Ask HN: Are there examples of 3D printing data onto physical surfaces?

How much data do you want to preserve?

I know it sounds “boring” but it is hard to beat a good acid-free archival paper printed with a good quality ink. Stored in the right circumstances (not too humid, dark place, not on fire) it should last half a millennia easily. It is also pretty much guaranteed that whatever happens we will have the technology to read it again.

Exotics like laser engraved metal plates or ceramics might be better if you have a lot of data and can’t guarantee your storage will be fire and flood free. If you don’t have a lot of data you can also think of engraving it into stone or press it into a clay tablet and fire it. These mediums are known to be very stable even in adverse circumstances.

First example I thought of is the titanium punch sheets and wordlists for crypto wallet recovery phrases https://shop.ledger.com/products/cryptotag-zeus and https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0039/bip-003...

There is also Microsoft Project Silica which I recall seeing in person at their EBC playing back a movie from it https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-sil...

Then there is m-disc which uses the DVD+R and BD-R/BDXL standards but writing to a sort of glass rather than to the traditional medium. These are cool as they play back n regular players too. https://www.mdisc.com/

I run a business that makes 3d printed braille molds that are used to repeatably emboss paper. I haven't considered the molds being offline storage, but I suppose they are. I mostly operate with the assumption of a shelf life of 10 years for the PETG molds, but ink free, embossed paper has excellent lifespan if stored correctly.

I guess you could consider it an "offline datastore as a service." It would be a pretty good offline storage of keys with a way to request a paper copy. Certainly issues of trust and physical security but wrapping it with encryption would be easy. Also benefit from your government's legal protections for mail. There might actually be a usecase here.

Couple fast facts:

- Current 26 * 32 = 832 cells * 6 dot braille = 4992 bits/mold/page

- Possible 28 * 34 = 952 cells * 6 dot braille = 5712 bits/mold/page

- Maybe some more headroom, but that's what is possible with current spacings

You can print QR code with different heights representing white or black. That piece of plastic would last a long time, and you could encode.....something. You could pint a version 40 (177x177) grid with a Prusa XL easily, and that would last for a few thousand years and be waterproof and fairly resilient to a lot of things. You could probably print a 177x177 grid on a regular Prusa MK4 and just have a color change layer. E.g. layer 1 white, and then layer 2 black. This would be 2,953 bytes.

You could even get a binder, and then print the QR codes sheets as 'pages'. You could print these thin enough to do 1mm sheets. That means ~ 120 of these in a 5 inch binder. So, a 3 ring binder of 1mm sheets of 177x177 QR codes would hold about 346.2 KiB. You could store encryption keys in this way. You can probably push the density well past 177x177 even on a Mk4s pretty safely. I may try this later today.

Seems like low data density. I recall some people talking about laser-engraving. IMHO engraving on a solid chemically-inert surface is more likely to be useful.

There are M-Disks. These are CD/DVD/BluRay disks which use a drive with a higher power laser and work by ablating a metal layer, rather than a photosensitive dye as in the lower-powered disks. Regular drives will read both kinds.

For a small amount of data (crypto keys?), consider deep laser engraving on stainless steel. That's very durable. Or even engrave text into stainless steel with a small CNC mill.

You can engrave QR codes, bar codes, etc. But there's a lot to be said for engraving plain text.

Easiest way (I'm sure it's been done) would be to encode as QR codes and print that. (Multi-filament for two colours, or raise one of them enough for shadow or filament change.)

why not print onto paper and put it in a safety deposit box?

your X/Y resolution isnt going to be fantastic woth filament, but your Z is gonna really suck.

you could instead print(emboss?) like a barcode on some paper, and encase that in resin. the big benefit being that you can read it non-destructively. keep it out of the sun so whatever ink doesnt fade and you're set

Wouldn't that be just QR codes (and equivalents)? I suppose 3D printers can be used to etch/print them onto a durable material and then have it read back using the measuring tools you mention, but at that point I think you would be better off just 3D-printing out something like a a vinyl disc maker/reader and using that.

Modern chips made via EUV lithography can be thought of as 3d printed. Like the most mind bogglingly complicated 3d printing imaginable.

I dont think TSMC make ROM chips using their 5nm process but I think they _could_, if needed. So that would be a very compact way of storing info.

you could maybe do the inverse of what a vinyl does or something. the problem would likely be reading the data back efficiently for whatever it represents more than some encodingscheme to put data onto a surface (just looking at it from an encoding issue without problems of running out of surface so to say :p)

To satisfy the "disk" condition, would a vinyl record suit your needs?

A "vinyl" record is probably your cleanest option. Record players are pretty common so there's much less risk of losing the ability to turn it back into a digital file. (physical object to .wav file is commodity, .wav to you your original binary data is left as an exercise for the reader.)

In the abstract, I don't see an obvious practical advantage of 3d steganography over 2d because the tools for 2d (printers and cameras) are more readily accessible and the processes of creation and reading are faster...particularly reading.

There might be corner cases where 3d makes sense...but it is hard to compete with decals/stickers, and 2d steganography can also use color and saturation as additional data dimensions.

But I could be wrong.

3D printing (additive manufacturing) usually involves layers that tend to be a weak point.

If you want something truly long lasting you might find substractive manufacturing techniques like CNC milling better. Indeed there are solutions from companies like Cryptotag for punching cryptographic seed data into plates / blocks of titanium. Something like this could be automated with a CNC router to store a bunch more data.

3d printing filaments generally aren't very heat resistant, by the nature of the process. There are ways around that, like 3d printing metal or clay. But if we are allowed attachments to 3d printers I'd choose a laser or a pen, then use optical equipment for reading back the data

Best choice will be thick metal medium, such as stainless steel.

Probably use a 177x177 QR code with Q or H error correction engraved (deeply). I would probably compress the data and encode it as Hex so it can be stored in alphanumeric mode on the QR. You might need a series of QRs for larger data.

This was solved with M-DISC. The data is literally glassy carbon pits. http://www.microscopy-uk.org.uk/mag/artsep16/mol-mdisc-revie...

For long term data storage, you might consider using a UV laser to etch inside a crystal cube. This should last for thousands of years I would think. You could also read back the bits using optics which is non destructive.

Some sort of wire recorder? The teeth of the 3d printer ‘driver’ (sorry lost on the terminology here) already make an imprint on the filament, maybe it could be made intentional

You could print an old-school punch card, bring it full circle.

There are special companys, like for ex. Axnum, the make needle printers for steel.

Depending on how you define 3D printing: braille.

Do you want to build a time-capsule?

Disney has a patent on this