Guess what I have!

I’ve been hinting around about a #Sekret on twitter and it is time to come clean (especially since Chris Dayton posted this picture on Facebook and it went a semi-viral 🙂 )

Everyone is excited about 3D printers. The whole domain of “additive manufacturing” offers all kinds of new opportunities.  It means super lightweight aircraft parts, biomedical devices customized to your body and cute toys for your kids.It even made the front page of USAToday.

We’ve hooked up with 3D printing expert Stratasys for a little product research.  I’ve got a Stratasys uPrint SE Plus in my office and it is one cool machine (I’m not sure what the SE stands for but for the next few months I’m going to say “Solid Edge” 🙂 ) My office neighbor commented that he has never seen so much traffic around my office before.

So why the excitement? Well, some of it is that we are an office full of engineers and industrial designers. This is a bit like software developers being given the latest mobile devices to research. However, the real reason is far more practical.

We know that additive manufacturing is becoming increasingly important to our customers. Additive manufacturing can be very low cost for small manufacturing runs.  Prices continue to drop making it much more accessible. It is great for prototypes. And there are things you just can’t build with other forms of manufacturing (e.g. you are not going to be able to machine the object in the picture above).

If you are interested in 3D printing, you may want to track the #3DPrinting keyword on twitter and onthis blog.I’ll be writing more about this topic and will send out a few images of things we are creating (I’m @burhop on twitter if you want to follow).

P.S. For those companies coming to Huntsville for the Solid Edge ST5beta test, I’ll have the Stratasys uPrint SE Plus set up for you to see.