If you’re a maker, 3d printing is an incredibly useful tool to have in your arsenal. Not only can it help bring your projects to life faster, but it can also offer unique results that would be difficult (or impossible!) to achieve with traditional methods. In these blog posts, we’ll provide you with some essential information and tips regarding 3D printing for makersโincluding the basics of how to get started, plus creative tutorials for spicing up your projects. Whether youโre already familiar with 3d printing or are just starting out, these resources will help take your game-making skills even further!
The Photon, an affordable 3D scanner, has already quadrupled its $80,000 Indiegogo goal, with still two weeks to go. Almost as gratifying: the Photon has generated a flurry of proposed uses for the device beyond the original โmaker hobbyistโ market they were targeting. The Photon is the first product from Toronto-based company Matterform, founded by friends and collaborators Adam Branejs and Drew Cox.
What would your reaction be to moving into an apartment and finding an old broken IKEA lamp? Normally you’d throw it out, but not if you’re Industrial Designer Samuel Bernier. Instead he designed and 3D printed a series of intricate lampshades.
Social Coding company GitHub has released a free, in-browser viewer for STL files in full 3D. In comparison to the iterative, collaborative environments for working on software, hardware has a lot of ground to make up, and GitHub’s doing great work to push things along. I’m eager to see how this grows and how it’s used in comparison to popular services like Thingiverse.
The MakerBot Replicator 2X is now available in the Maker Shed! This model is optimized for ABS printing and has two extruders, opening up a host of printing possibilities. In addition to printing two colors, you can use one extruder to print a support structure for the other, or print two small objects at the same time.
MAKE publisher Dale Dougherty looks at the current state of the 3D printing industry and asks: “How soon do you think we’ll get to one million printers and what will drive those sales?”
Imagine being about to 3D print customized characters, enemies, and props from your favorite computer games. That’s the idea behind Sandboxr.
Creators of Tinkercad announced earlier this week that they would no longer be developing the popular cloud-based CAD tool. We’re fans of Tinkercad here at Make, having written about and praised it on the blog and in our Ultimate Guide to 3D Printing, so this is sad news. The free version is still available to use between now and the end of April, and paying customers will have access until the end of 2013.
Here are a few other free alternatives to TinkerCAD, starting with what I think is the most beginner-friendly and ending with the least beginner-friendly.
