Creative Commons License Photo Credit: Lutz-R. Frank via Compfight

How amazing would it be to be able to have a balloon in any shape?  What would you want?  A piano?  A cartoon character?  A giant bouncy house?

The New Scientist just reported that a team at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and Disney Research has developed a method for taking any desired 3D shape, then using their research on how a rubber balloon stretches as it inflates, reverse engineers the deflated shape that would most closely lead to the desired inflated balloon.  Then, once they have the model for the deflated balloon, they create a mold for it using a 3D printer!  If you just can’t wait to learn more, they’re presenting their work at the Eurographics conference in Italy next month.

Thanks to Luis Rodriguez for the link!

Right now in the BotCave, the chirping of dozens of Replicators on the Q&A bench contends with the dolphin squeal of packing tape. Also the chatter of the production team hurrying assembled bots through to the testing process before handing them over to the shipping team for boxing and labeling. There is excitement building in the air … as well as the scent of  grease and lemony cleaning products.

Meanwhile, around the corner in the BotLair, the R&D team who developed and delivered the MakerBot Replicator product that is the origin of all of this activity are still hard at work testing and re-testing elements of the bots before passing off data to the documentation and support teams. Staff photographer Dave Neff spent the afternoon touring around the facility catching a few members of the R&D team who were on-site today, namely injection molding designer Aljoša, BotTech extraordinaire Ben, electrical engineer Alison, and the captain for the R&D team for this project, Charles. There are a few notable omissions, namely Jeremy who spent his summer designing the MightyBoard and Taylor who managed the extensive revisions for the lasercut case.

SIGGRAPH 2011 - Portable, super-high-resolution 3-D imaging from MIT

It used to be that creating highly detailed microscopic scans required huge expensive pieces of equipment, vibration isolation tables and hours of processing.  Researchers at MIT have developd a cheap small and portable 3D scanner about the size of a soda can that can detect features as small as 0.0001 mm tall and 0.0002 mm wide – and it can create the 3D images nearly instantaneously.

I cannot wait to plug one of these into my Thing-O-Matic!

Hattip to SlashDo

Dual Extruder / Dual Material Makerbot by ScribbleJ

ScribbleJ has done it again!  Not wanting to waste his MK5 extruder he built a mount for it to sit next to his MK6 and wrote some custom code and put together another mind-bending Thingiverse entry. While he says it’s not ready for prime time yet, it’s a huge step forward to printing with dissolvable support material. Don’t forget to check out the video of the dual extruder in action: