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Shapeways Talks 3D Printing at the US Patent Office in Washington DC

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Back in January Shapeways participated in a 3D printing conference at the US Patent and Trademark Office in Washington DC.Alongside representatives from EOS, ExOne, MakerBot, Stratasys and 3D Systems we briefed staff from the USPTO and other interested parties on the history, present and possible futures of 3D printing, and how they might interact with the patent office.It was a fantastic forward thinking move by the patent office to recognize that this is an area of growth that needs to be nurtured to realize the full potential. That while still protecting the intellectual property of those engaging in meaningful research, we do not close off the field with broad, over reaching patents that could really hamper the growth. Along with the representatives of the USPTO and companies involved in 3D printing, there were also interested stakeholders looking at the world of 3D printing and patents from various angles, including those that might try and control...

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3D Printed Bike Add-ons

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Shapeways community member, Pookas, recently pimped out an old racing cycle frame with some 3D Printed additional features.

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Daimler funds the development of a large-scale 3D printer for metal

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The German automaker Daimler AG has funded a research partnership between the Fraunhofer Institute of Laser Technology and the German company Concept Laser.The result was the X line 1000R system with a build volume is 630mm x 400mm x 500mm (23.6 inches x 15.7 inches x 19.7 inches) and a layer thickness of 20 to 100 microns.

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[Ben Krasnow] builds a CT Scanner

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After building a homebrew x-ray backscatter imager, [Ben Krasnow] realized he had nearly all the components to build his own CT scanner, able to make a 3D model of the inside of a frozen chicken.Basically, a CT scanner takes dozens of x-rays of an object and reassembles them with the help of fancy algorithms to allow doctors to peer inside a human body.The CT scanners you’ll find at your local hospital are monstrous devices, rotating an x-ray tube and sensor around a patient with the help of some very heavy duty electromechanical engineering.[Ben] wanted to keep his build rather small, so instead of rotating the x-ray tube and screen around an object, he simply made a stepper motor-driven lazy suzan to rotate his frozen bird.[Ben] set a digital camera off to the side of his build and captured 45 images of a rotating chicken.

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Copyright 101: What do you want to know?

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As the field of 3D printing grows, were starting to see more and more cases of copyright infringement, creative sharing, collaboration, and general discussion happening around what is allowed, what is possible, and what is protected.To address this, we want to put together a 3D Printing Copyrights 101 guide in the next few weeks, with the help of Michael Weinberg who wrote the awesome whitepaper It will be awesome if they dont screw it up.Weve done a few blog posts covering the debate over the last two years, and now we want to consolidate new information and answer your questions.

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3D printing is the future of manufacturing (infographic) | VentureBeat

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4 days ago For every 100 web pageviews on an iPad, a Kindle gets 5, a Galaxy gets 3, and a Surface gets 0.22 4 days ago Apple’s Mac Mini production may head to the U.S.(and it’s poised to kick butt) We’ve already written about how far 3D printing has come in 2012, but as 3D printing service Sculpteo shows, the technology is set to go much further in the coming years.In a very well-thought-out and comprehensive infographic, Sculpteo lays out not only the basics of what 3D printing is but also how current manufacturing businesses can integrate the technology into their own operations (one option: Use the cloud).

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3D printed drone recognition kit

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The UAV Identification Kit 001 was made by James Bridle while he was an Artist in Residence at the Visible Futures Lab at the School of Visual Arts in New York.It is intended both to help visualize drones for a public that is still largely unaware of their particulars and to aid in the identification of drones by observers on the ground.The kit includes 3D printed models of three commonly used military drones: the MQ-1 Predator, the RQ-170 Sentinel, and the RQ-4 Global Hawk.Equivalent kits for manned aircraft have long been used to train both military and civilian spotters, the most well-known example being civilian spotters trained during WWII.Drones, more properly known as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), have recently seen a dramatic rise in use for border patrol, storm observation, humanitarian relief, and, especially, warfare.

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Ford to put MakerBot Replicators on their engineers’ desks

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Ford intends to equip many of their engineers with new Replicator 3D printers from MakerBot, according to GigaOM.The video shows one of Ford’s engineers explaining how he uses an older MakerBot in his work, so Ford has apparently been using these printers for awhile now.3D printers have been used by major companies for, quite literally, decades, but only recently have 3D printers become inexpensive enough for individuals to own.What is interesting here is that this shift towards low cost 3D printers is also changing the way that large companies use the technology.Instead of only having a few large, expensive 3D printers for an entire company, Ford has elected to provide their engineers with individual, less expensive printers.

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Tinkercad Excitedly Launches Shape Scripts API

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Tinkercad, the company working hard to bring accessible 3D data creation to the masses, has just announced “some weekend fun” in that it is now possible to write Shape Scripts directly inside the Tinkercad editor and create shapes that are generated programmatically.According to the release, while the scripts are written in the editor the actual scripts are executed by the distributed Gen6 geometry kernel running on the Tinkercad server cluster and Tinkercad believes that this is cloud computing at its best — harnessing great power through an extremely easy to use browser interface.As they say: “When we started working on Tinkercad one of the earliest feature requests was to let users create scripts to augment the editor.A key concern for us has always been ease of use.We wanted the API to be extremely accessible to everyone interested.

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Dilbert starts experimenting with 3D printing

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If a newspaper comic can make a joke about 3D printing, then it’s probably safe to declare that 3D printing is now a part of mainstream culture, if it wasn’t already.

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