openMaterials

April 3rd 2011 @ Pavilhão do Conhecimento Lisbon, Portugal The AZ Labs Network is extremely happy to announce FabriCulture’s first event: FabriCamp Lx 1! That’s right, it’ll be a barcamp style unconference dedicated to digital fabrication. Several members and friends of AZ’s hackerspaces (LCD, altLab and xDA) will be demoing their 3D printers and CNC mills. If [...]

If you haven’t yet, check out this great blog post on recycling of 3D printing materials by i.materialise’s Joris Peels: Last week in a comment, Paul asked me, “When will more eco and sustainable materials be available for use in these printers? Something like hemp plastic or other biodegradable materials? What are the technical limitations and [...]

The first edition of Botacon took place last weekend in Brooklyn. The lineup of speakers was impressive and made for one of the best conferences I’ve ever attended. But one materials-related presentation stood out. Mr. Kim and John Sarik gave a talk titled “MakerBot Printable Transistors and OLEDs or I want to be Jeri Ellsworth [...]

D-Shape, whose 3d printers are capable of fabricating amazing mega scale free-form building size models, are now working with the European Space Agency to create a 3d printer that can extrude within the moon’s vacuum environment using lunar dust. They are currently experimenting with ’simulant’ lunar dust, and hope to conduct trials in a vacuum environment [...]

growth modeling device is an artwork by David Bowen which involves a system using lasers to scan an onion plant from one of three angles, which then creates a plastic model based on the information collected. The device builds a series of simulations of a growing onion plant by means of three-D scanning and printing, outputting [...]

This is great talk by Dominic Muren on the Digital Fabrication Ecosystem, given @ Dorkbot Seattle, Feb 3 2010. You can download the slides of the talk in PDF form here. Muren, a design professor at the University of Washington, runs the Humblefactory, a product development consultancy offering strategic and design consulting in open hardware, user-assisted [...]