It's real...a drone from your 3D printer.

[MindPilot]

“ You can’t print an iPhone (yet).” I wrote that in my e-book on 3D printing just six months ago. It was part of an entire section dedicated to what 3D printers couldn’t do. That section gets more and more out-of-date every day, and yesterday that was especially true.

Yesterday Voxel8, a company founded and run by several Harvard and MIT Professors, unveiled a developer kit for a 3D electronic-device printer shipping out in late 2015.

With the kit, engineers and designers will be able to print drones, phones, and (RC) automobiles, all in one piece, with electronics built in. The printer uses a modular design to print both circuitry and plastic parts. One printer head extrudes PLA plastic, building the bulk of the object, while another head prints out circuitry using super-conductive ink.

snip

This printer is important because this is your future. Eventually the price for circuit-printing printers will come down, and we will see electronics shops that print phones in the store, rather than buying them from a 3rd world sweat shop. I expect that within a decade average users may even be able to customize the shape and color of their phone to their liking.

https://medium.com/the-letters/3d-printed-drones-are-finally-here-c76811cf7ee4

[Octafish]

1. Amazing. When will we get 3-D Robots?

They can run the printers that take the jobs from everybody now sweating out iPads and printers who took the jobs from everybody that once could afford to buy a printer they made before NAFTA destroyed the UAW.

[Skidmore]

2. Aren't we drowning in enough plastics?

There are certainly good applications for it (e.g., creating prosthetics) but the idea that everyone needs to constantly need to have private technology to create their own endless amounts of plastic doodads most likely has many unintended consequences. I do think this particular technology needs to be thought through more carefully.

[MindPilot]

4. you could say that about any new technology

Haven't we used enough wood? We have clerics...why does everyone need a pencil and paper?

[Skidmore]

5. Wood is biodegradable.

The effects of plastic on the environment has been bad enough already. Do we need to add to it? Why make the production of more plastic crap easier in this throw away culture?

[eShirl]

6. So recycle the plastic we're drowning in for use in 3D printers.

#t=19

[Skidmore]

7. And what do we do with the plastic that gets thrown

away from the stuff produced on these things. How easy becomes just to print out a new thing when you've misplaced the one you have. I truly loathe plastic.

[tridim]

3. Getting closer...

IMO the real killer app will be when 3D printers are able to print at the molecular/atomic level, but by that time the "3D printer" will be a gaggle of nano-bots and not a modified inkjet printer.

[MrScorpio]

8. Sounds like the next best thing to a Replicator. nt