MultiMaterial Beginnings
Yeah, those are tweezers with silicone grips printed on a RepRap in one go.
It will probably be quite a while before we really start to see routine multimaterial posts to Thingiverse for a number of reasons: multiple materials are much more difficult to manage, new tech has to spread and get set up, and that’s not even counting slicing and design software, but this is the future, man.
OpenSCAD and other boolean-friendly tools will make designing for multimaterial fairly easy: just cleave off the parts you want in material A, flip the cleave operation and write out again. Easy. In the long term I think this will actually drive some genuinely NEW kinds of CAD, because since when have designers designed with the intent that the rubber grips would be built in place with the rest of the object?
Very exciting stuff.
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Two-material fabjects - machine quotidienne Said,
August 6, 2010 @ 8:46 pm
[...] From the Thingiverse blog: [...]
bogdan kecman Said,
August 10, 2010 @ 5:11 pm
check out rapman with dual head and bfb3000 with dual and 3 heads… bfb also fired out AXON (a gui for skeinforge + modified skeinforge that uses second extruder for support)
Matt Said,
August 13, 2010 @ 12:33 am
Actually, embedding multiple materials into a single object has been done for quite a while in the injection molding world. Take plastic toothbrushes with rubbery handles for example.
Nevertheless, for the MakBot, this is an awesome step into the right direction. Support material would be the most important second feed, but I can also see multiple colors in a single object!