While the rest of us are still trying to get our 3D printers to produce a flawless plastic figurine, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have leapfrogged a few dozen steps and are now printing fully functional electric motors. In a single, continuous process taking about three hours, their custom-built machine can fabricate a complete linear motor from five different materials with a total material cost of just 50 cents. The only manual labor required is to magnetize the components after the print is complete.
The breakthrough, detailed in the journal Virtual and Physical Prototyping, comes from a team at MIT’s Microsystems Technology Laboratories, including Jorge Cañada, Zoey Bigelow, and Luis Fernando Velásquez-García. They retrofitted an existing 3D printer with four distinct extrusion toolheads capable of handling everything from rigid and flexible polymers to conductive silver ink and composite pellets loaded with magnetic particles. This multi-modal, multi-material approach allows the machine to lay down the motor’s dielectric housing, conductive coils, and magnetic components layer-by-layer without interruption.
Why is this important?
This achievement is less about making cheap motors and more about fundamentally changing how we manufacture complex devices. It’s a major step toward “printing systems, not just parts.” The ability to fabricate an entire electromechanical device on-site could eliminate reliance on fragile global supply chains for critical components. For robotics, automation, and even medical equipment, this opens the door to rapid prototyping and the creation of highly customized, integrated hardware that was previously impossible to produce outside of a factory setting. The researchers state the printed motor performed as well or even better than similar, conventionally made motors.
