And so the Discov3ry is the lightest weight that's mounted on your nozzle head.
Now, so the way you would do this is you would use a longer needle.
And so a blunt tip needle, not a sharp needle and
so the longer needles are say maybe one or
two inches, about four centimeters, two to four centimeter in length.
And what you would do here is you would have your silicon rubber or
something like that, that is still wet, okay?
And so you could have platinum cured silicon or something like that to where
you got say four hours or whatever before it's going to cure, and it's like water.
So then you can extrude a conducting polymer or
a silver nanoparticle line inside that silicon.
Okay, so you basically plunge that needle into the silicon and then you print
this line inside the silicon and then you pull the needle out and then let that
silicon cure and now you got an electrical conduit inside that silicon, okay.
This gets a little bit tricky with the fluid mechanics side of it.
So you have to make sure that the flow resistance of
your two materials are compatible.
Okay, so if it's very watery,
you don't want your material sticking around on your needle and
not laying a nice line inside your silicone, okay?
So that takes a little bit of optimization and
it's different for different materials.
A good way to also play around with this is if you have a natural phase separation
with materials.
For example, when I did some printing just like this,
printing p.pss inside chitosan and these two materials had phase separation,
so if I stirred them together in a jar it's going to look like egg drop soup.
Okay, I'm going to have these black flakes or whatever, so
it's not going to mix with this hydrogel material.
And the reason why was because both of these had,
if I remember correctly they were both positively charged, okay.
So they were repelling each other based on their strong positive charges, okay?
So that allowed me to print submerge electronics and stuff, all right.
>> Right, thank you for that.
I think we'll sort of try and close up the session,
I know families are asking for some discounts.
I know your answer to that so I can answer that for them.
I asked him for a discount for the lab ourselves and
he said they're still a start-up so they need all the funds they can get.
So, we won't be able to get you a discount from Charles for the [LAUGH].
>> [CROSSTALK] Right, right, yeah, yeah, so, now the other side of this is that
even though we don't offer a discount we do share a lot of our knowledge, okay, so,
if you buy this and you have questions or whatever we'll
definitely try to help you out so that's kind of where the value add is there.
>> Well certainly, I think there are, from your expertise on several of
the open source alternatives, I think those who cannot reach that price
point can certainly figure out ways to hack together a solution.
So just do sort of a closing thoughts on sort of what is the future that
you're excited about in this space?
>> Sure, so the future that I'm excited about is I want to see, well first of all,
I'm very impressed with the 3D printing community as a whole.
It's grown, so even though it's very consumer centric and
things like that, it's become a tool where each of us can solve a lot of
problems that we have a personal connection to some way or another.
And so I love that aspect about 3D printing and
now I'm very curious to see as paste soft materials printing becomes
more mainstream what creative people do with that capability.
So that's where I'm very, very excited.
So both at the university and the research level as well as,
the level on the ground where people are solving unique problems on their own.
I expect to see a lot of interesting developments over the coming years in that
area >> So thank you for your time Charles.
>> Thank you.
>> And thank you to all the viewers for joining in and see you in class.
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