“She was the goddess of metis, which means cunning or craftiness … The word that we use today, to mean the same thing, is really technology.”—Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon
This over-life-sized statue’s original design is thought to be from a lost 5th-century BC Greek bronze. Many marble and plaster copies were made in antiquity, and they are all now named after the most famous Roman copy, the ten-foot-tall full-figure marble found near Velletri, Italy, now at the Louvre.
This particular Athena of Velletri data set comes from a 19th-century plaster cast of the Munich Glyptothek’s 2nd-century AD marble. That cast is now in the Skulpturhalle Basel museum in Basel, Switzerland, where I made this 3D capture in September, 2013 as part of my project, Through A Scanner, Skulpturhalle.
I used this survey of Athena of Velletri in my presentation, 3D Printing, 3D Capture, and Opportunities for Design Custodians, which I made to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in early 2014. One of my arguments was that museums interested in raising funds to digitize their collections should start with important works which exist in multiple copies in other museums’ collections.
Athena of Velletri exists in the collections of the Skulpturhalle Basel, the Munich Glyptothek, the Louvre, and LACMA—the Lansdowne Bust, formerly owned by William Randolph Hearst.
Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!
Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!
The Adafruit Learning System has dozens of great tools to get you well on your way to creating incredible works of engineering, interactive art, and design with your 3D printer! We also offer the LulzBot TAZ – Open source 3D Printer and the Printrbot Simple Metal 3D Printer in our store. If you’ve made a cool project that combines 3D printing and electronics, be sure to let us know, and we’ll feature it here!
Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
