Makerbot’s New Device Makes Cloning Instantaneous | Hacker News Reader

Makerbot’s New Device Makes Cloning Instantaneous

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9 pointssitver12 comments

Anyone who uses "instantaneous" in the same paragraph with "3D printing" is clueless :-).

That said, 3D digitizers look like fun. My thought is that one of these laser pico projectors, a RasPi, a web cam, a computer controlled turntable and some clever software, ok so that is like 5 things. Ah to have free time again.

It's hyperbole. I use 3D printers frequently. The "instantaneous" was referring to the digitizer, which takes 12 minutes to create the file. That, compared to the hours it would take to create such a design in CAD program, could be called instantaneous. Just as "rapid prototyping" can take hours, depending upon the object. It's fast, compared to the alternative.

It's all about frame of reference.

Fair enough, but when someone wants something printed on my Makerbot Replicator, and they don't know these things. They thing "Star Trek" not, slow grind :-).

Now that would be a printer that sells well. Even the most expensive printers still take FOREVER. One day. One day.

I wrote some software that could (mostly) do this scanning with a webcam.

http://jack.minardi.org/software/whats-in-a-shadow/

Has anyone considered obtaining a leap motion and making a small rig that does this same function? Given the accuracy of the leap motion, it seems like an almost trivial feat

Interesting idea. The issue is that (I'm guessing) you'd also need some intense software to decipher the image and convert it into a 3D file.

It seems like this particular idea is more realistic with something like a kinect, which has more direct access to point clouds, etc

The Leap seems optimized to detect hands and pointer things. There is currently no point cloud you can access either.

That is true, reference (inside SO answer):

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17938890/leap-motion-poin...

I've seen a human scale version of this done with the Kinect. An artist in NYC was doing it quite a while ago and had a showing in 3Dward. I saw the digitizer at Maker Faire this weekend and was impressed at the quality.

I'm guessing the res on this thing is better than that offered by rotating a Kinect around an object. It certainly requires a lot less space!

For something like that, I'd like to see someone put a bunch of leap controllers/other stuff on a hula hoop, and make models that way.

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