Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

The robot apocalypse is upon us!

It appears that the company had a cloud outage and it confused the printers, some tried to download their last job and reprint it, which was sometimes on top of the already-printed job, others just started slamming their print mechanism against its movement stops, potentially causing damage.

Were I in the market for a 3D printer, I think I would prioritize NO CLOUD DEPENDENCY. Granted, you sometimes start jobs to print overnight, I'd definitely power it off when not in use.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/16/23064592/bambu-print-asleep-cloud-outage

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/23/08/16/2128240/bambus-3d-printers-started-printing-while-owners-were-asleep

It eliminates the need for a laser, using a resin that hardens under direct UV light, so it can print objects larger than the faring of the rocket that places it in orbit! So you can print an antenna dish for a Cubesat that's only 100mm x 100mm x 300mm that's much larger than the satellite!

Very interesting possibilities here.

https://www.mitsubishielectric.com/news/2022/0517.html

(I thought I'd lost this post when LJ went down for maintenance, I'm glad it saved a draft!)


It was a year ago this month that the world learned about guns made by 3-D printers, that is, guns made out of plastic. And the world has not stood still. A man was arrested in Japan recently for making 3-D guns, Japan has VERY tough gun laws, their police at the end of every shift have to account for every round that they were issued at the beginning of the end of their shift. People are also experimenting with making lower receivers for semi-automatic rifles. The difference between an automatic rifle, one that continues to fire if you keep the trigger depressed, and a semi-automatic, one shot every time you squeeze the trigger, is the lower receiver. It is also the regulated part of the gun. So if you can print a full-auto receiver, you can buy all the other parts needed in an unregulated fashion and have an unlicensed fully-automatic rifle.

Here's what bothers me. There's a lot of people taking a very short-sited view of history. They think that if the government isn't doing precisely what they want RIGHT NOW, then it's obviously an evil and repressive government and all of their rights are being violated. Therefore, MUST HAVE GUNS! There's going to be a lot of wingnuts making and carrying these guns that are difficult to detect, and eventually people will be killed by them.

Would everyone having a 3-D printed gun prevented Putin from re-acquiring Crimea? I doubt it. What about Franco, if the population had been fully armed? Maybe, but a plastic gun isn't going to stop a tank or a Messerschmidt. France during World War 2? The American-provided Liberator single-shot pistols killed a lot of Germans, but it didn't liberate the country.

Yes, there is a political statement to be made, but what is it?

http://www.wired.com/2014/05/3d-printed-guns/

It's called the Bulldog, and they basically took the 3D plans for the Liberator 3D pistol and upscaled them to make a rifle, a .22 LR caliber, and apparently didn't do much to reinforce it. I'm not sure exactly how they failed since the Liberator is basically a proven design. Regardless, it shouldn't take much to refine the design and make a practical model.

One thing that I found amusing was the printer manufacturer said that their software was going to scan files uploaded for printing and see if they looked like gun parts, and if they did, not print them. Yeah, right. It's so hard to crack a system and create custom ROMs. Not to mention make subtle alterations to plans so that they no longer look like gun parts but ten seconds work with a nail file and they suddenly transform.

Making a 3D printed rifle was inevitable once a 3D pistol was made. The thing that I want to know, but won't until they have a working rifle designed, is how accurate it is? The point of a rifle is that you have a longer barrel for better long-range accuracy, but that barrel requires internal grooves (rifling) to impart spin on the bullet so that it gyro-stabilizes by itself and travels longer distances more accurately. I really want to know if 3D printers build rifling in the design of a barrel.

The fear of 3D plastic guns is that they're difficult to detect with current weapons scanning technology and that you could get a gun close to a high value target like the President. A printed rifle is totally outside this discussion because it's really hard to conceal a rifle under clothing. If you're going to snipe someone, you need a very accurate long-range rifle, and I don't see a printed gun filling that role.

It's going to be interesting to see how the media and politicians react to this.

http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/the-3d-printed-rifle-broke-after-its-first-shot-video