3-D Printing
The 3-D printing unit of our class has been my favorite unit so far. You can use the 3-D printer to to make something from nothing but an image you create in Adobe Inventor. Once you create your design for whatever you want, you put it through the makerbot setup and then save it to a flash drive an take it down to the printer. The 3-D printers take spools of thin plastic and heats it up and reads the design you put into it. One its read your design and heated up, it creates your design layer by layer by laying down thin layers of the heated plastic in the shape of your design and makes your design come to life. In a matter of about a few short hours it can take a design the you create in Inventor, and turn it into a real physical object. this is great for small items for projects, to teaching people how to use these machines, to bring them to a job using these machines with metal to create industrial objects, to making prosthetic body parts, to pretty much anything you can imagine and create in inventor. The potential is endless, especially with this technology advancing more and more every year. They've even got printers to create synthetic skin, organs, tissue, and bones.