Quite some years ago I played as a kid with these wooden Kapla blocks. Now I'm playing around with them again, this time for my job.

Not only can I play with blocks, I also play with (Denso)robots. How awesome! 

An interview with Frederic:

 Frederic Decru, our RepRap Thesis student at University College Ghent just posted his Lasercut mendel on thingiverse: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2697

I hope we win the Makerbot Challenge with this!

A teaser to tickle your curiosity:

 At the university College of Ghent we have done some printing tests. We have been building several RepRap/Mendels now, and divide them systematically in two categories.

• Alpha ones: These RepRaps are built with pieces of two or more different RepRaps. Important to notice is that these machines do not belong to the same tree. (These RepRaps doesn't have pieces printed by the same parent.)
• Beta ones: These machines consist of pieces by only one parent. Or worse, by pieces from RepRaps with a mutual parent.

Findings:

• The Alpha RepRaps have very good prints. The quality is really awesome! Some pictures:
   
• Far worse is the quality of the Beta ones:
  
  

 Further research:

As from today the University College Ghent will have Peter Van Ransbeeck doing his PhD on the subject of "Print quality of RepRap - Purifying the RepRap tree", in dutch: "Raszuiverheid der RepRaps". He will research these findings in greater detail. 

If you have some information for us, please leave a note in the comments. Or contact me at: Batist.leman [at] gmail.com. Any of your results or findings could be very useful for us.

This is a very important issue, and we don't now the cause of this... yet.

 It's almost there! The opening of the first Ghent-Hackerspace. It's located in the 'blekerijstraat', which translates as "Whitening-street". So we called our space Whitespace and gave it the corresponding url: http://0x20.be

You are welcome to register, but entry is free and no registration is required: http://www.doodle.com/bg5x7xrbcg5z9h8q

Soon more pics and videos about the space! 

Last week Adrian Bowyer came to FOSDEM in Brussels and to University College Ghent. This event didn't pass unnoticed by the Dutch and Belgian press: 

• Het nieuwsblad
• De Gentenaar
• NRC Handelsblad
• NOS Journaal
• URGent radio (live interview, but it hasn't been recorded...)

Thanks to Erik the entire RepRap talk at FOSDEM is now watchable on youtube:  

Some pictures of our attention drawing RepRap stand:

More pictures:

 With my exams finished, some predictions for the year 2010:

2010 will bring us... 3D: Video Camera's and Photo Cameras will do 3D

For a couple of years now we see 3D movies like Beowulf and Avatar but I expect this year to be a year of growing number of Youtube and Vimeo movies being made with consumer 3D cams. Youtube already supports 3D videos: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GcLW0g_c1s

2010 will bring us... Mendels

As you may now by now I'm a big RepRap addept, and I believe everyone will be in the next couple of years. The new, improved version of the RepRap, Mendel, is out for a short while now, and already there are many Mendels out in the wild... like here, and prusajr over here and here.
I'm getting about 2 mails a week with people asking me to print them Mendel pieces. The demand is way higher than the offer right now, this is a good from a growth perspective.

2010 will bring us... the iTablet and better gAlternatives

I think the iSlate, iPad, iTablet or whatever, will be a huge hit. But I'm not an Apple fanboy. At all. I expect the iWhatever to be a cash sucking machine. It will be connected to the iTunes store, where you can buy books, movies, songs and lots of other stuff... It will be a nice, slick machine, but very expensive.

On the other hand, I am a bit of a Google fanboy (As long as they are on the path of Open Source projects, and use the everything-is-Free-but-has-adds strategy). Hence I much more interested in the Chrome OS. And the effect it will have on the tablet world. I can imagine lots of tablets everywhere, in your living room, kitchen, in the lobby of a hotel, etc.
You just pick one up, log in with your google account and *bam* there you have your custom os, your email, your bookmarks, your documents, your videos (on a free service like revision3.com, or paid services like netflix.com), your passwords, etc. 

Perhaps it wont be free, or as 'designy' as the iWhatever, but it will be Open!

2010 will bring us... A.I.

As computing power keeps on getting cheaper and cheaper simple A.I. will also improve. These technological improvements will not be as spectacular and visible as the items above. However they will be important. I'm thinking about industrial techniques to improve manufacturing, controlling traffic, detecting potential dangerous situations in traffic. Automated maneuvering with you car, automated watering your plants, ... etc.

2010 will bring us... Robots!

As you know I'm a real Robots addict. And I'm also graduating this year as an Industrial Engineer Electromechanics, Automation. A "Robotics guy" for short.

So I'll promise you this. I'll do my very best to push Robots in the industrial world, but also in peoples everyday lives.

Now, have a nice 2010!