Ideas to products in 24 hours - #imaginationU summer Camp

We had the pleasure of hosting high school students attending the ImaginationU Summer Camp organized by the College of Media. They visited the MakerLab to learn about 3d printing, and how physical things are becoming digital, and then back to physical.

While chaperoning the students at the lab, Kyle Potthast, the program specialist had an idea to create a souvenir to give as a gift to the top performing teams at the end of the camp. He needed this for the final presentations, about 36 hours after his visit to the lab. He discussed the idea with our New Guru, Scott, and he had custom, souvenirs printed within 24 hours. https://youtu.be/ToFToSFDryA

If you need ideas converted to products, come by the lab for workshops, design help, or turn key design to print services.

Enabling the Future, one #3dprinted hand at a time

A selection of the hands available on e-NABLING the Future's website

Guest Post by Nora and Sam, students in the first Digital Making class at the MakerLab.

This semester Nora and I worked with Enabling the Future on designing and printing 3D prosthetics. Nora found the company and Vishal helped with getting in touch with the e-NABLE team at SXSW. From there we had our first assignment. In order to be certified by e-NABLE to make prosthetic devices for real people, we had to first print and assemble a prototype hand. The designs are premade so they just need to be printed. In some cases, the hands or fingers need to be resized to fit the end user. Our first hand was called the Raptor Reloaded, printed in black and blue filament. Printing the materials was quite easy compared to assembling the hand. The instructions were available online with detailed pictures and descriptions. The assembling process taught us a lot about how best to make the hand and what were some obstacles that we faced. For example, a lot of the parts needed to be filed down so that it would fit easily together. We also worked with the tension in the fingers so the hand would move properly and learned how to tie some pretty complicated sailor knots that the site suggested we use for the hand.

After the first hand was sent in, we decided to print another Raptor Reloaded to be used as a sample in the Maker Lab for future students that are interested in the project. The process was very similar to the first one except we didn’t have all of the assembling materials needed for the hand such as the strings, screws, and Velcro. Enabling the Future sells packages that cost around $25 for materials for the Raptor Reloaded. Instead of buying another package, we improvised with some of our own materials. Feel free to check out the hand in the Maker Lab during open hours!

Towards the end of the semester, the e-NABLE team got back to us about a real recipient, his name is Bruce and he is a 53 year old male from North Carolina. He is missing three of his fingers on the right hand, so instead of making a prosthetic hand we were tasked with making replacement fingers. Some sizing needed to be done in the fingers, but other than that the prints were ready. The instructions for the Owen Replacement Finger were also available online; however, they were not as detailed as the Raptor hand. We also had to improvise on getting the necessary materials such as a glove, needle and thread, and elastic, which were not available in a pre-made kit for this type of hand.

The MakerLab will keep working with the e-Nable organization, and enable students to create an impact and learn digital fabrication at the same time.

Celebrating the #NationOfMakers and the Week of Making

The MakerLab was setup with a mission to allow users to experience "making" with digital technologies, and show them that it is possible for everyone to be a maker. We have had the pleasure of hosting several hundred makers over the last two years, from across campus, area schools, and community members over the last two years. We could not have done without the support of our partners, such as Autodesk, Caterpillar and P&G and individuals who have donated generously. We have also reached out to the community with two field labs in West side of Chicago and in South Illinois, with our support of the Illinois Marketplace and Maker Literacy Project, funded by a $300,000 grant from the University of Illinois Extension. The university(along with several other schools) signed a letter of support for Making to the President last year. This year the White House is celebrating the anniversary of the first ever Makerfaire , held in June 2014, with some more events. In addition, we are part of the MakeSchools alliance, who have submitted a commitment to making from the schools in a letter to the president this year. The whitehouse press release gives a shout out to Illinois for supporting spaces such as ours, from among over seventy schools.

We are celebrating the National Maker Faire , and the week of Making with a variety of workshops. with something for everyone, from the MakerGirl workshops, to high school robotics and 3dprinting, and our Maker Certificate series.

To launch this special event, we are having the Free Print Friday on June 12th, with extended open hours from 12:00 pm to 6:00 pm If your print takes less than one hour, we print it free! Just for today, so join us and be a part of the #NationOfMakers.

Meet the Maker : Arielle Rausin

Guest post by Arielle, Mark, Sebastian , students from the first Digital Making class in Spring 2015 We were already well into the first month of class, and I still couldn’t decide what I was going to do in my semester long project . Then Vishal told us we were taking a field trip to the Beckman Institute of Advanced Science and Technology, with the assignment of bringing an object to 3D scan. I racked my brain for a while trying to come up with an object that was interesting and maybe held potential to be turned into something more.

Then later, at track practice, my coach suggested trying to scan one of the handmade gloves we use to race. Usually the gloves take hours and hours to make- custom fit for each racer, not to mention their 350.00 dollar price tag. One pair will last a long time, but since they are so unique they can never be exactly duplicated. This sounded like the perfect kind of item to try and scan, because having a 3D model that you could print over and over again would open up many possibilities.Sebastian and Mark were also interested in this project, so the three of us set out to try and make the world’s first 3D printed wheelchair racing glove! After Travis (from the Visualization Lab over at Beckman) completed the scan and cleaned up the glove file, we were off to work! We were incredibly lucky and barely had to manipulate the design at all in Geomagic because the scanner was so precise. Surprisingly, the very first time we tried to print our glove, it worked! Afterwards, when trying to make duplicates, we had a lot of trouble positioning it correctly on the raft so print would not fail, but eventually we figured out the best angle and direction to place the glove in order for the prints to continuously be successful.

Once we had our first printed glove, we got to work testing it. I added the additional materials needed to generate grip when pushing at high speeds- some suede and rubber- and encountered a little trouble getting these materials to stick to a different kind of plastic than I was accustomed to.

Once I discovered that using contact cement was the best method, I started putting the glove to good use! We were very excited that the glove held up after just using it for one training run, but we’re happy to announce that the glove is still working perfectly after over 200 miles of force and exertion.

The next step was mirroring the 3D glove file in order to print another glove for my right hand. Once we figured that out, I added the same extra materials and used the gloves to race in the 2015 Boston Marathon. They worked beautifully!

The things that make this project so successful though were all of the benefits we discovered after the prints proved their durability. For one thing, the plastic that we printed with is incredibly lightweight. My original gloves weighed 174 grams each, and the printed glove only weighs 70 grams. It may not sound like much, but this, I’ve noticed, makes a significant difference when using the gloves to climb hills and push at high speeds. Their lightweight quality also aids in injury prevention. It is common among wheelchair racers to get tendonitis in the wrist from overuse, but the 100 grams that the printed gloves shave off put less stress on the tendons and hopefully decrease the risk of injury. The cost is another great advantage! To print a single glove cost only 4 dollars, that’s a lot of green left in your pocket from the original pair costing a minimum of 300 dollars. The repeatability is probably the greatest benefit here though. The fact that you could print multiple pairs of gloves for different weather conditions could be a huge advantage when racing. Some of the world’s best athletes lose important races because they weren’t prepared for the conditions, whether it was rain, humidity, or even snow. Now that we found a way to print the perfectly fitting glove, it is possible to make many, many varieties.

Here is a short interview where I am talking about this project with Vishal, the Director of the MakerLab.

https://youtu.be/AhLMsJ3Pdvg

Our next step is to help everyone on the University of Illinois’ Wheelchair Racing team to get their own pair of printed gloves! We’ve started scanning more and more pairs and the team is getting excited. Eventually we would like to discover a process to create a pair of gloves from scratch- just by scanning an athlete’s hand. Over the summer we will continue to explore different methods so potentially people all across the world could buy a pair by simply sending us a file of their scanned hand.

We are very excited to continue pursuing this project, and hope to see it keep growing into the future! The uses for 3D scanning and printing are endless, and it is so thrilling to be a part of discovering why!

Update 10/17/15 : Watch Arielle in action with the gloves in Chicago!

Congrats to Winnie & Ryan!

Congratulations to Winnie & Ryan on their recent graduation from the University of Illinois!  Winnie and Ryan earned their BS in Engineering and are off to new adventures. Winnie will be working for Boeing in St. Louis, while Ryan is considering his options. We recently held a celebratory dinner at the Firehaus in Champaign.

Winnie and Ryan were two of our earliest Gurus and did great work in this capacity for over two years! Both of them excelled in leading workshops, creating 3D designs for students and businesses alike, repairing broken printers, and serving our diverse user base. Our Lab won't be the same without them but we are sure that they will be just as successful in their new jobs!

We Have a Winner!

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Printing People

Edgy

We have a winner! The 2015 version of our Making Things class concluded with product presentations by each of our seven teams. These presentations were judged by both their fellow students as well as a expert panel of professors and practitioners, including Joe Bradley, Ravi Mehta, Jared Phipps, and Vishal Sachdev. The unanimous winner across both sets of judges was team Printing People, which includes Cecilia Hogan (Design), Michael Kania (Business) & Jordan Kravitz (Engineering). This team identified a need for a better way to stick posters on a wall and used the 3D design and printing tools in the MakerLab to create a solution, called Edgy. This small but ingenious product is a set of four small plastic edges with a stick adhesive applied to the back. A poster's four corners can be easily placed in each of these edges and then applied to a wall. Compared to traditional approaches such as tape, Edgy has imporved aesthetics and also can be easily removed without damaging the poster. Congratulation team Printing People as well as our other six teams for another successful Making Things class!