就像简单地用办公打印机在纸上打印图片一样直接写出 电子产品是电子产品行业长久以来的梦想。笔者实验室已发明和论证了首台液态金属打印机的原型，为该目标的实现迈出了关键的一步。作为在不久的将来为社会制造非常实用的桌面液态金属打印机的持续努力的一部分，本项工作旨在将此技术向消费者层面推进。通过一系列针对关键技术问题的工业设计和技术优化，如工作可靠性、打印分辨率、自动控制、人机界面设计、软件、硬件和软硬件之间的整合，可制造出一台高品质的个人桌面液态金属打印机(为进行大批量工业化生产做准备)。本文解释了此打印机的基本特点和重要技术原理，并论证了为制造功能性装置(如发光二极管(LED) 显示器)的几种可能的 消费者终端用途。此液态金属打印机是一种自动的个人电子产 品生产工具，其使用简单，成本低，并具有许多潜在用途。本文论证了这种新设备对一些新兴需求可能发挥的重要作用，概述了这项尖端技术的远景，并与几种传统打印方法进行了对比分析。可以预见，在不久的将来，这种桌面液态金属打印机将在学术领域、工业、教育和个人用户中成为基本的电子产品生 产工具，并会被用于许多新兴实践中。

It has long been a dream in the electronics industry to be able to write out electronics directly, as simply as printing a picture onto paper with an office printer. The first-ever prototype of a liquid-metal printer has been invented and demonstrated by our lab, bringing this goal a key step closer. As part of a continuous endeavor, this work is dedicated to significantly extending such technology to the consumer level by making a very practical desktop liquid-metal printer for society in the near future. Through the industrial design and technical optimization of a series of key technical issues such as working reliability, printing resolution, automatic control, human-machine interface design, software, hardware, and integration between software and hardware, a high-quality personal desktop liquid-metal printer that is ready for mass production in industry was fabricated. Its basic features and important technical mechanisms are explained in this paper, along with demonstrations of several possible consumer end-uses for making functional devices such as light-emitting diode (LED) displays. This liquid-metal printer is an automatic, easy-to-use, and low-cost personal electronics manufacturing tool with many possible applications. This paper discusses important roles that the new machine may play for a group of emerging needs. The prospective future of this cutting-edge technology is outlined, along with a comparative interpretation of several historical printing methods. This desktop liquid-metal printer is expected to become a basic electronics manufacturing tool for a wide variety of emerging practices in the academic realm, in industry, and in education as well as for individual end-users in the near future.