This week, we learned what it will take to 3D print homes for humans on distant planets, how 3D modeling of your head and face can give you new hair — or just perfectly fitted sunglasses — plus, we found out how to turn used analog sound equipment into smartphone-connected wizardry.
Printing a New World
This is not a 3D printer, but one day, it will have 3D printer friends
Pioneering USC engineer Behrokh Khoshnevis told NBC how he’s working with NASA to use found materials on Mars to create 3D printed homes, machines, infrastructure… basically anything humans need to choose that Martian lifestyle. That means technologies like 3D-printing method Contour Crafting (CC), which Khoshnevis used to print a 2,500-square-foot building in less than a day — back in 2004. Our post-Earth future is looking up. Now, if we can just figure out how to get to TRAPPIST-1.
Trump Should Check This Out
ABC brought us the touching story of a woman whose upcoming wedding compelled her to address her thinning hair. Thankfully, a high-tech hairpiece created using 3D printing saved the wedding day. The result is so realistic, our hairdo-in-chief should probably know about this (please, someone tell him).
It’s definitely more realistic than this
Sunglasses, Sports, Mullets
In the search for the perfect-looking pair of sunglasses, it’s often impossible to find a pair that actually, literally fit your face. Not “too big or too small for my face shape” but rather “don’t dig into my cheeks, fall off easily, or squeeze my head oddly.” Guess what can help? 3D printing! Skelmet (they originally planned to make bike helmets) takes scans of your head and face and creates custom frames to your specific measurements, as TechCrunch reported. However, as they also noted, these frames are strictly sporty, so you’ll either end up looking like Lance Armstrong or Dog the Bounty Hunter, depending on your hair length.
Skelmet’s scanning-for-sunglasses app in use
Pump Up the Jams
Geeky Gadgets got a little less geeky this week when they pulled a DJ move, showing us how to mix vintage knobs and switches, 3D printed parts, and an Arduino to create a smart MIDI controller. Recycled, digitized, and made with 3D printing? Pump it up.
The MIDI controller of your 3D printed dreams
Strangely that 3D printed hairpiece story seems to have very little to do with 3D printing. They do machine a positive mold master of the patient’s skull but that is done using a CAD/CAM CNC system that mills the skull shape from a blob of what appears to be a styrofoam blank. They don’t even 3D scan the patient’s skull directly at the point of customer contact but instead create a negative mold impression of the customer’s head using traditional gauze and plaster type technology. This negative mold is scanned for 3D information using an extended moving pin digitizer, and that data is used for the CNC machining process. Finally the actual base of the hairpiece the customer receives is a hand mixed polymer solution that is applied to the CNC positive master mold. Sadly the term 3D printing is often misapplied to technologies that involve 3D spatial data in some aspect of production.