Posts tagged 3D Printing
Meet the machine of the moment: the DreamVendor, a set of four MakerBot Thing-O-Matics that sit behind glass and 3-D print your tchotchke of choice.
The DreamVendor is the brainchild of Dr. Chris Williams, Director of Virginia Tech’s DREAMS Lab, and student Amy Elliot, who led the design. “We wanted an experience where someone could walk up and use a 3-D printer without having to worry about anything besides loading a file and selecting ‘Print,’” says Williams.
(via The Future of Stuff: Vending Machine That Prints in 3-D | Wired Design | Wired.com)
MakerBot's 3-D Printers Let Consumers Dream Up Prototypes Of Pretty Much Anything. But Do We Need More Plastic? | Fast Company
In Pettis’s view, the Thing-O-Matic is a particularly potent example of a “meta tool”—a tool to make other tools. “It’s like getting a superpower,” he says.
My story on MakerBot for Fast Company.
What a lot of detractors miss about torrent repositories is how effective a means of sharing files they are, which is why this is sort of big news for the 3-D fabrication community. The biggest and best-organized site out there right now for these files is probably Thingiverse, which is great—it’s run by MakerBot Industries, the folks behind the MakerBot Replicator, which we awarded a PopSci Products of the Future award at this year’s CES. But it’s still a single-source site, and the Pirate Bay has the potential to host a huge number of torrents of these files and distribute them in a volume hardly anyone else could manage.
The “Physibles” site is already live; at the time of writing, there are only seven files in it, including a plan to print out a 3-D version of the Pirate Bay ship logo. But the site is adamant about the importance of this technology: in a post, they wrote, “We believe that in the nearby future you will print your spare sparts for your vehicles. You will download your sneakers within 20 years.” And we agree!
Pirate Bay Starts Offering Tangible 3-D Objects For Download | Popular Science
Appropriating a technique typically used in mattress production, Borre Akkersdijk creates a collection of 3D knit garments that are essentially “ready made.” The garments are created on a knitting machine that produces a round tube of fabric with seam allowances that are ready to be sewn. The fabric is also filled with a “filler thread” that gives it its dimension.
Results starting to come in from that “30 coffee mugs in 30 days” 3D printing effort that’s gotten a lot of buzz:
It has an overall look and feel of a hand-made product, which is very interesting, because this object was “untouched by humans” (except for finishing and shipping), meaning that it was designed in computer, with perfect radiusess, and perfect proportions, Then, it was 3DPrinted with a computer controlled machine accuracy, but the result is bumpy and imperfect, and it is nice. It almost feels like an object out of a craftsman shop, but this cup is entirely a computer-born and grown object.
Shapeways Launches 3D Printed Glazed Ceramics - PSFK
Shapeways, the creative site that turns designs into 3D products, has introduced Glazed Ceramics as the latest material available for creating objects.
