Transcript

3D Printing | Soumithri Bala | TEDxGunnHighSchool

when garrett peterson was born he could barely breathe he's born with an abnormal heart his pulmonary valve was missing this put tremendous pressure on his lungs which caused his airways to collapse his parents had to endure watching him go from a healthy baby boy to turning blue in the face they rushed him to the hospital where nurses had to perform cpr on him every single day doctors meanwhile were running out of options in a last-ditch effort peterson's parents and caregivers reached out to an engineer and a doctor at the university of michigan who had cured an infant with a similar condition before together they took a ct scan of garrett's lungs and using this information they created a splint that would fit inside of his body they took the splint and they created it out of a biological material on a 3d printer in an eight-hour surgery doctors took the splint and implanted it into peterson eight hours later when he awoke they opened his airways for the first time he took his first consistent breaths and he's been improving ever since contrary to popular belief 3d printers have actually been around for a really long time they're first invented in 1989 by an individual named s scott crump who went on to found one of the largest 3d printing companies in the world stratasys the technology he created is actually very simple but before we can get to 3d printers we need to see how 3d models start their life they start in a program like this many of you might recognize this but for those of you that don't know this is a 3d modeling program it basically allows you to draw two-dimensional shapes and attribute real-life dimensions to them and then extrude them into the third dimension so once a part is created here then it can move on to the actual 3d printing and for this to start it's converted into a solid whose surface is completely comprised of triangles so this surface may look completely smooth to you but in reality it's made up of a whole bunch of tiny triangles and now to actually show the 3d printing process i'm going to set up my printer here and the way it basically works is that it takes takes that object and it splits it up into a whole bunch of layers of uniform width and the printer using a thin plastic filament which is essentially a thin continuous rod extrudes this plastic into the shape so this is basically a simplification of the original problem because before uh any other way you would have to make the 3d printer move in all three dimensions but this essentially takes that problem and makes each layer a two-dimensional plane almost like a two-dimensional printer the only difference is that it's pushing out plastic and once it's completed with one layer it'll raise up a little bit start the next one and keep going up further and further and further until it creates the finished part so why am i telling you any of this and why are 3d printers important well i'm not going to try and explain it to you i'm going to try and show you so look around you right now look at the people around you look at your peers all right do you notice anything everything around you could be found and bought at a department store it's a weird statement but it's true everything around you was made by somebody else and put in something like this where you went and bought it right nothing you own was actually made in your home and 3d printers could change all of that and so i picked out just a couple of the really great innovations that people have been working on that really highlight highlight how great this technology is the first one i have for you are 3d printed shoes now i personally would really like to own a pair of these i think i look great in them and and this is really cool because right now if you're if you were to go to the shoe store and buy a new pair of shoes you can only choose sizes in half an integer increments right so if you want to buy shoes you can buy size six shoes size six and a half shoes or size seven shoes if your foot is in between then too bad you gotta compromise that's the same thing with width the width is fixed you have to get the correct size width well this could change all of that because with this you can create get the shoe that's exactly the size of your foot for those of you who like instruments this is a 3d printed guitar so rather than have the entire thing be made out of wood somebody could just run this body through a 3d printer and come out with this at the end and they have this finished part that they can just assemble the rest of the guitar around and sell and in fact you can actually buy this this is for sale you can run out to the store and you can buy this right now and and also one of the latest developments a 3d printed car and this is actually shown just a couple of weeks ago and this thing actually works this thing runs this thing moves and and the craziest thing that this isn't just some sort of silly prototype because and finally if none of these things interest you there's 3d printed food as well so this pizza was 3d printed and it was actually made in a very similar technique that i explained earlier each part of this pizza was actually drawn out as a layer so first it started with the dough then it raised up and laid down the sauce and it did this step by step until you got a completed pizza and the thing is this didn't come out of some crazy machine either this came out of a machine that looked like this right this looks like something that could fit in in your home and that was able to create that other thing and ultimately that's what's going to make 3d printers so important because they deal with all the physical objects around you everything you interact with every single day and everything you've been interacting with since you've been born they can be adapted to be used for anything which means they will be used for anything with given enough time and the best part is that everything that's created is digital right everything exists on the computer so you can create one and if you need another one you can just print another one out so for example the 3d printed shoes one day you might not need to go to the store anymore to buy new shoes you can just own the file of your favorite pair of shoes and just keep printing new ones out every single time you need one so why am i so interested in 3d printing well three and a half years ago i got my first 3d printer it's called the makerbot thing-o-matic and it was one of the first consumer 3d printers that you could buy it came as a kit and it took 40 hours over the course of three days to assemble and it was a good printer it was a great introduction to the subject and i really liked using it and i learned a lot from it but the problem was it wasn't very good there are a lot of problems with it and as you can see just the construction alone it's it's built out of wood it was built more like a prototype than actual finished products um and for that reason it had a lot of problems uh and it ended up breaking and now it's sitting in the corner uh in my closet actually in pieces um but that's okay because two years later i decided i wanted a new challenge so i went and found reprap now reprap is really cool because many of you may have heard of open source software where somebody can write an application and release it to the public but also release the code used to build that application well reprap works the same way except it works with the it works with physical hardware it's open source hardware so people who created this 3d these 3d printers took them and put the designs online where anyone can reference them and anyone can see how they're built but the best part is because 3d printers create physical objects and by their very definition 3d printers are a physical object you can use 3d printers to create new 3d printers it's like printer reproduction basically so you can start with just the digital files and you can actually just go on their website right now and you can download these files you can just download them and you can print them out and you can assemble these parts to create a new 3d printer well so i was thinking to myself i said well i have a 3d printer and i have access to the internet so i may as well try this out so i went and found a design that i liked and i took this design and i decided i would build it but as a challenge i would also try and improve it so i started at the first step i downloaded the files and i printed them out on my old machine and then i decided i would take that wooden design and i would make it better i'd make it into the thing you see here today so i refined it i designed the entire frame out of acrylic and aluminum and high quality materials that would make it look like a household appliance that i'd be proud to present and so it took me the entire summer to assemble it but i finally got it done right before the start of my junior year it didn't quite work it didn't quite work yet but i knew it could get there it had a ton of potential and i spent a good chunk of my junior year working on it but then when i got to this last summer i decided i had to do something drastic to make sure it worked perfectly i threw away a lot of the old parts and i ended up overhauling this entire thing um changing a lot of things in the process and that's actually why you can see it up here today with me printing because i'm so confident that it'll work and because because it's kind of small down here i actually have a video um this is actually an 11 hour print of a vase that i've condensed down to around 20 seconds and it's actually really cool to watch you can see how the layers work it's like it's like the print is essentially growing in front of your eyes the thing is this is really cool but it's not what interests me about 3d printers it's really cool that you can make these kinds of objects but it's not what they're good for because i thought when i first got my 3d printer this was what was going to be cool about them you could create these weird objects that nobody else had and you could place them on your desk and you could show off right but but that's not what it is at all because really what it's about is creating functional objects that can make a difference so a couple years ago i this old film camera and it broke down and back then i didn't have 3d printers and i had no hobby so i just had a dirty habit of taking anything i had apart and so i picked this thing apart and i found a whole bunch of lenses in it and so i was playing around with these lenses and one day i held it up to my phone and i found that one of these lenses magnified the image coming in through my camera there's this lens right here so i found this lens and i decided i would go ahead and see if i could make a part that would essentially combine my phone with the lens so i did that i created this in about an hour in a modeling software and half an hour later it was in my hands and so i put it on my phone and i decided to see if it would work i went outside and this is what you see normally through the camera and this is what you can see through my lens now it's a small example and the reason why i showed you this and the reason why i showed you the printer isn't to make you think that i'm cool or accomplished you know because because my mom thinks i'm cool and my dad thinks i'm cool and yeah so um and so so really what this is about is i'm trying to show you what's possible and i'm not that creative and i'm not that intelligent either but i was able to do these things which means every single one of you if you had access to a 3d printer could do great things as well and simply put what it's allowed me to do is essentially view the world as legos because before everything were static objects they that were just fixed in their final form when you bought them you got them you use them until they died and you threw them away but now things aren't static anymore you can take your printer and you can combine objects to make something that's greater than the sum of its parts and i know that somebody else will be able to do a far greater job with it than i did and maybe even create something that could change the world now i've been speaking for quite some time uh and and i'm pretty thirsty right now not that way um and so so i got this giant bottle of sparkling water right here but the problem is i don't have a bottle opener on me i just can't find one anywhere on me but thankfully i happen to download one off the internet before coming up here today so let's see if this works right never done this before oh something that was on the internet just moments ago is now physical in my hands i don't know about you but that's the kind of future that i want to live in thank you very much you