• The community is actively prototyping an open-source pick-and-place machine for RepRap, with a pneumatic stepper or complete PnP toolset targeted for spring break; the work integrates JEDEC SMT standards, gEDA part-location files, and automated Mouser BOM generation.

• A 9 mm, 420-step/rev “wobble motor” described in an IEEE paper and demonstrated by a Japanese lab is being evaluated as a printable RepRap actuator; scaling laws and FEM modeling in ElmerFEM (via caelinux.org) are being used to adapt the silicone-membrane design to larger, 3-D-printable dimensions.

• HeeksCAD’s lack of a persistent feature tree or parametric history after Boolean operations sparked a design debate: one camp proposes an event-queue/undo stack that can be branched and replayed, while another insists on keeping live references to all source shapes so the model can be rebuilt on load.

• New pythonOCC sample scripts and STEP/IGES face-extraction utilities were posted at heybryan.org/books/Manufacturing/pythonocc/, and developers are exploring porting HeeksCAD’s GUI layer to pythonOCC’s InteractiveVisualizer to create a more scriptable CAD/CAM toolchain.

• Lawrence Lessig’s SXSW keynote and a barcamp Austin session—where Todd Huffman reportedly demoed “rapid brain slicing” hardware—were highlighted as networking opportunities for fab-lab collaboration and mind-uploading research.