Happy Penguin Awareness Day

January 20th is Penguin Awareness Day. If you are in the Greenwich CT area, consider celebrating by joining us for a penguin evolution talk and a live demonstration of 3D penguin printing.  The event will be held in the same gallery as the photography show Antarctica: Images of an Ancient Land, featuring the work of Diane Tuft.

Penguin Prototype

This afternoon we welcomed the 3D printed prototype of our penguin to meet the original. In the photo, you’ll notice a few differences. The colors of our old reliable penguin have faded a bit over the last half century, which is natural in older museum specimens. I still think he/she (we don’t know the sex for this specimen) has charm. The spot and collar patterns were carefully done but are not 100% accurate because the current scanning technology detects the surface of the scanned object, but not the color. Overall it is really nice to have not only a light weight printed replica of our penguin, but a virtual copy that can be viewed instantly on a computer.

You can meet them both next Tuesday (January 20th) at the Bruce Museum Penguin Awareness Day event. Doors open at 6:30pm for refreshments, and the talk and demonstration starts at 7:00pm.

Test Penguin #1

In an earlier post, we saw the Bruce penguin being scanned at MakerBot.  Now for the test – will the scan print out correctly? We decided to start small, with this three inch tall version. It looks a little like a penguin cookie awaiting frosting, but the beak, flippers, and feet came out very well. Soon, we will give it a run at full power and see if we can create a perfect life-size replica!