Motorola Mobility, a Google company, is building a 3D printed modular phone, and has partnered with 3D Systems for commercial fulfillment. More »
The Captured Dimensions pop-up studio was located in the Smithsonian Castle and featured approximately 80 digital cameras all connected to 3D software. More »
Microsoft expanded their support for 3D printing by launching a Windows 8 app called 3D Builder. It includes a library of objects you can edit and 3D print. More »
3D Systems (NYSE:DDD) announced the availability of the Sense 3D scanner, the first 3D scanner designed for the consumer and optimized for 3D printing. More »
With rumors circling that 3D Systems will be purchased by IBM, the stock soars. We look at why IBM might be interested in the 3D printing giant. More »
Yearly Archives: 2012
Last Night to Trim the Christmas Tree with 3D Printed Ornaments
It’s Christmas Eve: the last night to decorate your Christmas tree before the big day. Here are some 3D printed ornaments to add to your holiday cheer.
Above, you’ll see Christmas ornaments by pmoews (available on Thingiverse)
From the designer: Here is a simple Christmas tree ornament consisting of a sphere pierced with 198 holes. It is related to the holed container in Two Spherical Containers, thing:32840. The holes are hypocycloids with 5 cusps and are meant to resemble stars.
Next, we have 3D Printed Christmas Balls by cunicode (available on Shapeways)
And finally, a cool design called Cube Ball Illusion by Ablapo (available on Thingiverse)
The sculpture is showing a cube or a ball depending on the view angle.
Merry Christmas and happy holidays!
hat tip to 3dprinter.net for finding these designs.
Researchers Use Nano-Scale 3D Printing to Combat Prostate Cancer
Advanced nano-scale 3D printing techniques are being used to develop new drugs for prostate cancer and other applications. Parabon NanoLabs in Reston, Virginia is conducting this groundbreaking research with support from the National Science Foundation and other grants.
Using a simple “drag-and-drop” computer interface and DNA self-assembly techniques, researchers have developed a new approach for drug development that could drastically reduce the time required to create and test medications.
“We can now ‘print,’ molecule by molecule, exactly the compound that we want,” says Steven Armentrout, the principal investigator on the NSF grants and co-developer of Parabon’s technology. “What differentiates our nanotechnology from others is our ability to rapidly, and precisely, specify the placement of every atom in a compound that we design.”
The new technology is called the Parabon Essemblix™ Drug Development Platform, and it combines their computer-aided design (CAD) software called inSēquio™ with nanoscale fabrication technology.
Scientists work within inSēquio™ to design molecular pieces with specific, functional components. The software then optimizes the design using the Parabon Computation Grid, a cloud supercomputing platform that uses proprietary algorithms to search for sets of DNA sequences that can self-assemble those components.
Read the full brief at NSF.gov.
Medicine photo by epSos.de used under Creative Commons license.
Video: Ford Gives MakerBot 3D Printers to its Engineering Staff
American car manufacturer Ford is embracing 3D printing.
According to GigaOm, Ford is planning to give a MakerBot 3D printer to every engineer in the coming months. Reminiscent of the computer revolution, computer workstations were first provided to professionals and later adopted by the general public.
In the video below, Ford engineer Zac Nelson shows how he uses 3D printers for rapid prototyping.
via GigaOm.
Shapeways Celebrates 2012: Infographic and 1 Million 3D Printed Products
3D printing marketplace Shapeways has published an infographic highlighting its 2012 achievements. Among them:
- 1 million+ 3D printed products
- 8,000 shops
- $500,000 income earned by shop owners
- Community members from over 130 countries
- Opening of a new NYC factory
All of the numbers
3D Prints
- Well over 1,000,000 3D printed products to date
- Over 10,000 uploads per week
Shapeways Shops
- 8000+ Shapeways Shops, who earned $500,000 in income for 2012
- Shop owners earned almost 6 times normal daily sales on Black Friday alone!
Our Community
- 230,000+ Community Members in over 130 countries
People, places and things
- 2 Factories of the Future with 3D Printers capable of each creating up to 1,000 unique products daily
- On our way to 100% local production, with nearly 90% of products sold in the USA made in the USA
- 30+ material options
- 70+ employees
Via Shapeways blog.
MakerBot Says No to 3D Printed Guns
In September, we covered the Wiki Weapon, a 3D printed gun. While it seemed like a relative innocent novelty, the stakes have changed this month, when a terrible tragedy struck Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, CT.
In response, MakerBot is enforcing policies around weapon design, as Forbes reports:
In the wake of one of worst shooting incidents in American history, the 3D-printing firm Makerbot has deleted a collection of blueprints for gun components from Thingiverse, its popular user-generated content website that hosts 3D-printable files. Though Thingiverse has long banned designs for weapons and their components in its terms of service, it rarely enforced the rule until the last few days, when the company’s lawyer sent notices to users that their software models for gun parts were being purged from the site.
Makerbot, for its part, included no mention of the Newtown shootings in a statement sent to me about the gun takedowns. “MakerBot’s focus is to empower the creative process and make things for good,” writes Makerbot spokesperson Jenifer Howard. “Thingiverse has been going through an evolution recently and has had numerous changes and updates. Reviewing some of the content that violates Thingiverse’s Terms of Service is part of this process.”
In the past, Makerbot chief executive and founder Bre Pettis has remained ambivalent about guns on Thingiverse, which has become the world’s most popular sharing platform for 3D-printing files. When I asked him about the issue last month, Pettis pointed to the terms of service ban on weapons, but added that the site goes largely unpoliced. He was more explicit in a blog post last year: “The cat is out of the bag,” Pettis wrote. “And that cat can be armed with guns made with printed parts.”
That freewheeling outlook contrasted with other 3D printing services like Shapeways, which bans the uploading of even gun-like toys more than 10 centimeters in length.
Good for MakerBot to make this decision. But it looks like it won’t stop Cody Wilson from attempting to advance his useless agenda.
In response to Makerbot’s crackdown, Defense Distributed founder Cody Wilson wrote in an email, saying that the group plans to create its own site for hosting “fugitive” 3D printable gun files “in the next few hours.”
Neither Wilson believes that neither Makerbot’s purge of gun parts nor the outcry over the Newtown shooting has hampered Defense Distributed’s initiative. “The Internet routes around censorship,” he writes. “The project becomes more vital.”
Via Forbes.
