Voxel8 sets tone for 3-D printing

A 3-D printed iPhone? It’s not possible yet, but thanks to a new startup, custom gadgets spit out by a 3-D printer are on their way.

Voxel8, based in Somerville, recently unveiled its 3-D printer, which can print and layer conductive ink to act as internal wires and circuits, integrating electrical components into design in a way that would be impossible with traditional methods.

“It allows free-form geometries of electronics, where they’ve been really stuck in 2-D geometries for decades now,” said Daniel Oliver, a co-founder of Voxel8. “We believe that electronics need to get more places and be more seamlessly integrated in the products they’re already in, and this is a technology that does it.”

3-D printing has taken off in recent years, but currently the most practical use for a 3-D printer is to make plastic objects with limited utility.

By integrating the electronics as part of the design, products can be designed more efficiently, Oliver said. Other products, including a smaller, more effective antenna, could only be designed using this method.

“Where this really fits in are those products that can’t be made any other way,” Oliver said.

Right now, the company is printing working quadcopters and LED lights to demonstrate what the technology can do. He said they plan to develop and create wearable devices using their system.

Future models of their printer, Oliver said, will be able to print single-piece custom hearing aids, a painstaking, delicate process today.

The company was spun out of Harvard University thanks to research by professor Jennifer Lewis. Her work with the conductive ink is what makes Voxel8’s system work.

While the thick silver conductive ink acts as internal wires inside a gadget, it cannot replace other important components, including batteries and processors. To address this, Voxel8 has teamed up with Autodesk, a California company that is one of the leaders in design software.

“It enables a whole new category of objects to be created,” said Karl Willis, principal research engineer for Autodesk’s Project Wire. “It really just seemed like something we could contribute to on the software side.”

Project Wire is Autodesk’s software for systems like Voxel8, and includes a way for the printer to stop when necessary so the engineer can place a processor in the design. Autodesk has embedded an engineer in Voxel8’s office to work on development of Project Wire. Willis said Project Wire and Autodesk’s collaboration with Voxel8 is “an investment in the future.”

“We don’t know what’s going to be made,” he said. “We think it’s going to be an amazing surprise to see the things that people make.”