On Saturday, August 13, 2022 we will be working on the Adafruit Customer Support Forums. If you visit over the weekend and things are not complete yet, please check back later, https://adafruit.com/forumupdates
Next to Use 3-D Printing: Your Surgeon #3dthursday
Having attended fascinating lectures from talented doctor-makers such as Dr. Nicholas Giovinco who are using desktop 3D printers to print out models to plan their surgical work (and even make bespoke clamps and tools for the surgery itself), it was fascinating to see this technique as executed on high end commercial 3D printers.
Surgeons at a hospital in Japan recently faced a dilemma before transplanting a parent’s liver into a child: How exactly to trim the organ to fit the space in the child’s smaller cavity while preserving its functions.
So they took a knife to a three-dimensional replica of the donor’s liver built by a machine that resembles an office printer. The model helped the doctors figure out where to carve it, leading to a successful transplant last month.
Surgeons are finding industrial 3-D printers to be a lifesaver on the operating table. This technology, also known as additive manufacturing, has long produced prototypes of jewelry, electronics and car parts. But now these industrial printers are able to construct personalized copies of livers and kidneys, one ultrathin layer at a time.
The medical field in particular is expected to benefit greatly from 3-D printing. Scientists are working on ways to print embryonic stem cells and living human tissue with the aim to produce body parts that can be directly attached to or implanted in the body.
Printing out artificial body parts is likely many years away, but advanced 3-D printers are starting to make their mark at hospitals.
Two of the world’s largest industrial 3-D printer makers, U.S. companies Stratasys Ltd. SSYS +7.82% and 3D Systems Corp., DDD +7.03% offer machines that can replicate human organs.
Using medical images such as CT scans, these printers can construct translucent models made with variations of acrylic resin, enabling surgeons to understand the internal structure of the livers and kidneys, such as the direction of blood vessels or the exact location of a tumor….
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
Python for Microcontrollers — Python on Microcontrollers Newsletter: ESP32 Web Workflow for CircuitPython, CircuitPython Day 2022 and more! #CircuitPython @micropython @ThePSF @Raspberry_Pi