By Arthur Poole
Sedona AZ (February 14, 2015) – The Oak Creek Apples Macintosh User Group will meet on Wednesday, February 18, at the Elks Lodge off Airport Road in West Sedona.
Beginning at 5:00 PM:
Continuing our regular sessions of “Mac Basics and Beyond”, local Mac/PC consultant Alan Gore will field any questions the audience might have about the Mac. At this session, please feel free to ask any Apple-related question, from the most basic to the most advanced. Come listen, learn, and ask questions about the Macintosh computer. We stress that there are no “dumb” questions. Attendees of this portion are usually about evenly split between folks new to the Mac and those with greater familiarity with the magical machine. But everyone seems to learn something.
The Main Meeting starts at 6:15 PM:
This month our feature presentation will be:
3D PRINTING – What it is, what it can Do
John Tester, Associate Prof. Mech Engineering at NAU will introduce us to the new world of three dimensional printing, which creates solid objects under control of your computer, just as the printer you have now creates pages of text and pictures. If we can arrange it, there will be an actual printer available to demonstrate the process.
3-D printers are available that work in any thermoplastic material, meaning a material that melts when it gets hot. The small hobby printers now on the market can make objects in PLA plastic, starting from reels of plastic wire, or “filament.” Filament is fed into the print head and, under control of a computer, melted as the print head moves to a position on an imaginary horizontal plane, in the same way that an ordinary printhead does on a sheet of paper. Now if you imagine a solid object as being a big stack of “pages” printed in this way, the printer starts the first “page” at the bottom of a three-dimensional volume of space sitting on the bed of the printer. Working “page” by “page,” the printer builds up a solid object from the bottom to the top of this space. That sounds laborious, but that is exactly the kind of task computers were designed to do best. There are 3-D printers that work in every metal, and even print in glass.
Free. Public Invited. Elks Lodge, 110 Airport Road in West Sedona. The lounge is open from three in the afternoon until the end of the Apples meeting. Three Tacos, Taco Salad or Nachos are available for $5 starting 5 pm to 7 pm or until they run out.
Spring Activity Schedule for 2015
