The Shapeways Blog: 3D Printing News & Innovation
Entries from January 2011
Sunday, January 16. 2011
Help Us to Help You with High Res Images
If you would like to have your images included please send them to duann(at)shapeways(dot)com and I will add them to our existing database. You can also post them in the Shapeways Flickr Group where many of the Shapeways community are already sharing images of their items.
As a rule, images need to be at least 300 dpi and 5” x 7” to be suitable for publication.
Also if you include a bio about yourself, your design/art/company practice and product, we may be able to leverage this into an article about you and your designs rather than about Shapeways, it's services and the products it enables.
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Friday, January 14. 2011
Digital Wood Joints - What can you make?
Most designs on Shapeways are printed as one whole piece, but one thing to consider is that if you happen to want a big piece and be able to disassemble it for storage and then use on the go, or for an added artistic aspect, or for when you move and would like to not squish something that's hollow inside, or in order just to jump on the DIY bandwagon, where sometimes the novelty of Doing It Yourself (or at least assembling it yourself) is an added marketing bonus to a product.
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Wednesday, January 12. 2011
White House commissions report on 3-D printers
"Just as personal computers have dramatically changed everyday life, 3-D printers will profoundly affect how products are made, designed and consumed, say Cornell professor Hod Lipson and analyst Melba Kurman in a new report."
A very encouraging report has just been submitted to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy
Recommendations include:
1. Put a personal manufacturing lab in every school
2. Offer teacher education in basic design and manufacturing technologies in relation to STEM education
3. Create high quality, modular curriculum with optional manufacturing components
4. Enhance after school learning to involve design and manufacturing
5. Allocate federal support for pilot MEPs programs to introduce digital manufacturing to regional manufacturing companies
6. Promote published and open hardware standards and specifications
7. Develop standard file formats for electronic blueprints design files
8. Create a database of CAD files used by government agencies
9. Mandate open geometry/source for unclassified government supplies
10. Establish an “Individual Innovation Research Program” for DIY entrepreneurs
11. Give RFP priority to rural manufacturers that use personal manufacturing
12. Establish an IP “Safe Harbor” for aggregators and one-off producers
13. Explore micropatents as a smaller, simpler, and more agile unit of intellectual property
14. Re-visit consumer safety regulations for personally-fabricated products
15. Introduce a more granular definition of a “small” manufacturing business
16. Pass the National Fab Lab Network Act of 2010, HR 6003
17. “Clean company” tax benefits should include efficient manufacturing
18. Offer a tax break for personal manufacturing businesses on raw materials
19. Fund a Department of Education study on personal manufacturing in STEM education
20. Learn more about user-led product design
Lipson, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and computer science, and Kurman, of Triple Helix Innovation, make the case for strong government support of such digital fabrication technologies as the authors of a report commissioned by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Script-based modeling with OpenSCAD
OpenSCAD is a 3D modeling tool with a twist: it doesn't use an interactive 3D interface for its modeling, but a scripting language.
You'll use text commands to add basic shapes, move and scale them and apply operations to them. This may sound cumbersome, but I've found it's a lot of fun to work with. Changing your model is as easy as going back to your script, editing it and hitting 'render'. Done!
OpenSCAD uses 'constructive solid geometric modeling' - you'll use operations such as 'union', 'difference' and 'intersection' to combine objects into new ones. And the good part is: your models are always printable! (Well, if the size and wall thickness are ok, that is).
You can load external (STL) objects in your file and work with them, so you can always do the modeling of more complex shapes in other software.
Did I mention yet that OpenSCAD it open source, and free? I've added a bunch of links below to get you started. Enjoy!
Links
Monday, January 10. 2011
3D Scanning Begins to go Mobile!
At the moment Trimensional (a mobile device 3D Scanner) is only available on the iPhone 4 and iPod touch 4th Gen. The main reason it's only currently on these two devices is because the way it works is that while the screen of the mobile device faces you it flashes some fancy lights at you while you stare unmoving at the front-facing camera in a dark room (try not to creep everyone out who lives with you, unless you want to).
I saw this 3D scanning application mentioned initially on my feed from the Smithsonian 3D Digitization page that I "like" on Facebook. It was only 99 cents, so I figured it wasn't a big monetary risk to try it out. It was pretty entertaining if not with wonderful accuracy (above is a less than flattering low-res 3D scan of me). But hey, it just came out and the creator himself said he's going to pimp it out a lot more as time goes by. I'm sure most of you reading this blog want to know how these 3D scans apply to 3D printing. There are export features in the works, go to the end of this blog for more info on my email exchange with the creator of this app.
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