Last week, WCIA news featured our Lab's new Maker Certificate in its nightly broadcast. The Certificate program was founded about a month ago and has over 250 sign-ups! Listen to the story below, and watch our head Guru, Ryan talk about this new program and its educational goals!
Recently, our friends at Dremel, donated a new IdeaBuilder 3D Printer to our Lab. This printer is similar to our standard Replicator 2 3D printers: both print using PLA (polylactic acid) filament. However, the IdeaBuilder has a multicolor navigation screen and also provides an enclosed build area which helps the printer maintain a consistent printing temperature and reduces the impact of unwanted external airflow. Please give this new printer a try the next time you visit our lab. We are very appreciative of Dremel's generosity and support of our Lab's initiatives!
Printing. Testing. Redesigning. Repeat. This seems to be the theme of our recent class sessions, including this past week. Every group now has printed at least a couple of prototypes and are getting closer to having a finished product.
Our most recent class began with a Skype conference call with Annie Wang, who is the President of the an additive manufacturing consulting firm, Senvol. As a recent MBA graduate from the Wharton School of Business, she passed along some good tips regarding how to market our products.
After the call, our groups went to work by making small adjustments to our models and developing plans for packaging, sales and branding. Our group, DigiCraft, printed an extensive redesign of our paint can attachment this week with good results and much improved functionality over our old design.
The semester will be ending before we know it!
Posted by Team Digicraft
Find out more about whats happening at the Making Things Class 2015. Stay tuned for updates by subscribing to our blog feed, or just get our posts via email(subscribe on the right navigation). You can also like us on Facebook or follow us on twitter to stay updated.
At the last few sessions, girls have left the sessions wanting to become 'MakerGirls' and engineers and parents have truly enjoyed watching their daughters learn about STEM. A fellow C-U parent has said,
"I think I've been so attracted to MakerGirl, for exactly the reason Covey indicates below. I've been looking for a way to change [my daughter's] paradigm from a consumer of technology ( watching Frozen on the iPad, playing apps, streaming video through Chromecast, etc ) to a builder of technology. MakerGirl has allowed that transformation to happen seamlessly."
https://youtu.be/faVDgxTmTKw
In last week's Making Things class, we focused on refining the prototypes for our products. Our team (Handmad3) is creating multiPLY, a bathroom aid that increases the capacity of your toilet paper holder. We finished prototyping, so we focused on other details, such as developing the instruction sheet that will come with the product. We also started working on our product's packaging, slogan, and distribution. So, in essence, we are working on our marketing plan. We will use Facebook, Square, and Instragram as tools for our marketing efforts. Our goal now that we have finished our prototype is to build an inventory. Having an inventory will allow us to begin selling quickly, as well as have a better presentation when we sell in person. We are therefore trying to print as many products as possible.
This week's class had another guest speaker, Eli Share from Dremel. He spoke about his company’s use and distribution of 3D printers, including their new consumer-level model intended for the casual user. He also discussed his vision for how additive manufacturing will evolve in the future: the ecosystem of 3D printing will change, but the hardware will plateau.
We also ate Rosati’s pizza and listened to the musical stylings of James Taylor and Bob Marley.
By Team Handmad3
Find out more about whats happening at the Making Things Class 2015. Stay tuned for updates by subscribing to our blog feed, or just get our posts via email(subscribe on the right navigation). You can also like us on Facebook or follow us on twitter to stay updated.
This is a Guest Post by Sam Bohner, a student in the Digital Making 2015 Class. The past couple of weeks, the digital making class went to the Imaging Technology Group at Beckman Institute where we met Geomagic guru, Travis Ross. There, he began to introduce us to the scanning equipment at Beckmann and to Geomagic software in the second week.
Geomagic is a CAD software that focuses mainly on preparing 3D products for print. It’s an extremely useful yet complex tool. Some classmates expressed the issues they encountered when using the software. Sebastian voiced in his post that the “software was a bit too powerful for us to learn in such a short time.” Kay, as well, expressed in her post that “we still have a lot to delve into about this software.”
In class, Travis went through a tutorial for the class that consisted of working with a scan done on a clay model. He went through the process of trimming, filling, smoothing, and dividing parts of the object all done in Geomagic. It is a fairly complicated process and the class tried their best to keep up with Travis.
Travis also worked on cleaning up the racing glove that Arielle brought to Beckman for scanning. Anthony provided some background on the glove in his post:
"The plastic glove is custom made and extremely difficult to replicate for racers. Having a digital copy of a good glove means the ability for a user to create multiple copies using 3D printing!"
During the scanning process of the glove the week before, there were some issues capturing the surface of the glove. Travis decided to spray it with talcum powder so the beams from the scanner could bounce back to the computer. It took multiple scans to make a complete model in the software. It seems that with the right practice and expertise in this type of software that amazing things can be done.
After scanning it, Travis was gracious enough to spend a lot of time cleaning up the scan, and then helped the team get a printable model. The team is working on approaches to develop a workflow to print custom gloves for each of the racing team members.
The scan was then cleaned up , and here are the results!!
Many classmates started to apply their knowledge of Geomagic to their lives. For example, Jill noted:
“I have a Tupperware container that I absolutely love to carry places when I want lunch on the go. Problem with it is, there’s no great way to carry cutlery with it. I want to scan this existing container, and further add on a pocket that carries forks and knives.”
Noah as well stated:
“…with this software caused me to think about the various economic applications of this technology. Perhaps, I will be able to create my own business concept around this technology. I still will need help to operate the scanner and software, but having this high level overview allows me to be able to think critically about using this technology in my own field.”
Geomagic is a powerful tool in 3D printing that has great potential. It is a little on the pricey side so I would recommend trying to obtain a free trial.
Learn. Make. Share.
