I have a lot of pretty crazy ideas, some of which turn out to be less crazy in hindsight. Often I try to follow them up by building prototypes and reading up on the subject to see if there is an invention or business opportunity waiting for me there. On a number of occasions my idea has proved to be following the Zeitgeist and others prove the idea has merit before I do, and often this is due to the level of funding and resources available to them. This is not my whining about how unlucky I have been, but I intend to start writing about some of these ideas here in the future. That way when I moan about this or that being 'my idea' :-) I can point back to a blog here to prove it.

So my areas of interest at the moment are:
3D printing. I know it is being touted as the next big thing for the consumer market, but my interest take me in a different direction.

A 3D printer has four essential elements, a machine that can move a print head in three planes (x,y, and z), a print head that deposits a material at any point, some software that takes a model and converts it into instructions for the printer and some software that allows a human to define that model.

The two target areas where innovation will take place are:

The print head.

Currently 3D print heads print in a single medium such as a plastic, starch based material or even metal. I believe a future development will be to increase the number of media that can be used by the printer. This could be achieved by having multiple, automatically replaceable print heads to embed different materials and elements into the model. This may be as simple as harder materials for an outer shell or generic electronic components that can be made to simulate different devices such as a FGPA type chip, and a print head to print the required circuit board in a material such as graphite infused plastic.
Another development may be to add post processing heads to the printer. Presently the printer makes a single x,y scan for each layer of a model being printed before progressing to the next layer in the z axis. The print head could quite easily be adapted to allow a post printing scan of the object to spray on colours or an external coating, to cut away areas where this could not be achieved during printing or drilling an adding fixings.
Multiple print heads could also be used to print elements of buildings. I have seen this is already being investigated, I feel that a loom based arrangement suspended above a printed building structure could also incorporate z oriented fibres into the materials as they are printed. Improvements in the print heads for this application would use dry concrete as the print medium, mixed with water at the tip of the print head rather than the current use of shotcrete.

The 3D modeling software

The current breed of 3D modelling software takes a lot of practice and training to use to make even the simplest models, I envisage a piece of software that allows you to create items from a pattern book of simple parts. Anyone can make a model out of lego. 3D modeling should be that easy. A standard set of virtual parts that can be snapped together in the software, but as this is a virtual model and not lego, the standard parts can then be modified, skinned and altered to make the desired model.

As a simpler way of printing consumer items, I envisage that models will be automatically translated into a set of parts like a kit that can be stuck together by the user once printed much like a plastic model kit. This would reduce the complexity of printing and reduce the print area required to make larger items.

I'll stop there for the moment and come back with my other ideas soon.