Christmas is coming

Can you design the most christmassy model: perhaps an ornament to go in a tree, a 3D printed stocking, a personal touch for your living room, anything really, as long as it brings Christmas cheer.

To participate, upload a model and add the tag christmas to it.

The winner will win:

The song White Christmas by Bing Crosby from Itunes.

Christmas Set of 20 Folding Gift Boxes!!!

A Christmas Carol (Ultimate Collector's Edition)

Blizzard Bucket Snow in Seconds

and

$250 in 3D printing!

Submission deadline: 30th of November, Winner announced 1st of December. Some have asked so we shall give: Shapeways staff will judge this contest. The winner will be determined to be: that model that can give the most Christmas cheer to the most people.

Image credit: Creative Commons: Attribution, Fabio Luiz Santos.  

Did you think that you were done with voting? Vote now for our Does your Character have Character contest. The winner will be announced on the 14th.

I know that previously we said that the contest would be over by now but AWN and we decided to extend it to give people more time to submit their models. I should have posted this earlier but was sick, sorry. So run over to our contest gallery and vote now!

We're in a rather strange building here on the High Tech Campus in Eindhoven. The ancient building we are in has two large open atrium-like areas in it. During the day they are unused. In the evening hours though these areas often surprise us. I've walked for coffee to find a usually empty atrium transformed into a full table tennis competition complete with official tables, referees and onlookers. It is also really weird to walk around your office building and suddly realise that you are one of the few people not wearing a judo outfit because the classes just started. I know not to work too late on a Tuesday because then the Philips Harmonie Orchestra practice tends to shatter any productivity gains. 

One of the neighbors that I was the most curious about was the Philips RoboCup team. They are a group of 15 enthusiasts, here every Wednesday night, that get together to enter into competitions revolving around autonomous robotic football players. They write the code, the algorithms and hack the hardware so that their team of autonomous soccer robots will beat out teams from all over the world in competitions. 

This is why in the middle of this atrium next door to our offices there is a RoboCup football pitch. The pitch itself rather confused me on my first visit but it has always intrigued me also. So, today I went over to shoot some pictures and talk to the guys on the team.The robots have very little in the way of processing power and come with a modem. But, they only use this modem to upload and download software to them and to communicate with the other robots on their team. The robots tell each other where they are on the field, where the ball is and how close they are to the ball. An individual robot can then "claim" the ball to make the ball if it is the closest to it and tell the others that it will go for the ball. Some robots are assigned defensive or offensive roles and there is a goalie also.

The robots use a camera pointed at a mirror to see the area around them, one processor handles the video the other movement. The processor that they use to determine where the robot should move has around a 100 MIPS of power. 100 MIPS(Millions of Instructions Per Second) is comparable to the power present in a 90 Megahertz Pentium processor. This was the power of a regular desktop PC, in 1994. If you do not know what Pentium means, think slow, think Windows 95, think Forrest Gump tops the box office. The power that you used to play Colonization in 1994 is now used to move a robot autonomously around a football pitch. You are currently viewing this blog on a PC that probably has 2.4 gigahertz. Although I can't be sure because gigahertz used to mean something and now it doesn't.

The goal of all the RoboCup players is to make machines that are capable of taking on and winning from human soccer players. While at the moment our RoboCup players might look kind of cute and goofy, beware! I've read a lot of Isaac Asimov and can tell you that robots and humans never end up getting along.

Bart and I had some fun painting some of our models with arcylic paint. You can use arcylics to paint White, Strong & Flexible and we wanted to show you guys that. For the both of us the last painting training & practice we ever did before making this video was in kindergarten. But, we can not wait to see what you guys will do with paint & Shapeways

The material White, Strong & Flexible is made by SLS(Selective Laser Sintering)on an EOS Formiga P 100. The official name of the material itself is Fine Polyamide PA 2200. If you are familiar with SLS parts and think that they are brittle, weak and don't look good then you probably have seen other materials made on other machines. I know I'm tooting our own horn since we have an EOS Formiga but this stuff looks amazing compared to all the other types of SLS out there. If anyone is on the market for an SLS machine, you simply have to pick EOS. And once you've seen Bryan's videos I think you can see why we named the material White, Strong & Flexible.    

After the design week was over I bought it. It is cuddly, soft and you can lie on it and I just think its a lot of fun. I do admit that it was a bit of an impulse buy and that it is not a very standard furntiture item.The net result is that I now have a unique design item and that my mom and girlfriend think I'm nuts.

Apart from the whacky and loveable appearance of the thing I really enjoy the concept of it. It is an indoor version of a common inflatable pool toy. Another piece by Geboren im Wald is "the island"(pictured below) which you might recognize as resembling quite closely the largest of these toys. So the deisgner took something standard and cheap that is for the outdoor use by playing children and turned it into something made for living rooms and grownups. Although some feel, incorrectly, that this purchase disqualifies me from belonging to this category.