So you send in your document through your computer and, after several clickings of the machine called a printer, your document comes out on paper.
2D printing has always seemed like a miracle to me. How does the computer collaborate with the printer to produce such exact results? It’s out of this world.
And, just when I was about to get accustomed to the wonders of 2D printing, my mind was blown away by something far more amazing.
I want you to picture this: you’ve just received the drawings for your new house and the engineers tell you that you don’t have to pay for human labor because there’ll be none.
You’re confused but you hang around to see what they would do and, right before your eyes, you see a machine practically printing out your house in 3D. It even goes as far as painting. Amazing, right?
That’s called 3D printing, the process of creating real structures from a printer of sorts. On the bright side, buildings aren’t the only things we can print in 3D which is good because not many of us would have had a need for it then.
Currently, you can even print food in 3D. But we’ll see that further down the line.
ORIGIN OF 3D PRINTING
Turns out, 3D isn’t as new as we’d think. The first 3D printer originated in 1980 and was designed by Charles Hull, an engineer and the co-founder / executive vice president of 3D Systems. It was used to create 3D models and structures.
As time progressed, 3D printing moved from using fused filament fabrication (FFF) technology to UV lasers and digital light projection. This initial success metamorphosed into various other inventions including 3D house printers.
For this article, I’m not as interested in the intricacies of a 3D printer as I am in showing you three of my favorite 3D printers and introducing you to how they work.
INTO THE WORLD OF 3D PRINTING
The Amazing Foodini: Created by Natural Machines, a company based in Barcelona, Foodini is actually a magic maker. I brought this first because, to a great extent, it represents the future of cooking.
Here’s how it works: you select a recipe from your PC or from Foodini’s touch screen interface. The recipes could be pre-loaded into the machine’s software or customized by you.
The next step is to put the required ingredients into the ‘food capsules’. The machine can only take five capsules at a time and each capsule has a nozzle with a unique size. From here, there’s nothing left to do but print your food.
It can take any predetermined pattern, irrespective of the intricacy. If the ingredients were in the raw state at the time of creation, you could then cook your printed meal or microwave it.
Foodini works for all kinds of food as long as they have a consistent texture. It’s perfect for a DIY food project and saves you from over-processed food outside.
Vulcan, ICON 3D House Printer: Talk about the miracle of building a house without needing a bricklayer. Vulcan is ICON’s next big tech thing as it revolutionizes the concept of building one-story buildings.
With resilience and building speed in mind, ICON designed Vulcan as an automated control system operated with an ICON customized mobile app.
It’s one massive machine capable of building houses as large as 3,000 square feet, which, so far, is the largest of all 3D Printers.
More than a dozen houses have been built since its conception which tells us that the future is ours to print
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Redefine Meat: It turns out that even organic materials can be printed- including meat. Due to the largely growing Earth’s population, the need to develop other sources of food has become quite apparent.
This, coupled with the health hazards caused by several kinds of meat, has led many companies around the world to come up with quite a solution: using plant proteins to mimic animal protein with an exactness unprecedented in history.
So far, these companies have succeeded in printing several kinds of meat such as minced meat and even chicken; however, Redefine Meat, an Isreali company, has decided to join the race to hit a new milestone- steak printing.
That’s what their new 3D meat printer is all about. The toughness of steak makes it quite difficult to create.
Since over 100,000 cows are butchered in the U.S per day, talk more of in Nigeria, these printers would really save the cows population as they are constantly been improved upon to generate the same amount of meat produced from slaughters per day.
Turns out that everything nowadays can be printed. Isn’t it amazing where technology is going these days? What would you like to see printed? Share it with us in the comment section.
