Device that changes a smartphone into a 3D printer

We keep hearing about the awesome applications of 3D printers, such as home-made braces (don’t actually try at home), toys and, you know, human ears, but despite the technology being cheaper and more accessible than ever, you probably don’t have too many people in your life who actually use a 3D printer for real.

Well, if devices like the OLO are anything to go on, that could all be about to change. The OLO is a $99 gadget that lets you turn any smartphone into a 3D printer, and uses the light from the touchscreen to process your plastic creations.

The whole thing is designed to be super-simple to understand and operate, and is battery-operated and fully portable, weighing just 780 grams and measuring 17.2 x 11.5 x 14.8 cm.

It consists of three parts: a reservoir, which holds 400 cubic cm of printing volume; 100 gm bottles of coloured photopolymer resin to build your objects with; and a mechanised lid.

So how do you use it First, you have to load a schematic of your object into the OLO mobile app and then fit your smartphone into the base under the reservoir. A piece of polarised glass is installed into the base, which your phone’s touchscreen will be facing when set in place. Then comes the printing part, which Drew Prindle explains over at Digital Trends: “Basically, once you place the lid on top and the printer starts going, the app makes your phone’s screen light up with a specific pattern. The polarised glass then takes all this light and redirects it so that all the photons are travelling straight upward. So as your phone’s screen beams light up into the reservoir, the directed light causes a layer of resin to harden onto the build plate, which slowly moves upward as each new layer is created.”