Yesterday, 3D Printing service Shapeways announced the availability of a new material in their already-impressive lineup, a flexible plastic polymer. Printing with this “Elasto Plastic” will cost $1.75/cm3, and like many of the other materials, is laser-sintered one layer at a time.
Last summer a student organization based out of the University of Washington, WOOF (Washington Open Object Fabricators), successfully created the world’s first 3D Printed Boat. The boat was printed on a large-format FDM printer, which was hacked together from a plasma cutter, and prints with post-consumer milk jugs.
If you were hoping to pick up Brook Drumm’s new Printrbot Simple at Maker Faire Bay Area this year, well…you’re too late. The Printrbot Simple beta edition sold out Saturday afternoon. Still, with alpha availability slate for June, you don’t have too long to wait.
Like most people out there, I sometimes have more ideas than time to implement them. So instead of keeping those ideas locked in a notebook somewhere unaccessible and not serving a purpose, I’m going to release them into the world as public domain in the hope that they might inspire, or at a very minimum keep an idea from being patented. You can do whatever you like with these, except for attempting to patent them yourself. It is my sincere hope that by releasing these ideas, more awesomeness and excellence will be brought into being.
The Inside 3D Printing Conference in NYC gave us a clear look at the business side of 3D printing. Usual suspects, like 3D Systems, MakerBot and Stratasys, attended in full force. So did some up-and-comers like FormLabs, ZoomRP, Sculpteo, Mbot, and MakerGear. Shapeways (based in New York) was noticeably absent, though CEO Peter Weijmarshausen gave a keynote speech and announced that the company would receive $30 million in new investments.
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.
Create awesome, sweet Escher cookies using 3D printed rollers with MC Escher art on them.
