running errands. In the winter, the heavy snow and below-freezing temperatures make driving difficult. In the summer, there are always delays and detours due to construction. Errands are time consuming, and if you’ve got lots of errands to run, you can feel like you’re on the go all the time.
To simplify the errand process, make a list before you start of all the places you need to visit: hardware store, dry cleaner, grocery store, etc. Check the websites for business hours. Pre-order items either using the website or calling the shop to make sure they have the items in stock. Sometimes checking the shop’s social media sites such as Facebook or FourSquare can provide you with valuable tips such as the closest car park to the shop.
It can be helpful to choose one day per week and do all of your errands. I used this method when I lived in Montréal. I did not schedule clients on Tuesday mornings and I did all my errands at once. When I moved to Ontario I had a corporate client and was in the office from Monday to Friday. I tried to batch my errands for Saturday mornings but the activities of our two busy teenagers often interfered with my errand-running routine. So, I changed the way I did things and started doing one errand per day on the way to or from work. I planned out 4-5 different routes taking me past various spots such as post office, dry cleaners, and grocery stores. I was only home from work a few minutes later or I had to leave for work slightly earlier, but the result was that I only had to leave the house once per day. I also tried to plan different routes to and from children’s routine activities so that we could quickly pop in and drop something off or pick something up.
It is even more frustrating trying to run errands in a new city when you don’t know where the shops are and you don’t understand the traffic flow. When I first arrived in Montréal, I used a satellite navigation system (GPS or Sat-Nav) to get around town. It kept telling me to make left turns, but in Montréal left turns are not permitted at most intersections. I gave up on the GPS and started using a paper map to plot routes that avoided left turns. This saved me quite a bit of time and made driving easier.
Now there are some great apps, programs, and websites to help you plan your routes to save time and save fuel.
Google Maps is an all-round great tool for plotting a route from Point A to Point B. You can adjust your route by clicking on the highlighted route and dragging it to a different street. Google Maps will tell you the distance traveled in miles or kilometers as well as the time it takes. Google’s Street View lets you see the place you’re going to visit. You’ll be able to familiarize yourself with the area before you even get there.
Driving Route Planner will let you choose multiple stops and optimize routes for you to choose from — shortest, fastest, or as entered. It will print driving directions and maps, email you the route, or save it as a GPX file to load into your own satellite navigation system. You can even add durations to stops so you know how long the total trip will take including stops.
When I was driving back and forth from university to my parent’s home, I had a CB radio in my car (I blame the Dukes of Hazzard). The CB was great because I could listen to other drivers and be able to avoid accidents and traffic jams. Needless to say, one of the most fun driving apps I’ve seen in a long time is Waze, a social networking, traffic and navigation app. Similar to Driving Route Planner, it can optimize your route for you and because it is interactive, taking input from fellow drivers, Waze will instantly update your route to avoid traffic jams. Waze will also learn your preferred routes to different places. Please dear readers, be VERY careful when using Waze because you should be 100 percent focused on driving. Check your local/state/provincial laws regarding handheld devices in vehicles, as the fines can be hefty. It’s best to have a passenger along to help you at least while you’re learning the route. Saving time and fuel is important but keeping the roads safe is even more important.
In a very crowded, celebrity-saturated area of the music accessory market, Torque Audio is carving out a place in the grounds of in-ear audio innovation. Their Zoom Series…
I recently read about how Tim Cook is feeling the heat about innovation from his Directors, so maybe this concept iPhone 5S will help. It proposes changing the home button to a camera, which can also act as a fingerprint scanner with a software support. What you can do is then assign your most used app a finger and just swipe it over the front camera (even when the phone is locked) and activate that app.
For example, get to your emails by simply swiping your index finger over the front camera. The back camera can be used for page scrolling – read your tweets with just one hand! What I really find interesting is the elimination of the 3.5 earphone jack and using the lightning connector adapter spot. The concept also shortens the height of iPhone 5S from 123.83 mm to 108 mm.
Some really forward thinking ideas that maybe Ive and his team can use!
– Yanko Design Timeless Designs – Explore wonderful concepts from around the world! Shop CKIE – We are more than just concepts. See what’s hot at the CKIE store by Yanko Design! (iPhone 5S – more @ less was originally posted on Yanko Design)
News: New Zealand firm Martin Aircraft Company has been given permission by the country’s Civil Aviation Authority to conduct manned test flights on what it claims is the world’s first practical jetpack.
Martin Aircraft Company has been developing the Martin Jetpack for several years and this ruling could help it meet its target of providing working ‘first responder’ jetpacks to the military and emergency services by mid-2014. Test flights will be restricted to a height of six metres and must be conducted above uninhabited ground.
Speaking to international news agency AFP about the announcement, Martin Jetpack CEO Peter Coker said: “For us it’s a very important step because it moves it out of what I call a dream into something which I believe we’re now in a position to commercialise and take forward very quickly.”
Martin Jetpack P12 prototype
The company’s latest jetpack design, named the P12, has a lightweight carbon fibre body and is propelled by a gasoline engine driving twin ducted fans, enabling vertical takeoff and landing as well as sustained flight.
Martin Jetpack prototype
A remote-controlled prototype carrying a dummy pilot soared to a height of 1,500 metres in 2011, and the company say that “changing the position of the ducts has vastly improved the jetpack’s performance, especially its manoeuvrability.”
Martin Aircraft Company hopes to release a commercial jetpack in 2015, with an estimated price of US$150,000-250,000 (£96,000-160,000).
Bart Veldhuizen, community manager at online 3D-printing service Shapeways, takes Dezeen on an exclusive behind-the-scenes tour of the company’s Eindhoven print facility for the final instalment in our series of movies about additive manufacturing.
Shapeways is a website where customers can upload a 3D model and get it printed out and shipped to their front door. It also provides an online marketplace where designers can sell their 3D-printed designs, which Shapeways prints out and delivers to order.
Bart Veldhuizen, community manager at Shapeways
Veldhuizen gave us a tour of the company’s European headquarters in Eindhoven as part of our research for Print Shift, the magazine about 3D printing we launched earlier this year.
“Shapeways is the world’s leading 3D printing marketplace and community,” he says in the movie. “You can design anything, have it 3D-printed, share it, sell it, make it your business. We have 250,000 community members right now who are designing their own work and who are selling and buying on the website.”
Strandbeest, mechanical toy printed in one go using laser sintering
One of the most popular products available on the website is a fully working model of a walking sculpture created by artist Theo Jansen, Veldhuizen says. Called Strandbeest, the intricate toy is printed in one go, without any assembly required. An optional propellor can also be printed separately and added to the model to make it wind-powered.
“It contains 75 moving parts and it will actually walk,” says Veldhuizen. “It’s wind-powered, you blow on the propeller and off it goes.”
Strandbeest being removed from a cake of nylon powder
Starting the tour, Veldhuizen takes us to a computer room, where incoming 3D files are processed and assessed.
“After you place an order, we need to check if a part is actually printable or not,” Veldhuizen explains. “That can mean several things. Will it survive the printing process? Will it survive shipping? All kinds of factors like that.”
Software used to stack 3D files in a virtual tray before they are printed
Shapeways do not print out objects one at a time, as you might using a desktop 3D printer. Rather, multiple 3D objects are printed together in large trays.
“We try to plan our printers as efficiently as possible,” says Veldhuizen. “Sometimes we fit in 300-400 parts in one printer. The more we can fit in, the more efficiently we can produce, of course.”
A laser writes out the cross-sections of components in a laser-sintering machine
Veldhuizen then takes us to one of the company’s printing rooms, where laser sintering machines print models out of white nylon powder.
“We deposit a fine layer of powder on the print bed, a laser sinters one cross-section at a time and then the process repeats,” explains Veldhuizen. “After the printing is done, we unpack the tray. We take the entire printed tray, we push it out of the box and we take it apart by hand.”
Cake of nylon powder containing laser-sintered parts
He continues: “Once the printer starts, it prints about one centimetre an hour. A medium-sized tray can take 24-36 hours to print. After that it’s still quite hot and will take the same amount of time to cool down. Only after that we can start unpacking it.”
For an extra cost, Shapeways can also polish and dye the 3D-printed models.
Shapeways remove the 3D-printed models from the powder cake by hand
“For most of the materials that we use, we look to see how we can make it more interesting for designers or consumers,” says Veldhuizen. “In the case of nylon prints, we found that polishing it after printing will give a much more smooth feeling, much closer to injection-moulded plastic.”
Next, Veldhuizen takes us to a different print room, which produces what Shapeways calls “frosted ultra-detail” models. Here, multi-jet modelling machines print out highly detailed models by depositing fine layers of plastic resin, which are cured with a UV light.
“Frosted ultra-detail” printers
“Ultra detail is a material that’s very highly detailed; we can print walls up to 0.1 millimetres thick,” says Veldhuizen. “It’s not powder-based, it’s a photo-acrylic and then we use a UV light to cure it. This is mainly used by designers who want to create miniature trains or miniature game models.”
We finish the tour at Shapeways’ distribution centre, where the 3D-printed models are given a final quality control inspection before being shipped out to customers.
Example of a “frosted ultra-detail” model
“After ordering, it takes between 2-3 weeks for an order to arrive at your home,” says Veldhuizen. “After printing, we check every part to make sure it’s printed to the right quality standards and if it passes it gets shipped out.”
Next in our series of movies about 3D printing we talk to Bart Van der Scheuren, vice president of Belgian additive manufacturing company Materialise, who explains how the three main 3D printing technologies work.
Bart Van der Scheuren, Materialise vice president
Based just outside Leuven in Belgium, where we visited while researching our 3D-printing magazine Print Shift, Materialise have been working with 3D printing technologies for over 20 years.
3D-printed car part, printed using stereolithography
“We offer a broad range of different technologies in different markets,” Van der Schueren says. “We are active in the industrial fields, where we produce parts on demand, and a second field is the medical field where we supply software tools or products, which are 3D-printed and used in all kinds of surgeries.”
3D-printed surgery guide
Materialise also offers a number of consumer-facing services and products. i.Materialise is an online 3D-printing service, which allows anyone to upload a 3D model via the internet to be printed out and shipped to their front door, while Materialise.MGX makes and sells 3D-printed lights, furniture and accessories.
Lotus.MGX by Janne Kyttanen, printed using stereolithography
“We have a growing focus on the consumer, because we noticed that the consumer is also interested in these technologies,” says Van der Schueren.
Lotus.MGX by Janne Kyttanen emerging from the vat of a stereolithography machine
Van deer Schueren goes on to explain the three main 3D printing technologies used in the industry: fused-deposition modelling, laser sintering and stereolithography.
“We have three basic processes,” says Van der Schueren. “What all these processes have in common is that they print parts layer by layer.”
Fused-deposition modelling machine
“The most simple technology is one where we start with a [plastic] filament,” Van der Schueren says. “The filament is fed into a nozzle that heats the filament until it becomes semi-liquid, a bit like toothpaste. And with that nozzle we will extrude the cross-section of the part that we are building. This technology is called FDM, which stands for fused-deposition modelling.”
Invented in the late 1980s, fused-deposition modelling is the same technology used by almost all desktop 3D printers. “If you have a printer at home, that’s exactly the type of technology that you’ll have,” Van der Schueren says.
A laser marks out cross sections in a bed of powder on a laser-sintering machine
Next, Van der Schueren describes laser sintering, the most recent of the three processes, which was introduced in the early 1990s and can be used to print plastics, ceramics and even metals.
One_Shot.MGX by Patrick Jouin, printed using laser sintering
“The second group of technologies make use of powdered materials,” Van der Schueren explains. “In this case we deposit a layer of powder and write the cross section of the part that we are printing with a laser beam. Where the laser hits the powdered particles they melt together; where we don’t write with the laser the powder stays loose.”
Fractal.MGX table by WertelOberfell rising up from the vat of a stereolithography machine
Finally, Van der Schueren discusses stereolithography, the first 3D printing process, which was invented by 3D Systems founder Chuck Hull in 1986.
Fractal.MGX table by WertelOberfell, printed using stereolithography
“The raw material is a liquid [for this process]” explains Van der Schueren. “We cast a liquid layer on a platform in a vessel and then we write with an [ultraviolet] laser into this liquid. The liquid will become solid where it is hit by UV light and everything that is not hit with the laser remains liquid. [Once it has finished printing] we move the platform up, the excess liquid flows back into the machine, and we have our components.”
Fractal.MGX table by WertelOberfell, printed using stereolithography
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