Over the holidays my Grandmother asked me to explain Twitter to her. To me, that marks the point at which Twitter has utterly and completely permeated society. From arguably being on the nerd-fringe at the beginning of 2009, to the punchline on Letterman by years end.

My prediction is that 3D Printers (or fabricators) will be the next to make this journey. Forget the iTablet (future destroyer of the magazine/newspaper industry), a friend with a MakerBot or RepRap is what you’ll be wanting when that Ikea-bought lamp breaks and you need to cheaply repair or re-purpose it.

So here’s a short interview with Bre Pattis about MakerBot, and the hacker space that spawned it, NYC Resistor:

Now have a flick through the site they mention, Thingiverse.

Another site to keep an eye on, The Product Bay.

Open-source zealots? Sure.. but this won’t be going away. Like Joe Rogan said right after his UFC co-host read out the full FBI Warning against piracy: “you can’t fight the internet baby”. Today’s pirated content is tomorrow’s pirated products.

Meanwhile, Shapeways - the experiment in fabricating-on-demand by Philips - continues to improve their ability to instantiate your designs. Check out this copyright infringing awesome grey alien!

Shapeways is offering some new things and some free things. First up is color! Instead of the the plain white, how about Terracotta, Limestone & Blue Jeans? A little color can change a design completely. Also, the Make Faire is going on soon, and Shapeways is offering a contest to coincide with the event:

To inspire people we would like to show off the best models that you can possibly make. Something that will make people go wow! Something that explains how 3D printing will change things. Something that someone will look at, hold in their hand and go..you can make this?

The Maker Faire contest is your chance to have your most amazing design made. Anything you want, anything that you think will inspire and amaze is game. The top 3 models will be 3D printed, exhibited at Maker Faire and then sent to the lucky winners. The winning designer gets an additional $300 in 3D printing from us.

The fine print: The contest closes the 15th of May. Enter by adding the tag: makerfaire to your upload. Your model has to be less expensive than $200.

Excellent. If you haven’t tried their service yet, here’s a chance to get your design printed completely free!

The Shapeways Photoshaper allows anyone who can click a mouse the ability to turn a photograph into a 3D image. No longer an exclusive right for the select few mass producers, anything a person takes a photo of can be created into a gorgeous 3D relief, which can be lit up from behind by a candle, or beautifully portrayed with natural light. The user has the options of how they want their photo finished.

Upload your photo, choose lite or dark, add text to the photo, then place your order.
Flipping the high to low option, the dark colors in your picture will become the highest parts of your 3D photo.

Thanks to Shapeways for the awesome sneak peek!

What are cool? Fabricators.

What’s cooler than a Fabricator? One made out of Lego.

What’s cooler than that? A Lego Polar 3-D Printer:

A polar printer is a printer whose principal axes, or how it can move, are radius(in and out), angle(spin clockwise/counter clockwise), and as opposed to a Cartesian printer whose principal axes are X(left/right), Y(up/down). In other words, it moves just like a polar coordinate system.

So why did I make a polar 3D printer instead of a good ol’ Cartesian 3D printer?

1. I didn’t have enough Legos to build a Cartesian printer.
2. I hope to eventually add a 3D laser scanner to it so I can scan in objects and send them to another printer somewhere else in world. Making sort of a ‘teleporter’.

via the dynamic duo of Cory@BoingBoing and Bruce Sterling.

John from Shapeways has contacted us with the following offer:

We’d love to give your readers 150 beta codes. They can go to www.shapeways.com/beta and use the BETA code GrindBeta.

Thanks John and all the rest of the Shapeways crew!

Soon your design could be instantiated on their Objet printer, just like this one:

Previously:

• Shapeways - a new 3D fabrication service

From Mashable:

Enter, Shapeways, a new startup molded by Philips Incubator Project and currently tagged as a private beta service.

..

The promise of Shapeways is to enable consumers to make stuff, virtually anything of reasonable size and detail, and have it in hand in 10 days or less for an average cost of $50-150.

…

Users are asked to import files from 3D modeling software in STL, Collada, or X3D formats. At that point, one is able to specify material and size. Shapeways describes current options as “White Strong & Flexible (SLS), Cream Robust (FDM), White Detail and Transparent Detail (Object). Additional choices will come soon.

Interested? Mashable have a limited number of invites to the closed-beta, so get over there quickly and grab one!

As Jamais Cascio notes:

This won’t be for everybody. You’ll have to do the hard design work, in a 3D program that outputs their preferred formats, so I really don’t expect this to be the Next Big Web 2.0 extravaganza. Make an app that will convert Second Life (or other Metaverse environment) objects into fully-qualified X3D files, and we’ll talk. I’m just fascinated by how fast this market evolves.

From the RepRap site:

RepRap achieved self-replication at 14:00 hours UTC on 29 May 2008 at Bath University in the UK. The machine that did it - RepRap Version 1.0 “Darwin” - can be built now - see the Make RepRap Darwin link there or on the left, and for ways to get the bits and pieces you need, see the Obtaining Parts link.

This is neat-o! A key step forward for the Future. Generation One of the People’s Fabricator has arrived!

Now to improve upon it, and distribute the means of production world-wide.

Oh, sorry, should I knock-off the Neo-Marxism, and tell you more about this beauty?

RepRap is short for Replicating Rapid-prototyper. It is the practical self-copying 3D printer shown on the right - a self-replicating machine. This 3D printer builds the component up in layers of plastic. This technology already exists, but the cheapest commercial machine would cost you about €30,000. And it isn’t even designed so that it can make itself. So what the RepRap team are doing is to develop and to give away the designs for a much cheaper machine with the novel capability of being able to self-copy (material costs are about €400). That way it’s accessible to small communities in the developing world as well as individuals in the developed world. Following the principles of the Free Software Movement we are distributing the RepRap machine at no cost to everyone under the GNU General Public Licence. So, if you have a RepRap machine, you can make another and give it to a friend…

From here, it will continue to get more and more interesting! Excellent work RepRap!!!

via mech_angel