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.
I took the last two thirds of the day off… Which I sorely needed. Diane Devon I drove up to Montréal Late morning to go meet Gabe and Hannah and Olivia and Ian and Maddie for lunch at the restaurant where Matt works.
The restaurant is called Lola Rosa and it’s awesome ! It’s 100% vegetarian and has some pretty exotic stuff like hemp burgers. Matt is now the main cook and really enjoys working there. The restaurant is right outside of the McGill campus. That was the real reason for our visit. David come up a couple of days earlier to go to a Swedish house mafia Show. The plan was for us to meet today and go to work the McGill campus. Which is what we did…
McGill is a huge place. Over 30,000 students. But it did have a nice compact feel to it. It has a great new biology and biochem lab which is what game seems to be most interested in. This is our first college campus visit so it was pretty exciting. All in all we liked it. It was a mix of old and new architecture. Students there seem to be reasonably happy. We got to tour a dorm room which was pretty nice. And there was a Tim Hortons right across the street… What’s not to like?
It was a relatively warm day but they still had quite a bit more snow than we had. I was thinking about how it would be to go to school in Montréal. I was guessing that it was one of the coldest Larger cities in the world. I actually looked it up I believe it is the eighth coldest city on average temperatures. The coldest being Ulan batarin Mongolia then a city in kazakstanthen I believe Helsinki, Moscow Tallin , Ottawa and then I think Montréal. Not too bad but Gabe would be used to it it’s the same weather that we have.
We’re trying to figure out other cool science schools that we can check out. ? I think Gabe is looking for a smaller place in a really nice setting with good science facilities. Any suggestions out there ?
Okay, time for bed… I’m exhausted.
Night all, night Sam
– me
I took the last two thirds of the day off… Which I sorely needed. Diane Deb and I drove up to Montréal Late morning to go meet Gabe and Hannah and Olivier and Ian and Maddie for lunch at the restaurant where Matt works.
The restaurant is called Lola Rosa and it’s awesome ! It’s 100% vegetarian and has some pretty exotic stuff like hemp burgers. Matt is now the main cook and really enjoys working there. The restaurant is right outside of the McGill campus. That was the real reason for our visit. Gabe come up a couple of days earlier to go to a Swedish house mafia Show. The plan was for us to meet today and go to work the McGill campus. Which is what we did…
McGill is a huge place. Over 30,000 students. But it did have a nice compact feel to it. It has a great new biology and biochem lab which is what game seems to be most interested in. This is our first college campus visit so it was pretty exciting. All in all we liked it. It was a mix of old and new architecture. Students there seem to be reasonably happy. We got to tour a dorm room which was pretty nice. And there was a Tim Hortons right across the street… What’s not to like?
It was a relatively warm day but they still had quite a bit more snow than we had. I was thinking about how it would be to go to school in Montréal. I was guessing that it was one of the coldest Larger cities in the world. I actually looked it up I believe it is the eighth coldest city on average temperatures. The coldest being Ulan Batar in Mongolia then a city in Kazakstan I believe Helsinki, Moscow Tallin , Ottawa and then I think Montréal. Not too bad but Gabe would be used to it it’s the same weather that we have.
We’re trying to figure out other cool science schools that we can check out. ? I think Gabe is looking for a smaller place in a really nice setting with good science facilities. Any suggestions out there ?
Okay, time for bed… I’m exhausted.
Night all, night Sam
– me
, just got home from the 300 mile drive back from Somers New York I drove with my friend David which was a whole lot of fun. We were both coming back from the IBM fellows meeting in Somers the last two days. The meeting was very interesting in a whole bunch of ways. Some of it was great some of it was strange some of it was…… I don’t even know how to describe. But in the end it was Great being together. These meetings make me realize how much I still have to learn about the company I’ve been in for more than 30 years.
Here are most of us
Here are our friends the bloggers
And for some reason we took pictures of the Indian fellows. Thought it would be too weird to take a picture of the Jewish fellows for some reason.
Anyway it’s freaking home more tomorrow
Night all, night Sam
– Me
