A 3D CNC machine built from Lego that uses floral foam. Wait 'till you see the final result before you judge the quality!

Last Friday, about 30 Shapeways enthusiasts met in Amsterdam. This made it the largest usermeeting so far! Many brought their own work, and we discussed all kinds of topics like what's going on in the company, technical stuff and how to start up a Shapeways-based business.

Many people asked me if we had already planned a new meeting, and you've made me realise we should do this more often. So: stay tuned - I'll make sure there's another meetup in Amsterdam this year. I'll also make sure there's space to present your own project next time.

It certainly was a very inspiring evening for everyone and it was awesome meeting you all. Thanks for coming, and see you next time!

High-quality 3D printing at home has just come one step closer. Researchers at the Vienna University of Technology in Austria have presented the smallest 3D printer to date. At the size of a carton of milk and weighs 1.5 kilograms, it currently costs around €1,200 but the makers expect the price to drop quickly.

The printer uses stereolithography: it hardens layers of synthetic resin by an intense beam of light of only .05mm wide. So not only is this printer small and cheap, but it also prints at a very high resolution!

You can see it in action here:

With the introduction of the new Frosted Detail and the re-appearance of Silver, our production facilities have been pushed beyond their limits. As a result, some of you may experience a delay in delivery of your items. Let me take a moment and talk about the specific issues that we’ve run into and what we’re doing to solve them.

Frosted Detail

I think it’s fair to say that we’ve never seen a material introduction that has been as successful as Frosted (Ultra) Detail. Just within the first few days we received the same number of orders as we usually do in one month for the regular Detail materials and they are continuing at the same rate. At this moment, our printers are running 24-7 but it’s not enough. We’re adding more printers this week to match the demand. We should be back on track in two weeks from now, but until then you may experience a delay of up to 10 working days.

Silver

We’ve offered Silver a couple of times before in the past, but its current popularity is unprecedented. In addition, people are no longer designing small objects (like rings), but also beautiful larger objects of up to 10x10cm. It seems like silver has been discovered by a new breed of designers!

While this is fantastic news, it also places a heavy burden on our wax printers (which can take up to 70 hours to print a large model!). We’re working hard to add additional wax printers early next week and solve the backlog by the end of next week. Until then, you may experience a delay of up to 10 working days.

Detail

As if the sudden growth of orders in Frosted Detail and Silver was not enough, our Objet printer has broken down. We’re busy getting a new one - hopefully early next week. Once its in, we should be up to speed again in 4-5 days. Until that time, Detail orders may be delayed up to 10 working days.

What about your order?

As soon as we see that your order is delayed, we’ll get in touch and keep you informed of the progress. If you have ordered parts in multiple materials, we’ll ship the each part as it’s ready. Of course, if you have any questions you can always contact us at service@shapeways.com.

We’re sorry things are taking longer than you’ve come to expect from us, and we’re all working hard on a solution. Thank you for your patience!

Theo Jansen is a Dutch kinetic artist, since 1990 occupied with creating new forms of life. He is father to the "Animari" beach creatures, or "Strandbeests", made of PVC tubing, that walk the beach powered by the wind. As time progresses the Beests evolve, with the ultimate goal of living their lives on their own.

Now Theo Jansen's Strandbeests have found a way to multiply by injecting their digital DNA directly into the Shapeways system. From now on several small strandbeests are available from his shop . Next to being a great abstraction of the inspiring work of Theo Jansen, these strandbeests are also an example of what 3D printing is capable of. Right after birth from the 3D printer these models will work straight away and do NOT require any assembly.

Designing the Beests this way proved quite the challenge. They consist of at least 76 separate moving interlocking parts. Multiple prototypes were used to come to the first viable solution, "Animaris Geneticus Parvus" #5. But the evolution process continues with evolutions #6 with lightweight bone structure and #7 with pointy feet.

3D printing is very suitable for rapid design changes, and as time goes by the Beests will evolve and new types of DNA will be added to the store, while others are removed. Expect more evolutions and variations in the future, with possible variation in size, shape, material or means of propulsion.

Also worth mentioning, a big brother to these Strandbeests is the limited edition "Animaris Geneticus Parvus XL", which is only available from Theo's Dutch Gallery Akinci

Animaris Geneticus Parvus is a joint project of Theo Jansen and Dutch Designers Bo Jansen and Tim van Bentum.

Check out the models in Theo Jansen's Shop.

From the truly-amazing-department: you guys have earned over $100,000 with your Shapeways shops, counting from the moment Shapeways started back in 2008. That's true earnings, not just revenue. I think that deserves a round of applause! How about we aim for another $100,000 in just 6 months from now?

(Picture: record shipment of 136 orders in one day, last month. From left to right: Egbert, Petra en Ramon)

An often heard request was support for the OBJ file format. This is an open and rather old format, meaning that many many applications offer really good support for it.

After some quiet beta testing, we're now ready to offer it to everyone. So if exporting your designs to STL, VRML97, X3D or Collada always gave you a headache this just might make your life a little bit easier!

A few things to note:

• OBJ is a unit-less file format, so you'll have to tell us the scale of your model when you upload it: millimeters, inches or meters. For example, if you select millimeters then 1 unit in your 3D model translates to 1 millimeter in your printed object.
• We currently do not yet support material/texture files (.MTL) - this is planned for the future, however. NURBS are also not supported. But in our research we found that NURBS are not commonly used by OBJ exporters of 3D software packages.

We'll be updating our list of supported applications over the next couple of weeks, but we can really use your help with that. Let us know if your favorite 3D app supports OBJ - either natively or through a plugin. You can leave your feedback on the forum. Thanks!!

One day you stare at your cordless screwdriver and you wonder: 'What else can I use this for?'. Well, it could power your full-size, 3D printed racing car, for one!

In this step-by-step tutorial by Mike Sweeney shows how to design and 3D print your own medal clasps in Carrara Studio using existing photographs as reference material.

Mike writes:

The Médaille Coloniale -- the French Colonial Medal -- is a prime uniform decoration for any good 19th-century soldier. Adding some campaign clasps to a recreationist friend's medal seemed like an excellent project to test out the Shapeways workflow, from reference images to final prop.

This instructable is mostly concerned with the method(s) of working in scale from photograph to final item.

He takes you through the following steps:

• Gathering reference material and processing it in Photoshop.
• Setting up your working size in Carrara Studio.
• Designing the clasps.
• Checking if the model meets the Shapeways design rules.
• Exporting and uploading the model to Shapeways.
• Finishing the printed models.

Nice work Mike! Thanks for taking the time to post this on Instructables.com.

Link: Medal Clasps via Shapeways.

One of the things I simply couldn't wrap my head around is how people design Rubik's cubes mechanisms. Eitan Cher shows us how to do it - it involves some clever Solid Works tricks and a LOT of manual labour.

Eitan writes:

Some of you may have seen the plethora of puzzles that have been uploaded to Shapeways in the past few years by members such as Tom van der Zanden and Oskar van Deventer. Well, I'm one of these twisty-puzzlers, and I've just made a video showing how to do it.

Bored out of my mind in freshman CAD class, I decided to find better things to do with my time, and promptly began to design twisty puzzles. In the 5 minutes that follow, I'll walk you through through the design of my most recent puzzle, the Master Heximate, ending with me holding the finished puzzle in my hands. It goes by kind of fast, but if you've had any experience with CAD you should be able to get the gist of it.



Enjoy!

Eitan is currently finishing up his 3rd year in mechanical engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder. If anyone out there is looking for an enthusiastic product design intern for the summer, a single email would seriously make Eitan's day. To see some of his other designs, pay a visit to Eitan's shop.

Bart and I were lucky enough to attend the Maker Faire Newcastle last weekend ( 12 and 13th of March) For the third year in a row it was a huge success for Shapeways with hundreds of new potential users flocking to our stand. They were all eager to check out what Shapeways is all about: the models, the materials, the people.

Maker Faire is all about do-it-yourself creation and there were heaps of cool/crazy art installations to admire. To name but a few: the Nightingallery singing mechanical bird, remote controlled garbage bins that chased kids around and performers with huge Tesla coils. Also, lots of home 3D printing with printers like RepRap and the eMaker.

Especially our new Silver fascinated the crowd. Community members Euphy and Stop4Stuff traveled to Newcastle and helped us out for the full two days. It was great to see them promote their models to all the enthusiastic people who came by our stand. Thanks again guys!!

We had a chance to get to meet some members of the Shapeways community members, who were also so kind to join us for a nice dinner in a Tapas restaurant.

We can't wait to see what the Maker faire 2012 will have in store for us!

Ralph

Peter recently sent me a link to an interesting piece about "Startup Suicide - Rewriting the Code" on AlwaysOn about the "re-architect and re-write" solution usually being the beginning of the end for a company in a rapidly changing market. This is interesting to me as we ramp up for doing exactly that yet no decisions have been made.

I think it's a perfectly confronting article. There's a lot of truth in it if done the way it is described there: some sort of a big-bang upgrade. I like the phychological aspects of the article, the 'condemned code' part. Very recognizable, very Scary too.

I prefer the modularization of the code model instead, and then optimize / replace those parts. This gives a gradual upgrade model instead of a big-bang upgrade as the article mentions. Like what I'm doing now with the Zend JobQueue migration to the Gearman JobQueue. Replace piece by piece. This however is an easy move compared to replacing an entire PHP framework.

For the modular change model to work one needs an easy and automated way to deploy code changes often. I've implemented a Continuous Deployment system using BuildBot with which we now have unattended and automated site updates available, most even without downtime. We're using that for some time now with multiple deployments per day.

If we ever replace our ATK framework for something else we'll do it piece by piece. I hope that'll scare off the "Startup Suicide - Rewriting the Code" demon

Hans Lambermont, Senior Architect / Developer at Shapeways, Makerbot enthusiast, Astrophotographer, Open Source fan and Juggler.

As of last Wednesday, we have a new Community Manager! Her name is Ana Hevesi.

I’m a freelance consultant and because of other projects, I can only work part-time for Shapeways. And as you guys deserve full-time attention and TLC, we set out to find someone new who fits right into this community. We found Ana. I’m sure you and Ana will all get along great!

I am also excited to move to other activities within Shapeways. As you may know I have been quite involved in the new renderer and the generated creator and I'll work to improve these further and work on other new (secret) stuff....

It’s been a privilege to be able to spend to much time on this community, and I’ll be sure to keep a close eye on everything that’s going on here. So behave!

Cheers,

Bart

*passes community manager hat to Ana*

I'm Nancy, the new product lead of content and materials. For the past week, I've been getting up to speed on our offerings, building office tables, and meeting Shapeways colleagues. I'd like to take some time and share my very early stage, initial reflections with you guys.

Creators are gaining popularity. In my search for the most X (popular, sales, ordered), easy-to-use creators are consistently appearing on top. In the future, I want to work on making more of these available for our community members who are not experts in 3D modeling.

Stainless Steel orders are high in demand, but not without its quirks. It is one of the most in-demand materials. However, production tends to take longer and models may stall for one reason or another. I want to dig into this problem, and work to provide a more consistent service and better set expectations.

Shapeways product category is diverse... and evenly diverse. The number of models in each category (as well as sales, views, etc.) was more evenly distributed than I expected. This means the community is growing past early adopter and niche users, leading to a wider variety and more even distribution of product categories.

In case you are interested, out of the statistics I looked out (most views, most sales, most ordered, most this and that)... the following designs stood out at the top, just to name a few. Congrats!

• Gyroid by Bathsheba
• Road Popper by Pick
• Text/Logo Branding Iron Cricket by byShapeways
• PadFoot - stand for iPad by Michiel Cornelissen
• Pod a porter - neckband for iPod shuffle by Michiel Cornelissen
• Lightpoem for LED candle by byShapeways
• Octopus Ring by nullnetwork

See you guys (and your designs) around Shapeways!

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

• OpenSCAD
• Thingiverse - Getting Started with OpenSCAD
• Thingiverse - OpenSCAD: Modules and Loops
• Edutech wiki - OpenScad beginners tutorial