As cool as the last of CreativeTools‘ featured projects was, they’ve really upped their game with his one.  It’s a high-res laser scan of  a bit of high tech from the bronze age — a shield.  No, not a lolshield or gameshield, a literal shield.  It might look basic to us today, but to a bronze-age Scandinavian soldier, this was state of the art.

In all seriousness, we all know that digital fabrication and 3d printing are the future — but they’re also key to providing access to the past.  Want a Venus di Milo (Ἀφροδίτη τῆς Μήλου to those in the know) or maybe a Laocoön and His Sons?  Well, print your own…one day.  After all, these treasures should be freely available to all — they’re certainly not copyrighted.

I hope to see more antiquities on Thingiverse — until then, hats off to CreativeTools for getting the ball rolling.

Untitled by CreativeTools

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Hot on the heels from contributing the mind-blowing Thingiview functionality to Thingiverse, Veteran MakerBot Operator Tony Buser (“tbuser“) is up to more hijinx, currently designing and printing a Laser Target Scanner on his newly built Thing-O-Matic #3745.

His project is quite gorgeous, and so is his love for his new MakerBot Stepstruder. Here is a tbuser tweet that has been making the rounds in the BotCave, and touching the hearts of all of us involved with launching this new product:

tbuser: More Stepstruder love http://j.mp/fnaQEp Seriously, I want to have it’s babies. #makerbot

Tony Buser, we hope that you and your Stepstruder are very happy together and live long and happy lives!

Scan of a lighter

While there are already a number of open source scanners out there.  There’s the MakerBot 3D Scanner which uses structured light, the milkscanner which uses a little tub of milk to detect the outline of an object as it sinks into the milk, the chess board and laser level scanner, and now Mark Moissette has invented a way to use his own 3D printer as a limited scanner.

As best as I can understand, he’s using a laser line with some cheap optic electronics to turn his print head into a light emitter and sensor.  Even if the scan area is relatively small and the resolution limited, it’s an incredibly cool idea.  It also sounds like with some know-how, some custom software, and cheap parts (€5.00 or about $6.61) this is a reasonable solution for low resolution scans.