Social coding company GitHub announced today a new, free feature for 3D Printer owners and modelers, an STL file viewer. Now you can view your files right in the browser, in beautiful 3D, like this.
GitHub’s been doing cool things with their MakerBot for awhile now (which I’ve written about), and I’m particularly happy to see that they’re creating tools for people interested in hardware. In comparison to the iterative, collaborative environments for working on software, hardware has a lot of ground to make up, and they’re doing great work to push things along.
There are more STL files on GitHub than you might think, and now you can seamlessly zoom and rotate around each one. Since GitHub allows you to track each version of a file, you can see the model in various stages of development. One of the two developers leading the charge, Mike Skalnik, says “I think 3D printing is exciting because it’s a cool blend of software and hardware. I really want to make it easier for people to work on things like this together.”
Are you going to start hosting your STL files on GitHub as well as Thingiverse? What features would you like them to add next? Let us know what you think with a comment below.
Announcement Blog Post
Wireless 3D Printer control with Make-Me
ADVERTISEMENT
