Saturday, January 11, 2014

3d printing done while flying on board an octocopter?

    If you are interested try pasting the following url to see an octocopter fly into the air near the Rose Bowl while a 3D printer on board makes something while flying into the air.

    http://www.cio.com/slideshow/detail/113815#slide3
    Flying 3D printer
    For whatever reason, a group of makers from Deezmaker and Velocity Pigeon set out to create a flying 3D printer. Perhaps the point was to draw attention to Deezmaker’s Bukobot desktop 3D printer. Regardless, the project showed that if anyone was interested in attaching a 3D printer to a remote-control octocopter, then it is possible.

    end quote from:
    http://www.cio.com/slideshow/detail/113815#slide3

    I was thinking about the real world implications of this. Imagine a large manufacturing complex composing of several miles and a part breaks on one of the machines. The just make a phone call to  another part of the complex and have an octocopter with a 3d printer on board print one on it's way over right then. Someone grabs the just completed part from the octocopter 3d printer and the whole operation might be completed within 15 minutes time with the newly manufactured part installed.

    Compare that to now when a part breaks on a machine, you order one online, and it arrives by UPS, FEDEX or another carrier within a week or so. Of course the alternative is to have backup parts available for all your machines so it could be replaced within 15 minutes but how many companies actually do that?

    Having a machine go down and be down for a week or more might be very serious under some circumstances to any business or company.

    Another scenario. A small company doesn't have an octocopter. But, a service business is created that has a small plane that can fly near that location with a 3D printer on board to manufacture a part for that small company. The small company has already given the service business the coordinates for all parts in all machines they use. The service business is called and installs the program into the 3d printer which is already on board the small aircraft. So, while the pilot flies to the airport nearest the company someone from the small business drives to the location of that nearby airport. The whole operation is only limited by time which in the United States (lower 48 states) could be within 5 hours from any airport to any airport. So, the part would arrive within 8 hours for sure as long as the order arrived before 9 or 10 am of that day.

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