Possibly of interest:  very cool robot programming methodology--use 3D printer  plus arduino to make hand held model.  Teach the model, then push to the real robot.

ROBOPuppet from Indiana U.  Really cool!

http://youtu.be/mcF0FTIEiG0

See the web site and conference paper for details.

Anna Eilering, Giulia Franchi and Kris Hauser, “ROBOPuppet: Low-Cost, 3D Printed Miniatures for Teleoperating Full-Size Robots,”  IEEE/RSJ Intl. Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), September 2014.

Possibly of interest: Autodesk Labs is investigating 4D printing among other things

http://www.autodeskresearch.com/groups/nano

Wild and crazy stuff and totally for real.

(And I'm glad to see software people deeply involved: it'll never fly until there are good tools to do it.)

An interesting 'wearable scupture' from NYU graduate project.  This uses technology familiar to Fabbers, and could be recreated in the CUCFL: 3D printing, smart fabric, an arduino, and data feeds from mobile devices were employed to create a provocative garment that amplifies the wearer's "exposure":

as she eimits metadata that reveals her personal activities, the garmet becomes transparent to reveal more of her personal person.

See also:

X.pose by Xuedi Chen and Pedro G.C. Oliveira

"Description

Interesting article in the NYT about Shapeways and creative designers who have been able to realize ideas because of Shapeways.  (Shapeways has a new, so far small, retail outlet.)

Tons of ideas and inspirations in this short article:

Bringing 3-D Power to the People by Steven Kurutz

For example....

"Ashley Zelinskie, 26, a sculptor who works with 3-D printing, tried using a desktop machine to print a full-size chair whose structure was embedded with hexadecimal code readable by a computer. Influenced by “One and Three Chairs,” a conceptual art piece by Joseph Kosuth, the project was an exercise in high-tech frustration.

CUDO, the Champaign Urbana Design Organization, hosted a board game creation competition called CUDO Plays. The competition started back in Sept. of 2013 and just ended on Feburary 16th 2014. Several teams joined, and over the course of the six month span there were a number of events held with the intent of encouraging constant progress on the creation of new games from the Champaign Urbana community. 

Of course the Community Fab Lab opened our doors to be as useful as possible to the competitors. Here's a few examples of what they made...

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JHT4KPdZPx-0M3qbJUJf25-HJYgcW-dGiAh9ydqKdu0/edit?usp=sharing

This printer is experimental. It is best for small-format (coin size), flexible 3D printer parts. It has a little bit of flexibility with support (you could do columns for a house, but not floating parts). The idea is you take a 3D rendering file and slice it up into slide images, which are blasted as light against the resin, which freezes each layer, ultimately building an object.

Learn how to operate the printer:

• https://nano-cemms.illinois.edu/materials/3d_printing_full
• http://sedgwick3d.com/V2

Possible software downloads:

• http://www.freesteel.co.uk/wpblog/slicer/
• http://Sedgwick3D.com/FlashPoint

This isn't yet a formal tutorial, just resources for 3D modeling and printing with Minecraft:

Fab Lab Creative Server

Easy | Online Sever

Connect at fablab.no-ip.org:25567

Printcraft

Easy | Online Server | http://printcraft.org/

Create in game on an a plot, get emailed your 3D model.

Mineways

Moderate | Open Source Software | http://www.realtimerendering.com/erich/minecraft/public/mineways/

Export sections of maps, including creations and terrain of existing worlds. You need access to your world file (personal server or single player) in order to use this.

MCEdit

Hard | Open Source Software | http://www.mcedit.net/

If you have never heard of printcraft, it is a creative server for minecraft. Minecraft is a sandbox game where you break and place blocks of various materials. Printcraft is one of the many ways that players of minecraft can create an STL file of the things they create. This means they can physically print the things they create in the game. What makes printcraft different is that it converts the standard minecraft block, 1mx1mx1m, into a 2mmx2mmx2mm block when creating the STL file. This means that you can build things to scale and for specific purposes. While it is still used primarily by players who want physical copies of their favorite game elements, it is an excellent way to introduce youth to the idea of designing real world objects in 3D. So far I have printed new usb drive cases, have drawn a holder for my tv remote controls, and printed a Tardis that my 14 year old son drew.

Possibly of interest to some of you, “hybrid basketry”,  “a medium where 3D-printed structures are shaped to allow the growth and development of hand-woven patterns.”   Example product

This work was presented at SIGGRAPH 2013, published in:

Hybrid Basketry: Interweaving Digital Practice within Contemporary CraftAmit Zoran, Leonardo , Vol. 46, No. 4, LEONARDO SPECIAL ISSUE: SIGGRAPH 2013 Art Papers and XYZN: ScaleArt Gallery (2013), pp. 324-331 [PDF]

Other works by Zoran can be viewed at: http://web.media.mit.edu/~amitz/Research/Research.html

http://www.3ders.org/articles/20131010-3d-printing-reality-myths-about-3d-printing-busted.html

A spot on some of what Shapeways offers.

http://www.tomsguide.com/us/maker-faire-shapeways-video,news-17610.html

Possibly of interest:  An NSF sponsored collection of high quality scanned specimens (skeltons and fossils).  The datasets are availalbe in a number of formats, some of them are available in STL, intended for 3D printing.

The Digital Morphology library is a dynamic archive of information on digital morphology and high-resolution X-ray computed tomography of biological specimens.

Using the method described here - http://cucfablab.org/book/3d-print-your-spore-creature-3d I was able to create a number of monsters in 3D by using Spore, the game. I then later went back to combine parts from monster models with scans from the xBox Kinect.