Quick… Whats the most talked about and most hyped coming technology in the universe. If you said 3d printing then you are one of the bazillion people
Who mention it too me in the course of any given day. 3d Printing is the process of building Directly from a digital image to a physical object. The 3-D printer we have at the Vermont Fablab Uses ABS plastic. It’s a bit like Weedwhacker cord. a small heated head moves back and forth on the platen leaving little dots of plastic where the digital image indicates it should. As time progresses the platinum the moves down and a 3-D object appears out of nowhere. This technology can print any shape that you can imagine. Technology is evolving rapidly. There are now machines that can print in ceramic and metal I even saw one that printed in sugar and chocolate. People are already using the technology to print new bones for people parts for airplanes toys you name it… It only thing that is certain distance. Will appear more and more.
Most of the time the digital images that one print input from scratch in a 3-D modeling program such as solidworks. Sometimes you want to copy an object from the real world. For that you need a 3-D scanner. The Vermont fab lab actually had a 2-D scanner but it wasn’t working very well. We just got a grant to upgrade it and I just received the new scanner last week. I had a couple of hours this morning so I tested it out.

The first thing I could think of to scan was a Samstone. Normally we make sandstones by hand with Clay. U-shaped the stones Into small balls with her hands and then we use a metal band to put Sam’s name on the front and the website http://Samstones.org on the back. Made them out of other things including metal glass chocolate… But I’ve always thought it would be fun to let people make their own. And here Was our chance.

I set the Stone on the small turntable in front of the scanner. After a little fiddling I was able to get the thing to scan. First the machine took a picture of the stone with bright white lights. Then several lines of laser light came and moved up and down and across the surface of the stone. After the laser scanning the turntable turned a few degrees in the process repeated… At least 10 times. It took quite a while to do. As it scanned you could see the digital image being built up on the screen it was pretty exciting by the time the scan was done I have a perfect rendering of the sandstone in 3-D point cloud. I have to spend time cleaning it up to fix a hole and take out little digital artifacts. But it wasn’t very difficult. Here’s what I got.

I then uploaded the new digital Samstone to a site called http://thingiverse.com . It’s a site dedicated to digital designs of objects that people put up there for the free use of others. My idea is that anyone who would like to can now download a digital Samstone at http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:56481 and print it in his or her 3-D printer.

Give it a try and let me know if it works !

Night all, night Sam

-me

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