Could 3D printing revolutionize the Internet of Things?

by Dawn Bushaus| Open Digital Ecosystem & IoT   I January 23, 2015

For the past two years, 3D-printing has been in the spotlight at the Consumer Electronics Show. (Of particular interest at this year’s event, which was held last month in Las Vegas, was the ability to print chocolate!) For all the excitement, however, 3D printing today is largely a novelty – a kind of playground where early adopters can print cheap, plastic toys, and now food. But the technology has the potential to be revolutionary for manufacturing and for the Internet of Things (IoT).
Karl D.D. Willis is an entrepreneur who is trying to solve some of 3D’s biggest challenges, chief among them how to scale production of what are potentially millions of unique 3D-printed objects (as opposed to traditional manufacturing which builds hundreds of thousands of objects that are exactly the same) and how to connect those objects digitally. Willis has been involved in two projects that have implications for IoT, one while working as a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University and another while working for software developer Autodesk. Today he is working on founding his own company focused on 3D printing.

As a researcher at Carnegie Mellon, Willis worked with Microsoft Research on a project called InfraStructs developing passive material-based tags that embed machine-readable information into physical objects. These tags can then be read with terahertz-imaging technology. The idea is that these tags could be used to identify 3D-printed objects that look nearly identical but are not. They could also be used down the road for IoT security – for example to authenticate objects and devices.

Here’s how InfraStructs works:

A second project Willis worked on while at Autodesk called Project Wire makes it possible to design and fabricate 3D-printed circuits, bringing us closer to being able to print electronics in their entirety. This could make life much easier for IoT device manufacturers since they would be able to create prototypes very quickly. I talked with Willis recently about both of these projects.

DB: A lot of people think of 3D printing as a novelty, but you’re looking at its potential for enabling the digital ecosystem. What are some of the possibilities?

KW: The things it can do are interesting – you have any kind of shape you want and complexity is free, which is an amazing property. But if you look deeper there’s even more you can do by combining materials in ways that haven’t been possible before. The InfraStructs project was trying to do that to create individual tags that could be identified. The fundamental idea behind that is if you can have two different materials that have different properties, in this case index of refraction – that’s the speed of light as it travels through the material – that difference in material, even though it may be invisible to the eye, can have machine-readable properties, and it can be read just like a barcode is. In this case you have two different materials where the physics changes when a different wavelength interacts with it. Adding that kind of functionality to 3D printing will be huge.

DB: Can you tell me more about Project Wire?

KW: Project Wire looks at how you can design and fabricate 3D-printed circuits, really for the very first time. It uses a hardware platform created by a startup called Voxel8. They’ve created a material that is room temperature-drying, silver conductive ink. One of the issues with 3D printing of plastics is that they can’t withstand high temperatures, so having an ink that dries at room temperature without having to put it in the oven to increase conductivity is huge. With this printer, two different materials can be printed at same time – one is a standard plastic that’s extruded, and on top and amongst are these conductive tracings. For the first time, these can be created in 3-dimensional space, so they can be free-form conductive traces embedded inside objects.

This has some interesting applications, for example, with cell phone antennas. Being able to fabricate different antenna designs that are not only 3-dimensional but also embedded digitally inside of objects themselves opens a whole new space for fitting antennas into places that maybe they couldn’t have been inserted before. There’s a push in the cell phone industry to compact atennnas and make them high-performance. This is one area that results from being able to combine silver conductor material with standard plastic. 

DB: How far along is this work?  

KW: The printer has been announced and will be released later this year. It’s the first step along a much longer trajectory towards being able to move away from using individual mass-manufactured components and getting closer to printing objects in their entirety. Conductive material is a first step but we’re certainly not far away from being able to do passive components like resistors, capacitors and inductors.

DB: What are the biggest challenges in 3D printing right now? 

KW: There are two big challenges: One is functionality and the other is automation. When I say automation, I mean making things scale. We need to be able to enable 3D-printing to print more than just plastic Yoda heads or Eiffel Towers. And we need to enable these objects to have more function – that could be mechanical function or electrical function like with Project Wire, or adding InfraStructs-like technology to make these things machine-readable. Then you need to be able to scale – you need automation to enable that broad range of objects to be made in volume, in not just hundreds but millions of objects. I certainly think we will see really interesting work in the coming years on both of these problems, but they’re long-term, 100-year problems.

DB: What are the implications for the Internet of Things?

KW: In the near term the ability to do conductive material is really exciting. That will disrupt how traditional circuit boards are made certainly in the prototype stages. All of the sudden you don’t have to wait a week to get a printed circuit board made – you can just print it. For IoT, this is the foundation of a new way to make and prototype objects. For anyone working in hardware or wearables, prototyping is where it all starts. There’s a good chance for a lot of disruption in that area.

DB: Security is a pressing problem for IoT. How can 3D printing and technology like InfraStructs help with security?

KW: This is definitely one of the problems it can potentially solve. There are implications for being able to say this object is real; this is counterfeit; this belongs to you; or this is something else. This is one of the unique things about being able to digitally drive how objects are made – it means they can vary in very subtle ways and that variance can be something that links you to the object or the object to a company or any variety of combinations. It’s a second-order problem, though. If we don’t get to the stage where these objects can be manufactured to scale, that issue never really presents itself.–