The highlight of Pop-Up Digital MakerSpace #week2 was the informal meet-up ith the 3D Printing and Digital Fabrication group on the 27th Jan, a small but perfectly formed mix of staff & students came together to explore & have fun with new technologies.

It was great to see students from Camberwell working with Students from Chelsea sharing their experiences of using 3D printing and 3D software, Blender seems to be the software of choice for the students, its free and not too complicated to use. There are some Blender online video tutorials on Lynda.com which UAL students & staff can access for free. 

Matthew Edwards came over to Chelsea from Camberwell to share their new iSense 3d scanner and the Leap Motion.

Feedback: students really liked the opportunity to meet other students and share knowledge and interests across disciplines	Feedback: It was great to test new kit out together, there's lots of potential to ignite interest & creative thinking for the sake of small investment in new technologies

LCF Digital Anthropology Lab (a research studio bringing industry and academia together to develop a new way of making smarter with technology.) introduced us to the Leap Motion during our visit to one of their Digital Coffee meet-up sessions. We look forward to seeing how we can collaborate with the team at LCF? Have added the LCF Digital Anthropology Lab to our MakerSpace community.  

Community of interest groups at CCW

Now online for posting external facing group updates and resources (You can add to these resources by tagging the main headings:

• Digital, Analogue & Upcycling
• Internet of Things
• 3D Printing and Digital Fabrication
• Physical Computing
• Virtual/Mixed Reality

New Sub Groups Under Development

I met up with Molly Smisko, BA textiles Year 3 who is keen to help lead the Virtual Reality group. Molly will hopefully be collaborating and experimenting with VR industry leaders including the Gravity Sketch team, so we'll have some updates on this soon.

Using recycled materials for 3D printing

Kristina Thiele and fellow students Giulia Fontana & Jimena Cieza De Leon Del Aguila on the FDA ISD course at Chelsea are looking into use of recycled materials for 3D printing.

3D Raspberry Pi

Richard Smith at Chelsea is leading a new sub group of 3D Printing and Digital Fabrication to create a proof of concept small scale scanner that can be scalable to a full body scanner using raspberry Pi's. The idea is based upon the work done here: http://www.pi3dscan.com/  http://www.instructables.com/id/Multiple-Raspberry-PI-3D-Scanner/ . Richards plan is to start with 2 Pi's and get them to sync and transmit data, his thought being that the methodology can then be scaled, to build a Proof of Concept (PoC), to scale this we will need funding I see this as potentially 2 phases, 12 Pi's and then around 72 (for full body).

And finally ....

Autodesk Fusion 360 workshop at MachinesRoom: Paid a visit to the MachinesRoom for a taster session workshop on Autodesk Fusion 360, taught by Paul Sohi an expert in Autodesk Fusion 360. The software is free for education and seems you can do some pretty amazing stuff with it. The workshops do have a fee and you can find out more on the MachinesRoom Website.

Key words in this post: Blender, iSense, 3d scanner, Leap Motion, Virtual Reality, Digital Coffee, Gravity Sketch, LCF Digital Anthropology Lab, Molly Smisko, Autodesk Fusion 360,  MachinesRoom, 3D Raspberry Pi, recycled materials for 3D printing