Designing a 3d Printed EXOSKELETON and How to 'grow' Electronic Parts on It!

Originally posted on symbioticcube.com [http://www.symbioticcube.com/exo/]

David Gann from symbioticcube.com explains a workflow for producing a body fitted exoskeleton from freely available resources. Additionaly a method of growing mounts for electronics on it is explained:

Continuing with my thoughts and experiments about bringing together wearable computing and a generative or ‘symbiotic’ design processes, I ended up doing a 12 minutes video tutorial. In the video you see how you can easily create an exoskeleton using freely available software together with a 3d-printer and a 3d-scanner, which you most likely will find somewhere in your town as well. In the last half of the tutorial I also packed in a method that uses a very experimental approach for designing or ‘letting grow’ a mount for electronics on your body. In this case the Arduino Fio wireless micro controller. The growing approach is very experimental and I have to admit that I didn’t print it so far. I know that it will require a lot of mesh processing until you really can print it. But I hope that I made the idea clear so far.

Here is a list of the software that you need:

ReconstructMe (http://reconstructme.net/)
MeshLab (http://meshlab.sourceforge.net/)
Assimp View (http://assimp.sourceforge.net/)
Blender (http://www.blender.org/)
IvyGenerator (http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/)