Another week, another round of LinkBits: your source for brief bits of news from the 3D printing industry. The industry is booming and so are we, so here is a list of stories that we couldn’t quite fit into our complete article schedule for the week. Bon Appéprint!
RoboTurtle is Recovering!
This week, Tarun wrote up a great list of animals that had been helped by 3D printing and that list couldn’t be complete without Akut-3, aka RoboTurtle, who had his jaws repaired with 3D printing after an unfortunate propeller accident. The Turkish company that supplied RoboTurtle with his 3D printed titanium beak, BTech Innovation, sent us an update to his story, video footage of Akut-3 swimming in his recovery tank!
MakerBot Launches Hands-on Learning Guide
MakerBot developed an e-learning guide for how to incorporate 3D printing in the classroom with a number of ideas and projects. Titled MakerBot in the Classroom: An Introduction to 3D Printing and Design, the e-book is available for free to registered MakerBot customers until July 1st and the first chapter is free for all. After that, learning comes with a price.
Kast Publishes New Video on Super Fast Light-Curing 3D Printer
Last month, I wrote about a new 3D printer coming to Kickstarter from a company called Kast. They’ve since sent me the above video showing the printer printing an item at 10 inches per hour using their unique light-curing technology (yet to be fully revealed). That’s fast!
New Filament Colors Launch on Kickstarter
Tom and Tracy Hazzard, of the Hazz Design product design firm and WTFFF?! 3D Printing podcast, have launched a Kickstarter to get some new filament colors on the market. Seeing a gap in filament colors, the firm aims to bring Fir Tree, Crimson, Coral, Audrey Aqua, Iris and Orchid filaments to the market. Incidentally, their podcast also just featured 3D printing documentarian Brian Federal on the show. So, you should check out both the podcast and the Kickstarter.
MIT Tech Review Lists Voxel8 & 3DS Among 50 Smartest Companies 2015
For the past five years, MIT Technology Review has been putting out a list of the 50 Smartest Companies. The very nature of the project makes a number of presuppositions: that these will be tech companies, that companies are smart, and that MIT Tech Review has the authority to declare which companies these are. I was not authorized to see the FAQ page related to the list and, so, can’t determine what criteria they use to judge who makes the cut, but we must trust the authority of the words “MIT”, “Tech”, “Smart”, and “List”. On this year’s list, multi-material electronics printer start-up Voxel8 is listed at 17, just after Apple, while 3D Systems is number 42, above Microsoft at 48.
Florida Institute of Technology Adds 50 CTC Printers to Electronics Library
Typically, when a US university adds 3D printers to their campus, the printers come in the form of industrial machines or a MakerBot Innovation Center. Chinese manufacturer Zhuhai CTC Electronic Co. Ltd, however, has been making some pretty impressive headway into the international 3D printing industry lately and, now, the Florida Institute of Technology has purchased 50 CTC Bizer 3D printers to their Electronics Laboratory for the school’s new 3D printing courses.
Welp! That’s it for LinkBits this week! As they say in the picture shows:
