AUSTIN — The nostalgic return to vinyl LP records is endearing, in a way, but no one expects the digital music recording industry to start producing the large discs in mass quantities again.
With the new Stratasys comes a stronger array of products. Here’s how we see our new family: The Idea Series: I find this one the most exciting because many of its users are accessing 3D printing for the first time. This line includes the Mojo and uPrint SE systems, which make 3D printing accessible for the individual designer or engineer, or small teams
While the rest of us were enjoying the dulcet tones of Bing Crosby, Amanda Ghassaei of Instructables was as busy as ever over the holiday: she posted a ‘compilation’ video of her experiments in 3D printing 12” records, for which she has unsurprisingly published the plans on Instructables , on the day after Christmas. “In order to explore the current limits of 3D printing technology, I’ve created a technique for converting digital audio files into 3D-printable, 33RPM records and printed a few prototypes that play on ordinary turntables.” Suffice it to say that it’s a significant improvement upon Fred Murphy’s diverting Fisher Price records : This project was my first experiment extending this idea beyond electronics. I printed these records on a UV-cured resin printer called the Objet Connex500.
The dawn of 3D printing was pretty good at making basic forms, and as the technology develops, the intricacies of the designs that can be 3D printed are fast improving, but not everything is ready to be 3D printed. Case in point, Instructables assistant tech editor Amanda Ghassaei has 3D printed some “vinyl” versions of her favorite songs . They work, but the sound quality is lacking.
Objet, maker of fine 3D printers, is at Euromold 2012 this week to show off its latest innovations in 3D printing.
BBC recently did a special on 3D printing , and Jeremy Paxman was on hand to ask a lot of patronizing questions.
If you’ve ever opened up a three-dimensional modeling application (such as Rhino, 3D Max, Maya, SolidWorks, or Sketchup), chances are you’ve had some experience with ‘Boundary Representations’ (or Breps for short). Whether you knew their technical name or not, almost all Computer Aided Design tools used today are built on the paradigm of Breps, where a “solid” object is that which is enclosed by a set of boundaries or surfaces. The digital representation of these “solid” objects are often treated as discrete, and homogeneous – where there is a clear distinction between what is “inside” and what is “outside” this boundary envelope. Yet, there are other ways to consider digital material, most notably using a technique called topology optimization . Topology optimization is a method often used in engineering to produce optimal lightweight structures. We start with a volume of material and redistribute [ie.
Eric Doremus Today’s guest blog post comes from Eric Doremus, a civil engineering student at Roger Williams Univesity, and summer intern at R&D Technologies. R&D Technologies is a Rhode Island-based reseller of Objet’s complete line of 3D printing systems and is also a 3D prototyping service bureau.
One of the main challenges in 3D printing is to produce prototype parts that can be tested and used in the same way as the final product. Objet has overcome many aspects of this challenge thanks to the Connex multi-material 3D printing system which can print a range of different material properties at the same time within the same model.
Over at the Fabbaloo blog this week there’s a nice summary of the results of an academic survey into 3D printing conducted by the P2P Foundation. Interesting to note here is that although fewer respondents were from the industrial user space, Objet has done well to come ahead of all the other professional 3D printers when respondents were asked “Which company/projects made the most popular 3D printers?” I believe it could have something to do with the sort of models that can only be created on Objet machines – stuff like this really cool 3D printed hand – in Clear Transparent material with the delicate bones inside in Objet Rigid White material. (3D Printed on the Objet Connex multi-material series - of course!) Multi-Material 3D Printed Hand – Created on the Objet Connex 3D Printer

