Shapeways Beta

Just saw this article: [www.boingboing.net]

There might be some beta accounts left, for anyone who'd like to get some 3D printing done.

Cool. Unfortunately for me, they're in Europe (I'm in the US). From the limited time I looked at it, though, it does look like they'd be willing to ship to the US.

Just to pique curiosity/interest (and to help out people using search), they say they're using a Stratasys FDM system that can make objects up to 35x25x25 cm. [www.shapeways.com]


What's interesting to me is their level of professionalism. They have an easy-going style and fairly non-technical presentation on the front end. This is easily apparent by the graphics and fonts used on the site, as well as a quick read over a few of their pages.

I believe this is primarily to ease consumers into the market. I'll bet they think that if they acted more scientific/professional/etc. then consumers with little or no knowledge of the technology would be scared away. It's a simple and sensible approach, and I applaud them for implementing it.

Perhaps this company, and others like it, will be able to grow the 3D printing market to the extent that it can become relevant to the world economy, within the near future (I think 10-20 years could be called "near" in this sense). I certainly hope so.

so.. signed up.. wish me luck, maybe I'll get an account

'sid

I have an account with them.

I tried uploading all the parts for an extruder, but they are treating stl units as meters and all the parts fail saying they are too large

You can scale the models using AoI. There's info on this page [reprap.org] on how to scale from inches to mm. Just use 0.001 instead of 25.4 to scale mm to meters.

wow, aoi is tricky to use...

I'm pretty sure it didn't scale right, but it kind of looks like its supposed to except it looks like its missing the arm part.

[www.shapeways.com]

Size:
Height 1.0 cm
Width 3.6 cm
Depth 11.7 cm

getting this one part printed with them would cost $106.25! oh well...

I live 40 km or half an hour (by car) away from them (Philips High Tech Campus). I could personally pick up parts if they allowed me to

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Regards,

Erik de Bruijn
[Ultimaker.com] - [blog.erikdebruijn.nl]

mellery,
It looks to me like it has got one or two of the triangles facing the wrong way in the gap for the clamp nut. They don't respond to light as they should indicating a problem with their normals. This is the reason I gave up on AOI.

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[www.hydraraptor.blogspot.com]