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Showing posts from May, 2016

Adventures in 3D Printing

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This year, my school purchased not one, not two, but five 3D printers.  All of them, the same model, the  XYZ DaVinci Duo printer .  As an EdTech specialist, and self-proclaimed 'king-nerd' of the office, I chose to learn what I could to get them useable in learning activities in the classroom. So... here is a bit of where I came from, and where I got to... and a few of the 'how-to-fix' things I figured out. STL vs CAD file .STL files are a pretty standard file for 3D printing.  Basically, your 3D printer is printing lots of little triangles, stacked and arranged in different ways to build your model.  But, there are different types of STL files.  The XYZ printer likes ASCII STL files.  So, if you are downloading... conversion may be required. Making  Getting 3D designs made is a challenge, but there are a lot of tools.  A number of them come from AutoDesk for free.  Here are a few I like: Mac 123D Design  this Application is Mac/PC and iPad..