Peter Dilworth, the other cofounder, was watching one of our Up! 3D Printers do its thing when it made an error. He was kinda miffed about it; he just wanted to take the thing off the platform, fill up the gap, and put it back on. And then he had that “Oh! We can!” moment. That’s when the idea for the 3Doodler was born, and it’s been quite a ride since then.
I made a flash diffuser for the Canon Speedlight 580EX II after seeing our photo intern taping a piece of paper to his flash to act as a light bounce. His paper bounce didn’t last more than a few days of project photography in the extreme conditions of our lab, so after seeing him repeatedly throw them into the recycling bin, I decided to make him a durable 3D printed diffuser.
If you look up “octopus anatomy” in Google Images, you will mainly find detailed illustrations of the internal organs. Unfortunately, they don’t do the anatomy of an octopus justice. I saw the octopus I’d dissected as a piece of art: a clean, tightly-packed bundle of clearly distinguishable parts with a great sense of symmetry. I photographed everything from different angles as reference for the 3d model I was planning to create. The goal was to start work on something I’ve dreamed of for a long time – a library of very detailed anatomical models.
Affordable and hobbyist-friendly manufacturing tools that convert polygons into physical objects have been available for more than a decade. Although new technologies such as ABS extruders are different in many ways, it’s reasonable to suspect that the prospects of home manufacturing may have relatively little to do with the choice of a particular tool.
For months, controversy has been building around 24-year-old Austinite Cody Wilson, full-time law student and part-time director of Defense Distributed, a non-profit working to develop and freely distribute designs for working 3D-printable firearms. Even before Sandy Hook, their “WikiWeapon” project was controversial, placing the group squarely at the intersection of emerging debates over the uses and abuses of both crowdfunding and 3D printing. After the tragedy, that controversy assumed a sudden, violent urgency on the national stage, and Wilson became an even hotter media commodity. He receives death threats and strangers recognize him on the street. When I catch up to him, on Jan. 16, President Obama has just unveiled the most sweeping package of gun-control proposals the U.S. has seen in decades.
