Now granted, this spinal column is designed for demonstration/instructional purposes, but when I look at it, I start to think really seriously about the scenario Bre came up with concerning making replacement body parts.

These days there are a lot of stories about replacement limbs, and increasingly there’s this air of rehabilitation rather than adjustment– missing hands and feet are replaced with tightly-wound bundles of servos and sensors, implants restore sight and hearing.  In time, between biocompatible materials and advanced electronics, we may see more developments towards home-made fixes for serious injuries.  We’re already seeing little tools such as this one developed by an MS patient to make his routine easier…

It’s been a while since I talked about economics here, but I’ve been thinking a lot lately about an economic effect Ray Kurzweil pointed out a while ago (but didn’t name) where rapidly advancing technology tends to create a bunch of stuff which a few years ago would have been priceless but which now has virtually zero street value.  He pointed out that this was deflationary (a dollar buys a lot more, at least of what’s advancing) and that this wasn’t well modeled in current economic theory, because unlike classical capital deflation, nothing has “worn out” to make it cheaper.

I think we’re seeing a lot of that lately, not just with processing technology (although this is a key enabling technology to all home 3D printers and Thingiverse itself) but also with fabrication technology in that anything you can make on a home 3D printer rapidly shoots to a price point that has to do with per-pound plastic and the local cost of electricity.

This tends to synergize with the lowering cost of information technologies into things like the above spherical display.  The value in the things that have become so cheap hasn’t gone away at all– it’s just become easier to get.

Am I being overly dramatic?  Maybe.  But for a moment look at what that is.  The above is an exhibit where people discover a cluster of technological marvels they might never have even known existed, and getting to make something wonderful to take home with them.

The DIY geek goodies on this one are pretty much off the charts: Blender.  Arduino.  Digital Sculpt Interface.  Makerbot.  On about the cheapest table imaginable.

Via Blender.org.

Singularity Hub, a kind of blog outpost for those who peer particularly deeply into the murk of the future in hopes of spotting real game-changers like immortality, artificial sapience and nanotechnology, has a great piece on 3D printing, making note of the (impressive) upswing in use 3D printers of all kinds are enjoying lately.

I thought it was interesting that they mentioned the rapid expansion of the professional 3D printing sphere, because it shows that while there’s a lot to be excited about in terms of the hobbyist end of things, the general phenomenon of drift– from standardized to custom-by-nature digital fabrication is happening in little pockets everywhere.

Hardware turning into software.

Two stories popped up on my radar this morning that illustrate the difference between Open Source EULAs and Closed Source EULAs, and given the way open source licenses are built into Thingiverse, I thought they were worth sharing.  First at the Blender foundation, Ton Rosendal takes a close look at the Autodesk EULA– the terms might surprise you.  Then we have Microsoft’s SDK for the Kinect, which is also more restrictive than I would have thought.

When your products are closed source and you’re dependent on holding on to IP, you can’t afford to really participate in the Open Source world.  At best, like Microsoft, you can tag along and hope there are developers willing to play in your sandbox.

Microsoft and Autodesk are both to be applauded for their efforts to court and engage the innovative open source community, but I think they’re going to need to have a long talk with their lawyers (and with a few members of the open source community) if they want this to be more than a one-sided and strained relationship.

Gigapixel imaging via CNC is one of those great ideas on which I love seeing new permutations.  This one has files to generate the GCode to drive a MakerBot as a CNC micro-imager.  There’s also an image sorting script.  Neat stuff!

One thing this has me wondering about though, is there a way to use the redundancy of taking many, many images to improve signal quality?  Perhaps to such a level that you wouldn’t need an especially good camera even?  Sources of error: spherical deformation of the lens, scratches, dirt, other obstructions on the lens or in between the lens and the CCD and noise.  CCD noise: filterable, particularly if you have lots and lots of images to calibrate off.  Obstructions: as you move, you’d see the image around it, same for spherical deformations.  Focal length– with a really large number of images, maybe you could work something out.  Better yet, take the sweep at different heights, then you’ve got a 3D pixel cube from different Z-values…

Dangit I knew there was a reason I almost went into signal processing…

Woa, how did nobody tell me about this one?  This is awesome!

I just noticed the first versions of exports to Thingiverse showing up, and while there’s nothing really earth-shattering evolved yet, this is still in the breaking news section– you can bet I’ll be watching this to see what evolves!

Autodesk 123D is in public Beta, and the ad copy around it has a pretty resounding Maker-Friendly feel, they’ve put up some example files, there are frequent references to “print ready” design, AND there are links to 3D printing services.

The industry would seem to be paying attention to the home-fabrication revolution.

It’s not open source, but it does seem to export to STL, so at least it will be compatible with Skeinforge.  I’m downloading it as I write this, and will be back with my thoughts on this new tool after I’ve had a chance to kick the tires.

Via: Blendernation

So over the next few years I expect there will be quantum shifts in the way personal manufacture works, and along with them Thingiverse’s content will expand in character.  Already the things you see on Thingiverse usually are no-support printable, are virtually always manifold, and are generally scaled properly.  This is now the ground state.  I have not forgotten that it was not always this way.  I uploaded this without irony, after all:

Woefully unprintable (never was printed, either), won’t interface properly to any motor around, and I was one of the responsible ones!  Times have changed, though, now it’s almost expected that you at least offer some advice to get things printed, and on many if not most of the new things, you can find at least one picture of the thing already made, which are often gorgeous:

But what’s coming is new technologies.  What’s coming are the powder printers, and beyond them, the deeper leveraged systems that get us access to the realms of the very small and the very large builds.  There are designs for bigger CNC tables here already, as well as DIYBio to get us access to the very small world of genetics.  The infrastructure of Thingiverse isn’t intrinsically limited to squirting or cutting plastic with nozzles and lasers, it’s general, and it can handle powder-native designs like this one easily:

And when things start showing up that are really wild, it’ll handle those too.  (Although of course, a flexible model that harkens to the shape of C-60 is pretty wild if you ask me…)

Super-late post on the super-neat option of bezier surfaces in OpenSCAD here– William Adams is extending OpenSCAD to create a whole new set of options for modeling in text!  Bezier surfaces are one of the fundamental (if less well-known) primitives of 3D modeling, so this is definitely about more than being able to make wavy surfaces (although the wavy surfaces will doubtless be many and beautiful).  Sweet!