3D Printing is a Hot Political Topic

3D printing or additive fabrication is a hot topic, and not just to the engineers, fabricators and hobbyists anymore. It seems to be becoming part of the political symbology wrapped up in economic recovery or development. As I commented on the Made in Dayton blog, the National Academies Press recently released a report about Building the Ohio Innovation Economy that includes significant emphasis on additive fabrication, and the President mentioned the National Additive Manufacturing Innovation Institute, located in Youngstown, in his State of the Union address. There is also the Midwest Pilot for connecting High Performance Computing (HPC) resources to small and medium manufacturing concerns. As we saw in this topology optimization post, there is considerable need for scale-able computational approaches to fully realize the promise of additive manufacturing. Closer to home, your Dayton hackerspace is playing with a printrbot.

Scientific Computing Going Mobile/Embedded

I follow both the Octave and Maxima user mailing lists (I learn more from the Maxima list, but the Octave one still throws up a gem every now and then). I am also a founding member of the Dayton Diode hackerspace. So it was interesting to see some things of interest to makers/hackers pop-up on those two lists.

The first was a thread on the Octave list about installing Octave and the Octave Forge packages on a Raspberry Pi. In theory it should be as easy as any other Debian system using the package manager for the distribution. No word back from the OP yet on whether it works in practice or not.

The second thread to pop up was on the Maxima list about installing Maxima on Android systems. Maxima-on-Android is apparently a bundle on Google Play of Maxima 5.28.0, Gnuplot 4.6, Mathjax 2.1 and Qepcad 1.69. I have not played with it yet on any of my Android devices.