Jon Gohr was a pack-a-day smoker for more than 20 years until he quit three years ago, thanks to electronic cigarettes. Gohr is a software developer by profession.  Several years ago, he discovered the Maker community and was hooked. “Electronics were the first thing that brought me into the whole world and idea of making things. It just seemed to fit with my technical background and software development experience. I’ve been doing small projects with Arduinos for quite a few years,” he explains.

PathPilot™ has been out of beta for nearly four months, and we’re quite proud of our new control software. While we expected PathPilot to improve the lives of our customers, there were a few features that we weren’t expecting to have such an impact. Here’s our top six list of our favorite (somewhat) unexpected advantages with PathPilot, in no particular order:

Now that we have hundreds of users (both new and veteran) using our new PathPilot™ software, we've created a series of tutorials on using the software to educate on the workflow and user interface.

As many of you are aware, we announced our new PathPilot™ software last month and are expecting the official release in April. The Tormach engineering group has taken painstaking measures to develop this entirely new control architecture that is designed specifically for our products.

St. Paul, MN–based programmer Joe Hoover, came up with an innovative idea in custom pen manufacturing that lets anybody create a one-of-a-kind machined pen on his Web site, www.bellisi.me. "The Web site has a widget that works like a mini-CAD system. It lets users design a pen with easy-to-use parameters," he explains. To get the word out, Joe's launched a campaign on Kickstarter, the popular crowd-funding platform.

Founded by Nathan Patterson, Kevin Harris, and Nathan Schumacher, Radiant Fabrication in Fitchburg, Wisconsin hopes to bring 3D printing into the mainstream.