Just when you thought the Fabaloo DIY Fab@Home 3D Printer machine was a big sticky mess by squirting goo onto things, there is a new even more sticky 3d Printer design you have to see. The CandyFab 4000 machine by a company called Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories is a DIY 3D printer that utilizes hot air and sugar to craft real life 3D objects. The low-cost method used in this 3d printer is called Selective Hot Air Sintering and Melting (SHASAM). The printer uses sugar as a powder they is laid onto a flat bed in thin layers, then the CNC hot air blower melts the sugar wherever the 3d computer model has a solid body. As each layer finishes a new layer of sugar is put on and the process is repeated until the entire model is complete. After completed, the heated and melted sugar is very hard and glassy. The finished object is a bit rough on the edges, but can be smoothed out. The 3d sugar printer can fabricate fairly large scale objects.
The software for the CandyFab 4000 3D printing machine is designed to be open source for the DIY do it yourself home builder. Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories wants this project to be available for interested hobbyists who want an alternative more affordable rapid prototyping machine. The open source software makes this a project that other people can help improve as well. Hopefully in the near future the designs will be greatly improved with higher resolution prototypes.
The CandyFab 4000 printer is the cheapest 3d printer available today, the total cost of building this 3D printer is only around $1000 plus some spare parts laying around. That is much less than any other design out there. And not only that, you can build it yourself! There are even 3D Google Sketchup models available online for free. All you have to do is order the parts and send some of the parts to local machine shops to make the parts and then you have you very own personal 3d Printer! I think it’s a great project because the materials are so affordable! At the cost of only $1000 you could even build more than one! B)
BigDog is one of the next generation military assist machines in development right now. Big Dog is a research and development project by Boston Dynamics. The Big Dog project is funded by DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency. Boston Dynamics claims Big Dog is the most advanced quadruped robot on earth. BigDog runs at 4 mph, climbs slopes up to 35 degrees, walks across rubble and carries a 340 lb load. BigDog can even walk over terrain such as ice and snow to reach its destination. It also has amazing balancing skills, in the video you can watch someone kick Big Dog from the side and it knows how to recover itself without falling over. BigDog is the size of a large dog or small mule, measuring 1 meter long, 0.7 meters tall and 75 kg weight. This is an amazing robot, when the final production model makes it to the troops it will be a huge help in areas where it is unsafe for people to travel. From the U-Tube description
“BigDog is the alpha male of the Boston Dynamics family of robots. It is a quadruped robot that walks, runs, and climbs on rough terrain and carries heavy loads. BigDog is powered by a gasoline engine that drives a hydraulic actuation system. BigDog’s legs are articulated like an animal’s, and have compliant elements that absorb shock and recycle energy from one step to the next. BigDog is the size of a large dog or small mule, measuring 1 meter long, 0.7 meters tall and 75 kg weight.”
