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A step toward fully 3D-printed active electronics

(news.mit.edu)
183 points gmays | 3 comments | 21 Oct 24 01:17 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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jayyhu ◴[21 Oct 24 01:47 UTC] No.41900019[source]▶
Reading the article, it looks like so far they only have a working resettable fuse (a passive device), and only hypothesize that a transistor was possible with the copper-infused PLA filament. So no actual working active electronics.

And from the paper linked in the article[1], it seems the actual breakthrough is the discovery that copper-infused PLA filament exhibits a PTC-effect, which is noteworthy, but definitely not "3D-Printed Active Electronics" newsworthy.

[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17452759.2024.2...

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1. bee_rider ◴[21 Oct 24 06:49 UTC] No.41901359[source]▶
Well, it is just “a step.”

Whether or not it is newsworthy… eh, I mean, what is MIT News? A campus newspaper? I’m pretty sure we had articles on particularly big games of capture the flag in mine.

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2. jayyhu ◴[21 Oct 24 07:44 UTC] No.41901682[source]▶
It looks like the editors have amended the title of their article since this was initially posted. The original title was just “3D-printed Active Electronics”
3. notjulianjaynes ◴[21 Oct 24 16:08 UTC] No.41905606[source]▶
What seems cool about this to me is that they seem to have done it with a plain old FDM printer and copper impregnated PLA. The devices are fairly large (mm scale) so presumably anyone with a $200 ender and the correct filament could print these.

I am able to find copper PLA for sale too, although I'm not positive it is what was used in the experiment, and it's kind of pricey (~ $100/kg).