Fighting with computers

I had a visit this week of a teacher interested on creating 3D prints out of equations. The thing is that most of the tools I used need to have a polygonal mesh in the form of an STL file in order to print an object. I have found a couple of interesting tools. On one hand, Wolfram Alpha allows you to download any generated volume out of your equation, but you need to have PRO account. It seems you can have free PRO account for a couple of weeks, but later you have to pay a monthly fee. I did not explore that route any further. The other is a piece of software called K3DSurf that does the job for free. It is interesting though it did not work in my Mac, not even after installing Qt3, but it worked in Windows XP. It is worth a try!

Not one but two friends brought to my attention the apparently innovative new product by HP touted as a 3D scanner and printer  HP TopShot LaserJet Pro M275 . I was surprised by the marketing information and curious to see what this device was capable of. If you've followed my blog, you've read about my late interest on 3D scanning and printing, so a 3D scanner that was being made by the biggest printer maker seemed like a big deal and maybe the signal of new devices to come. However, after cutting through the marketing campaign, I was able to read some of the details of what the device can really do . That was the disappointing end of the history: what HP Topshot technology is about is not 3D scanning but to take pictures of objects. Do I really need to say that of course the objects you can take pictures from can be 3D objects? Are not all the objects we use 3D? Ok, maybe you can claim that paper pages are not 3D (we can argue on the scale of it). But to me, HP mark

I mentioned a while ago the cool software by Autodesk 123D Make that enable those with access to a laser cutter to create 3D objects from cardboard slices. The problem was that the software was only available for Apple computers. Now there is an online version that does the job no matter what operating system you use. The image shows a cardboard version of my happy new year design you can get on Thingiverse.com Update: A big oops if you use Linux ... (I do).