Wow, what a busy week. Please don’t expect this from us every week!
On the 29th of May, Darren met with Swinburne University’s 3D interest group to demo his 3D printer and let them know more about CCHS!
Angela, from the group, wrote a blog post you can have a read of at http://blogs.swinburne.edu.au/3dprint/entry/introductory_meeting_with_a_real
Darren has added his own thoughts below. Thanks to both of you for spending the time putting pen to paper (or keystrokes to bits as it were)!
Darren’s trip to the 3D interest group:
The traffic around Hawthorn was horrible, as usual, and Google steered
me straight into the extensive on-campus road-works. But when I arrived
at the designated car park, I was greeted by a couple of guys who were
keen to get me parked and carry my gear. I was surprised by how eager
they were to hear about my 3D printer – a customised Prusa i3 with a
wooden frame. To me it was the result of two months’ tinkering, and
having only just gotten it to print reliably I was a little tired of
fiddling with it. But to them, it was shiny and new – I guess they’d
never seen one before!
We arrived at a large meeting room in which there were several wooden
desks arranged around a data projector and screen. Angela greeted me,
and introduced me to the other participants. I told them about the
hacker-space, and extended an invitation for all to come and join in at
one of the regular meetings. They had already had some discussion, and
were looking forward to seeing the printer in action. We quickly messed
up the layout of the room, so that everyone could get up and close to
the printer later on. I set the heated bed to warm up, and spoke about
the free software movement and copyleft in general. I introduced the
Arduino and the RepRap, both of which caused pens to scribble. The
concept of free/open hardware seemed exciting to the others, and with
the projector I displayed the RepRap wiki page of free designs that they
could build themselves, with help from others at the ‘space.
When it came time to give a demonstration, I asked Angela to pick
something from Thingiverse, on the screen where all could see. She
settled on a tiny triangular die, as we didn’t have a lot of time
remaining. I wanted to show off the resolution of the printer, as there
were already plenty of large printed objects going around. So after
first destroying my Z end-stop (which had been bumped on the way over),
I roughly leveled the bed and started to print. Everybody gathered
around this tiny red plastic object as it came into being. The
discussion continued, with questions about how 3D printing would be
useful in my research as a scientist/engineer.
At the end, we had to pack up because we had run out of time. I’m sure
we could have continued for another hour, but instead the conversation
continued as several of us walked back to my car. Sadly, I’m not capable
of remembering so many names at one time, but I hope that as this
project continues, there will be some questions that I can answer to
point people in the right direction. Maybe they will take up my offer,
and build their own printer two blocks away at the ‘space?