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

Using this DIY hack you can attach any SLR lens to your iPhone4, and have it mimic the wonderful quality of a vintage 'Lomo' camera.

It'll add great depth-of-field and vignetting to your iPhone photographs (although, admittedly, it won't fit in your pocket anymore).

Why buy something when you can make it yourself?

Link: 'LOMO like pictures by iPhone 4'

Researchers at the University of Nottingham, UK, have achieved a breakthrough in nanotechnology: they succeeded in building self-assembling 3D nanostructures. By introducing a 'guest molecule', they create structures that grow upwards, while until now only 2-dimensional surfaces were possible.

The research group sees the main application of the new technology in creating molecular computers and information storage devices of the future.

This is still far removed from 'real' 3D printing of course, but it's an inspiring first step. I still believe that Captain Picard's 'Tea, Earl Gray, Hot' will become a reality one day.

For more background information, read 'Guest molecule builds 3D nanostructures' on physicsworld.com.

Ben, Dan and Nancy have joined the Shapeways team at our New York office. I asked them each a few questions so we can get to know them a bit better. Welcome on board, guys!

	Ben Horst Can you tell us a little bit about yourself? I've been living in New York City for the past six years where I've worked for a number of startups including SharedBook, Air America, Six Apart, and others. I'm interested in open source software and online communities, as well as outdoor activities like hiking, biking and camping. Why did you decide to work for Shapeways? Shapeways fascinated me from the first time I discovered it via a post on Boing Boing. Having read books like The Diamond Age, I've long thought that 3D printing represents a major shift in manufacturing that will prove to be as influential as mass production. The economic and cultural effects over the next few decades will be enormous and exciting--and I want to be a part of this world. What's going to be your role? I'm the product lead for the Shapeways web platform. I'll take feedback from customers and community members, combine that with our strategic plans, and implement the result on our website. What will be the first thing we see from you? The first thing could turn out to be an upgrade to our company blogging platform, or some upgrades to our widgets for displaying shop content on external sites and blogs. We'll see which makes it to the finish line first!
	Dan Fried Can you tell us a little bit about yourself? I grew up in Brooklyn, New York. When I'm not coding, I like to juggle, ride my bike around New York City, and cook Asian food. Why did you decide to work for Shapeways? Because Shapeways is going to change the world. Seeing all the amazing stuff that people have designed using Shapeways is really inspiring, and I'm excited to be part of that process. What's going to be your role? I'm a web developer. I'll be working to improve the website, adding features, fixing bugs and improving performance. What will be the first thing we see from you? Today I did some work that should speed up the website quite a bit. Other than that, we have a lot of exciting new features coming over the next few months.
	Nancy Liang Can you tell us a little bit about yourself? I love technology and design, so I'm super excited to be a part of the Shapeways family. Previously, I've worked in Sales and Marketing at Google and Intel. I've also done a 2 year stint in management for a hedge fund. In addition, I'm currently on the board of 2 non profits--one doing work with the Asian American community, another a career accelerator program in international development. In my free time, I love organizing fun, quirky excursions with my friends, like going to Come Out and Play or organizing walk on water races. I'm also interested in hacking together random web tools and discovering random interesting products and toys. Why did you decide to work for Shapeways? It's the perfect intersection of all things I love: creating cool products + technology + design + community building + FUN! All the people here are crazy passionate about what they do, and really dedicated to their products and customers. I'm really happy to be a part of Shapeways. What's going to be your role? I am a product manager for materials and content. This means I will work on introducing new materials to our portfolio for you guys, and work to get better pricing for those materials. I will also work on managing the content of what Shapeways offers--the products you see online, including the co-creation platform. My goal here is to make 3D Design accessible to anybody, regardless of their 3D modeling abilities. Got any ideas on how to make this work? Let me know! What will be the first thing we see from you? It's too early to tell (my second day!) exactly what my priorities will be--but hopefully you'll see a new emphasis on co creation, a lot more clever tools to help everybody design and customize products, and new materials and finishing options. What that will eventually translate into will be more designs and a growth in our community... and a larger drain on my bank account since I'm love buying cool designs.

Have you already tried our gallery widget? It's a great way to display your designs or shop items on your own website. It turned out that adding it to a WordPress blog wasn't that easy though, so we created a WordPress plugin for you.

To install it, simply add a new plugin from the WordPress admin menu and search for 'Shapeways'.

The plugin can work in two modes: as a WordPress widget, or in an individual post.

To use it as a widget, just add the 'Shapeways Gallery' widget to your theme and configure it (learn how to do that here). This is a great way to include the widget on each page of your blog. There's just one thing to remember: enter your shop name (and shop-section if you want) OR your username, not both at the same time.

Using the widget in an individual post or page requires the use of a 'shortcode':

[shapeways option=value ...]

Available options are:

• shop - the name of your shop
• shopsection - the name of a section in your shop (ignored if 'shop' hasn't been set).
• fav - display the favorites of this username (can't be used together with 'shop').
• cols, rows - the number of columns and rows in your widget.
• style - allowed valued are 'light' and 'dark'. The default value is 'light'

For example:

[shapeways shop=byshapeways cols=3 rows=3 style=dark]

Please give us feedback, and don't forget to rate the Plugin on WordPress.org, thanks!

Please note: WordPress.com doesn't allow users to install their own plugins, so you can't use our plugin there..

Here are some first sneak peeks at our new office in New York. It's still completely empty, BUT we have a (laser printer. We'll post more pictures once it starts to look like a real office!


Lunch table, anyone? (Peter)

from $ 40.00 | (€ 29.14)	$ 47.60 | (€ 34.68)	$ 99.00 | (€ 72.13)

We are very proud to offer Sterling Silver as our latest production material! In the past we did a test with Silver Ring Poems and Cufflinks, but now you can order any design in brilliant shiny Silver, until at least November 7th10th.

We'll use this test period to see if we can achieve the quality and speed that we want. Also, we'll need to learn what size of objects will be ordered - larger objects mean lower overhead costs for us, and in the long run better prices/cm3 for you!

Material and Process

We're using Sterling silver which is 92.5% pure silver. The models are created using the lost-wax casting process using a high-resolution 3D Wax print of your design. After printing the model is cleaned and optionally manually polished (we call this Silver Glossy). Please note that only well-reachable surfaces can be polished!

Price and Delivery Time

Silver costs $48/cm3, with a minimum of $30. The optional polishing step for Silver Glossy is an additional $15 per model. Delivery time is 12 working days.

Design Rules

The design rules aren't finished yet - we're still learning how to handle Silver properly. The quick version: the minimum wall thickness is 0.5mm, and we can print details as small as 0.11mm. For the long version, check out our Silver design rules.

As we're still in the initial stages we have to rely heavily on our operators - their experience will tell us whether an object is printable or not.

Adding Sprues

The casting process needs sprues to insert the liquid metal into the cast (and to let air escape). Our operators will add these to your models - they are trained to select good locations and will also take care of cleanly removing them afterwards. (Of course you only pay for the volume of Silver that is used in your model - not for the sprues!).

Ordering new objects in Silver

When uploading a new model you can now select Silver as an available material. Also, we have added Silver to all the models in the Jewelry category.

The Dutch Design Week is a major art and design fair in the Netherlands. It lasts for a crazy 9 days and of course we'll be present once again as well! Our theme this year is 'From Design to Reality'. Our focus will be on producing and selling your own designs.

This year we've had help from none other than Michiel Cornelissen, who dressed up our 32m2 booth with his 30 pencil icosahedron. We'll also feature other work by Michiel, as well as designs from Nervous System and Stijn van der Linden (Virtox) on our booth.

Michiel and Stijn will also be present to help us out, so come on over and say hi to everyone!

Here are the details:

• Date: October 23 – October 31.
• Time: Daily from 12.00 – 18.00
• Location: Stijp S, Eindhoven, Hall 2

We've just replaced our Summer Colors White Strong & Flexible with a new selection: the Winter Colors. They are Winter Blue, Winter Green and Winter Red. They are slightly darker and warmer variations of the Summer Colors and are more suited for for example Christmas designs.

In addition we have one extra color which will ONLY be available during the month of October: Halloween Orange.

These colors have a start up cost of $4 and cost an additional $1.99 per cubic centimeter (prices excluding VAT). We will offer these colors until the end of December.

Last Saturday Marleen, Stijn (Virtox) and I spent the better part of our day with a television crew of RTL4 Nieuws, a major Dutch news show. Stijn is the star of the item - he explains how he uses Shapeways and how he can now create objects that would have taken his grandfather months to make, and Marleen looks to the future and how the recent investment will allow Shapeways to grow. I'll make an appearance next to one of our printers, trying to explain what 3D printing really is.

The item was broadcast in the 7.30pm evening news and you can watch it online (it's in Dutch, of course).

Zoybar is an open R&D Lab for academic, hobbyist, and commercial developers to easily create music instruments and applications. It's an 'Open Hardware' platform that offers production (CAD) files for instrument parts, and you can order certain key elements on their website as well (read more about Zoybar).

We're working with Zoybar and Blenderart Magazine (the leading Blender PDF magazine) on an exciting new contest: Design original hardware features that can be incorporated with the Zoybar instruments and that can be 3D printed with Shapeways.

A platform for Open Hardware, working together with Open Software and an Open Production platform - how cool is that? Read on for contest details.

We just released the 'Multiple Shell Merge' feature. It was announced on our blog earlier and it should save you some money. It took some time to iron out the last wrinkles, but we're happy with the results now. There's just one catch: it doesn't work for color (i.e.: VRML2) models yet, but we're working on that.

Two other interesting features after the link!

In just a few days time, from july 27th-29th, SIGGRAPH 2010 will break loose in Los Angeles.

SIGGRAPH (Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques, in full) is the world's largest conference on computer graphics and 3d technology, and it's THE place to be if you're interested in 3D. Cities that host SIGGRAPH turn into a madhouse: all hotels are full, movie and game studios throw parties every evening and you have a good chance to run into 3D celebrities.

Even better: you can run into Shapeways! We'll be there for the third year in a row, showing 3D artists how they can transform their work from the virtual into the physical. If you're in the area, we'd be thrilled to meet you! Come on over to say hi and meet the team, check out our sample prints and meet fellow Shapeways users. (We still have free tradeshow tickets left - get them here). You'll find us at booth number 538. You can download a map of the event, and our SIGGRAPH leaflet.

In just a few days, SIGGRAPH 2010 will kick off in Los Angeles. It's THE place to be if you're interested in anything that's related to 3D graphics and technologies. I've been giving away free tickets to the tradeshow since last week, and there are still some tickets left. If you want one, mail me at bart@shapeways.com and include your full name and Shapeways login name.

This week, I'll be giving away 3 much coveted tickets to the SIGGRAPH Animation Festival - it's the showcase of this year's best 3D animations. It's always an amazing ride - if you're at SIGGRAPH you should really try and see this.