3 Tricks to Optimize STL Designs for 3D Printing 3D modeling for printing can be hard-work, especially when one does not know all the tricks of the modeling software and cannot put them in application to ensure a shorter printing time of the model. There is the general belief that a high-detailed model in printable file format, with accurate and clean-printed outer shell, must take a lot of time to design, weigh much and print forever and a day. However, this is not the case. In this article we will focus on 3 modeling tricks which contribute to the 3D model’s optimization for 3D printing and cut down modeling time, without affecting the quality of the final 3D printed model. These New 3D Models Put the Smithsonian’s Most Renowned Items in Your Hands The Wright Flyer, the legendary aircraft built by the Wright Brothers and sent skyward over Kitty Hawk in 1903, was acquired by the Smithsonian in 1948. Since then, it’s been on public display nearly continuously. Of course, visitors aren’t allowed to touch the plane, and educators teaching lessons on the Flyer have had to use models to give students the chance to handle it and see it from different positions. Engineers and historians have faced similar limitations, unable to climb inside to examine its inner machinery or take out a tape measure to assess its specs.
70+ Web Tools Organized For Bloom's Digital Taxonomy The number of web tools currently available to teachers, administrators, and students is downright absurd. You can’t swing an iPad without hitting a free web tool looking to revolutionize your classroom. Luckily, there are a few brave souls out in the world wide web attempting to organize the chaos a bit. We like to take our best shot here at Edudemic but also like to showcase some of the great organizing done by others. One of those fabulous organizers is Phillippa Cleaves ( @pipcleaves – worth following!)
Why Time Slows Down When We’re Afraid, Speeds Up as We Age, and Gets Warped on Vacation by Maria Popova “Time perception matters because it is the experience of time that roots us in our mental reality.” Given my soft spot for famous diaries, it should come as no surprise that I keep one myself. Perhaps the greatest gift of the practice has been the daily habit of reading what I had written on that day a year earlier; not only is it a remarkable tool of introspection and self-awareness, but it also illustrates that our memory “is never a precise duplicate of the original [but] a continuing act of creation” and how flawed our perception of time is — almost everything that occurred a year ago appears as having taken place either significantly further in the past (“a different lifetime,” I’d often marvel at this time-illusion) or significantly more recently (“this feels like just last month!”). Discus chronologicus, a depiction of time by German engraver Christoph Weigel, published in the early 1720s; from Cartographies of Time. (Click for details)
15 truly useful things you can 3D print for your home Feb 19, 2016 | By Tess, Kira We’ve said time and again that desktop 3D printers are for much more than just making cheap plastic tchotchkes and trinkets. Beyond the ornaments, the paperweights, and the 3D printed coasters are tons of truly useful 3D printed household goods that could make your daily life easier than you’ve ever imagined, often while being cheaper or more practical than comparable store-bought products. Don't know where to start? We’ve compiled a list of some of the most practical, useful, and ingeniously simple 3D printed objects that you can make at home for your home, regardless of your 3D printing skill level. And the best part is, you can download all of the STL files for free, today.
Getting Started Learn about the fascinating features of the new Smithsonian X 3D Explorer and how to navigate, explore and manipulate 3D collection objects. This page gets you started and explains the functionality of the explorer in detail. The Smithsonian X 3D Explorer is beta software. If you find bugs or want to share ideas for improving the software and website, we'd be happy to hear from you. Please send your comments to 3d.feedback@si.edu. Getting started Soo Meta - A Nice, New Way to Create Multimedia Presentations Soo Meta is a new digital presentation tool from the same people that developed the YouTube remixing tool Dragon Tape. Soo Meta allows you to combine videos from YouTube, pictures from the web or from your desktop, text, and voice recordings to create a presentation. You can also pull content in from Pinterest and Twitter to use in your final product. The Soo Meta editor is fairly easy to use.
The Science of Dreams and Why We Have Nightmares by Maria Popova The psychology of our built-in nocturnal therapy. “The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind,” Freud argued in his influential treatise The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900. “The earth is heavy and opaque without dreams,” Anaïs Nin wrote in her diary in 1940. “In the olden days, people believed that our dreams were full of clues about the future,” Alain de Botton told a little kid who wanted to know about dreaming. Top 20 Biggest 3D Printers in 2016 Feb 10, 2016 | By Kira We know that bigger doesn’t always mean better, but when it comes to 3D printing, the ever-growing list of absolutely massive, large size 3D printing ventures is hard to ignore. That’s why we’ve put together a list of the top 20 biggest 3D printers right now, and the various large-format 3D printing projects they are capable of. Though you’d need a pretty powerful microscope to see the tiniest color picture ever 3D printed (small enough to fit inside a human hair), there’s no way you could miss the giant 3D printed airplane parts, 3D printed furniture, 3D printed cars and yes, even 3D printed buildings coming out of these colossal 3D printers. Our list of the top 20 biggest 3D printers covers everything from industrial metal 3D printers, to record-breaking construction 3D printers, to low-cost 3D printers you could potentially keep at home.
12 Top eLearning Tools for 2012 and Beyond - Getting Smart by Melissa A. Venable By Melissa A. Venable, PhD What’s new in learning technology? As we wrap up 2012 and head into 2013, there are a lot of lists out there to help us discover the latest tools and techniques. The Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies (C4LPT) conducts an annual study of learning tools, creating a list of the top 100 from votes submitted by learning professionals (i.e., educators and trainers at all levels) around the globe. Map of the Brain’s Connections We knew anatomy could be gorgeous, but this is beyond anything else we’ve ever seen, and it’s guaranteed to be something you haven’t seen, being the first 3D image of a brain’s connections. Van Wedeen, a Harvard radiology professor, is awestruck: “We’ve never really seen the brain – it’s been hiding in plain sight.” Conventional scanning has offered us a crude glimpse, but scientists such as Wedeen aim to produce the first ever three-dimensional map of all its neurons. They call this circuit diagram the “connectome”, and it could help us better understand everything from imagination and language to the miswirings that cause mental illness. But with 100 billion neurons hooked together by more connections than there are stars in the MilkyWay, the brain is a challenge that represents petabyte-level data.
3D Modeling for 3D Printing Tutorial for Beginners This beginner's class on 3D modeling and 3D printing is series of six tutorials that will help you turn your idea into reality. You'll start with a hand drawing, extrude into a 3D model, and modify and prepare your 3D model to 3D print. Taught by Lauren Slowik, Designer Evangelist for Education at Shapeways, all the tools used are free and easily accessible. The course will teach you the basics of 3D modeling and printing, converting images to 3D models, and critical basic concepts in computer aided design (CAD), including extrusion, scaling, mesh, water tight, and even interlocking parts. What You'll Learn The course will uncover the core processes behind 3D printing and reveal one of the most powerful capabilities of the 3D printing revolution—that it’s accessible to anyone, and that companies like Shapeways make the process easier than ever through online 3D printing.