welcome to a uh getting started with 3d
printing talk
um i wanted to
go over a lot of sort of the basics of
what 3d printing is and how it works
to prepare you guys for the incredible
onslaught that is the
3d printer township which you should
definitely spend some time in over here
so
before we get started can people do back
here is it good excellent
um how many of you have seen 3d printing
before
and i'm looking to see if anybody has it
because it's probably impossible to
leave the fair this year without seeing
something
um
how many of you actually have 3d
printers
excellent
oh no i
i i'm glad that you have a 3d printer
you should you should throw it
but this um yeah so
that's good because
i gave one of the getting started 3d
printer talks yesterday and
well everybody not only had them they
were you know they were just they're
eager to talk about the more advanced
stuff later in the in the process once
you get really familiar with one but
this is a talk that we'll start at the
very beginning
and
address what
3d printing is and we're going to get
through
sort of the highlights
and then i'll be able to field questions
because i know you guys will probably
have a lot of interesting applications
questions for what uh what you guys
would like to do with these kind of
tools
so
the
the term additive manufacturing
is the sort of official one that
industry has uh has chosen for what for
what we more commonly call 3d printing
and
this is
sort of an interesting
situation
3d printing is actually 30 years old
a lot of people think it was just
invented recently
and that it's you know a brand new
science but it's been around a very long
time and has had like specific roles in
industry and with rapid prototyping for
a while
and it's just now basically since about
2007 and much more since 2010
that the idea of desktop 3d printing of
people having 3d printers in their home
or access to 3d printing services to
make inexpensive parts has changed the
behavior of how people use 3d printing
um and has really changed stuff
so even though the
adoption of the term additive
manufacturing came around that time to
attempt to to stop the uh the use of the
word 3d printing for this uh
really they're entirely interchangeable
at this point um so
but if you want to uh
share uh your your secret uh
you know technical tips you can say
additive manufacturing from time to time
so um the
you know a very simplified explanation
for how this works attempting to bridge
the hundreds and hundreds of methods
that people that machines are using to
to produce 3d printed projects
we have we have come up with
any manufacturing process
that builds the design up layer by layer
are either extruded through a nozzle
like a precise computer controlled glue
gun
or cured by laser or projector
these are
sort of the most popular modes of 3d
printing but you'll find
new ways to approach this popping up
every day there's a really interesting
uh story recently that uh a uh i think
it's either an engineering or design
student
made a um
used a
robotic arm
to go and selectively
you know hit
lay in parts in a big gel vat
so that he could build structures with
no support material
you know taking advantage of this five
axis robotic arm that's a pretty new way
to build it doesn't really match with
the building up layer by layer so uh so
watch for how this sort of develops as
3d printing gets more and more
widespread
um
and
did the video appear for you guys
oh um can can we get can we go to the
show aha
there we go
so uh the the green
uh print that's happening
on uh
i guess what would
what would be your uh your left right um
there's a print of a yoda head that you
will probably see all over very popular
uh design to print
and one of the reasons that people print
it is it kind of a cheat
the
all the wrinkles of the skin are
actually really good for 3d printing
they uh they help hold things in and
make a very pleasing
final finish it's actually harder to
print really geometrically smooth
perfect sides that
shows off the limitations of the format
much more
but do you
you see as we were going through there
how it was printing the outside and then
it was printing an infill that is a kind
of a grid pattern that is
so that you don't have to print solid
material through the thing but it
maintains uh
the shape and structural integrity to
support
the outer edges and also what comes up
on top
so
this is one of the
things that you can choose typically
with 3d printers when you're going from
a design that you have ready to go
to
setting something up for a printer you
can choose how dense or solid you want
the
infill
and
the
the slicing software will
take your your percentage of you know i
want it like 10
solid or i want it 30 solid and
calculate a pattern
that will
make use of that much plastic and leave
these these chambers
so you reduce the
the print time and the weight of the
final object which is really great if
you're
say paying for the you know the weight
of the plastic et cetera
and then on the other side is uh is an
example of a sla print and you you'll
see
several more sla printers this year than
than ever before
it is another process almost as old as
fdm fff
the fuse filament fabrication style that
you have
with the the yoda head
in in fact sla actually uh precedes it
uh that's that's that was a very first
mode and
you're using
light to
cure a resin and building the object up
layer by layer but it's actually lifting
the object out of a vat
of the the resin material it's really
fun to see if you haven't seen that
before it
hasn't been featured as much lately
because it's something that's just now
becoming available for
new people to create machines and
and
materials to sell for these kinds of
printers
okay well
so 3d printing has been around a long
time and it has had as like i was saying
before a very specific
role in industry for rapid prototyping
stages of manufacturing so you can test
something before you say go through the
process of creating
a very expensive mold
for injection molding etc
it's a
plays a pretty crucial role but now that
you have less expensive means of 3d
printing and the availability of
affordable 3d printers now all this
explosion of other things that you can
do are appearing for example
uh
it's now affordable enough to make you
know
toys and
gifts for people
and uh and artwork that would otherwise
have been prohibitively expensive that
industrial ring habitat the huge ring
with the sort of little smoke
coming into the middle
is actually a tremendous object and to
3d print it in the past or produce it in
another manufacturing method would have
been insanely expensive
it's so the artist just paid for it with
his time and the plastic he needed to
produce it and that's it it was
over 200 hours of printing
but um
it you know it was on his terms and with
him tweaking every element as he was
designing it
uh
like this big it's it's really big
so people are still prototyping with
these kinds of tools but they're also
using it for something sort of related
to prototyping but a little bit new
the automatic transmission the red and
black element up there that is a a
working sort of teaching model of an
automatic transmission
so it's not something you're going to
throw into your car
but
you can operate it and it has the
appropriate gear ratios to you know step
between you know the various uh
modes and you you use your finger to
advance it from you know
one to two to three
um you know gearings
and
this is an example of how you can use a
3d printer
to design and learn about something in
the world that you're curious about it's
an incredible teaching tool
and would been really difficult to
produce any other way
the sterling engine in the middle
is interesting not only because sterling
engine engines are fascinating but
somebody spent some time figuring out
how to solve this and make something
that would work given that
these sorts of plastics are pretty
sensitive to heat they're
workable they're very low temperature so
you have to approach this a different
sort of way and he found a really great
solution it's really interesting design
and
which actually i do want to talk about
the plastics that are most commonly used
in the
in the fdm and this this style the
layering building up of plastic
that you'll see most frequently around
here
people tend to use abs and pla and abs
is the same plastic used for
lego blocks though legos are produced
within a in a different method it's
they're pressure molded
but
definitely uh many of you should be very
familiar with legos and how light and
strong they are and how much they hurt
if you step on them in the darkness
it's a really great material to work
with because you can make machines you
can make sculptural objects and they're
still light enough to work with and
material is pretty affordable
so
rather than you're not actually
precisely melting the stuff you're
really bringing up kind of like a
viscous fluid to a workable temperature
so
as a result you're not really having the
kind of state changes that you might
expect from another like really
industrial process
so they don't really off gas they're not
dangerous these are plastics chosen
because they're pretty safe to work with
maybe right there where you design
things instead of like out in the
workshop or in an industrial space where
you would typically work with
much more dangerous toxic chemicals and
that has been
a very big change
for how people use this they're right at
hand and people will sit there and and
iterate and design over and over
uh
right there where they're most
comfortable instead of sending
off for their pieces to be produced and
mailed back and
which can take a lot of time and money
and pla the other very common one you
actually are probably more familiar with
it
in in terms of use because it's often
used for cutlery and food containers so
it's been you know both of these
types of plastics have been around you
all the time
and they're really they're really
convenient and affordable for uh for
working with the resins
it's
actually spending some time in 3d
printer village will be very interesting
in terms of learning of the resins for
sla because there's so much development
happening and how to make those more and
more affordable and safer
a lot of the you know specific details
are changing from week to week as people
are discovering new ideas new people are
offering residents for you to work with
so
in addition to
creating things that are say mechanical
models etc people are using these to
design things and maybe they're using
thing
they're designing things that they want
to to use not just to use as a an
example of what they later will want to
produce in a different way
the atomic
bomb mushroom cloud there is sort of an
interesting model because it's
it was uh created from taking footage of
a little atom bomb explosions and turned
into a structural shape and then
produced in a translucent material so
you can get a light source into it light
it up and you have sort of suspended in
space there
that
mushroom cloud from the uh from the
video
the uh the white watch body is an
example of uh sort of a fun enclosure
that in this case i i made this one to
go around existing electronics project i
thought it would be fun to
sort of change the shape of how this
works the
the kit which is made by adafruit called
the time square kit which is really fun
is very square and
i wanted to see what it would be like to
throw a very
small enclosure on it to kind of round
it out make it more
soft and organic
this year uh more than the previous
years there's more and more things for
you guys to explore here to learn about
3d scanning
there are many methods of 3d scanning
and i would say most of them are here
somewhere if not
i don't know that there are ct scanners
but there are examples of even some of
the complicated medical scanners that
are
being used to source for
designing all kinds of things from
scanning a mummy without unwrapping it
so that you can see what it looks like
without damaging
the tissues
and
i represent a couple of the most popular
sort of maker modes for doing this
you can use
a laser line scanner
and you'll see a lot of those this year
in particular like the makerbot
digitizer over there i think they have
set up
and there's one two 3d catch which is a
stereo photogrammetry tool so you
actually just use a normal camera
and you take photos from all around a
figure and kick it into
a cloud server that will then process it
find the the sync points and build the
volume of the object you're looking at
photogrammetry is actually as old as
photography but the stereo
photogrammetry stuff
like the stuff i'm showing here
has only been available really for
architects and
for like sort of analysis using pretty
expensive tools until recently
and i'm using 123d catch in the the
picture along the the riverfront to work
with some people from the milwaukee
maker space to try to
3d scan
the bronze fawns which is a local
landmark of theirs
so you take photos all around it any
sort of camera you have and
upload it to a server
they give you a model back that you can
work with it's really a great way to
work
also the
connect projects you'll definitely
probably see interesting connect
projects around in particular in the uh
the lower level the science center
there's the uh scanorama folks
which is a
project
from out in coney island to
build a really handy
sort of vertical
rail system for using a kinect
that was designed for you know
interacting with games
as a 3d scanner
so they set it up so they can sort of
run the scanner up and down and really
efficiently
capture all they need to make a 3d model
of you and print it out and fred who's
running that process is really fast it's
sort of neat seeing that because these
kind of processes typically you would
use a whole array of cameras and be very
expensive but his rig is totally
affordable
and much less expensive than the 3d
printers that he uses
and one one story that is particularly
interesting this year since january
there have been a number of projects
that have popped up to
address 3d printed prosthetics
and one of the reasons i really like
highlighting this is that this is
something that is now it's not something
like some of the exciting stories about
3d printing livers and
all sorts of replacement possibilities
in the you know the biosciences
this is something that's already in play
and making a big difference in people's
lives
and being produced
in some in in the cases of the the
children on the on the right on
desktop 3d printers so they're
the uh prosthetic
a you know a commercial
prosthesis
can cost upwards of forty thousand even
eighty thousand dollars depending on
what sort of uh situation you wanna you
need as far as you you want it to behave
as naturally like
you know give you the control to to
not not think about it not be distracted
by
the now what would it be the best way to
put that um
there's a couple there's a couple
examples here actually on site you can
go see
there are uh ways that people have done
things like
sampling uh nerve firings further up the
arm so they can still trigger the
fingers and you you get really good at
it and you can have complete control
over um you know a hand even if
you know you've
you know you no longer have that that
hand
these are being produced
on 3d printers
for for children and
it's a very exciting development because
they're able to track all the physical
development of the kids and make sure
that they always have these tools at
hand which is a very big difference in
their lives they're not always working
with a slightly not well fitting shimmed
sort of version
of what they wanted to have they can
actually
not only
have them constantly updated and for you
know only
you know 100 dollars perhaps in some
cases
they're reporting but the kids can get
involved with designing them and
changing them and really kind of owning
them which is really just wonderful
so if i started to try to list out all
the 3d printer options and vendors here
we'd be you know through not just the
next talk but the one after it there's
so many options here so i strongly
suggest you travel around and take a
look at what's here and what you'll see
is that not only the the fff the fuse
filament fabrication ones that i was
talking about before with like the green
yoda etc and the sla stereo lithography
ones that are you know pulling the
object out of the vat that they're
curing layer by layer but there are
actually a bunch of other modes of 3d
printing
represented all throughout the 3d
printer village area here so it's
definitely worth spending some time
there
and one of the reasons that there's so
much interest in in these areas and so
many new printers appearing
is that uh
the a lot of the keys patents that had
shaped
um and sort of controlled the various
modes that you could you could explore
in 3d printing are expiring and as they
are they're cycling into the public
domain and people are able to make
machines and re-explore how these things
work
so you're gonna see more and more of the
next couple of years of you know new
ways to 3d print that haven't been
available
to be done on a you know affordable
level
sorry and even if you don't have a 3d
printer there are a number of 3d
printing services that are doing their
best to make it affordable
to print not only using the materials i
was talking about before but a huge
range of materials and machines that you
really don't want to have in your home
next to your desk
so you can take a look at things like
shapeways which is really yes i think
it's just right over there
and see all the various metals and
ceramics that you can you can print
using the same design files that you've
been exploring to 3d print on a desktop
3d printer that you might have
you know have on your own you know proof
of design and then print it in you know
in gold or silver and give it as a gift
it's really neat way to go
so typically when people are first
exploring desktop 3d printing they'll
spend a lot of their time going to
places like thingiverse grab cad
and other sites and grabbing the
incredible models that are appearing
there
shared for free for you to download you
know every day
but after a while you'll realize uh that
you know
they've been able to create something
they're very excited about i now want to
create something i'm excited about and
this is a very good time to explore
design because there are more and more
tools and resources than ever before a
lot of them free
if you had any curiosity about any
particular package or you know
way of working you'll find thousands of
videos on youtube that will demonstrate
how to do this so there are a lot of
people who instead of
going through a very long apprenticeship
to learn how to use one tool that they
will be sort of dedicated to for the
rest of their lives they'll uh pick up
something here and there and they'll
watch a couple videos and they'll check
out some training tools and they'll be
making things on the spot
and what's more exciting to me than even
just all of these
ways to get access to the existing tools
that have been developing and getting
better and better over time are all the
new tools that
are
changing the user interface thinking in
terms of how you might want to design
and trying to make it easier for you to
go from your ideas into a design that
you're ready to work with to print
so i'd strongly suggest you'll check out
tinkercad and 123d design so you can see
right in your browser
some of some of the things available to
you and try them out
one one example of a place to start that
we had selected when we put together
this presentation
it's still when you when you you know
when i when i talk to the folks who are
curious about 3d
printing and 3d design
i ask how many of them have you know
worked with 3d design software before
and there'll be some folks and typically
in the in the maker scene in particular
people will they'll have dabbled they'll
have
tried some things but they they don't
feel that they you know know how to
express themselves with those tools as
much as they would like to and they're
really eager to learn more
but you ask them if they've ever used
photoshop or illustrator or tools to to
work in two dimensions and they have
tried so many things and they're very
comfortable they do it you know all the
time well that's actually a really good
entry into working in 3d design you can
design elements in 2d and extrude them
and and stack them up as you might think
about legos or a laser cutting project
and get some pretty interesting
3d forms that way and as you get more
familiar with how that's working you'll
you'll start to identify the things that
you wish you could do differently and
sort of add the tools as you need them
to to get the kind of shapes that you're
really going for
after you've printed your object there's
still a lot more you can do
and while
you know sanding might not sound like
the most fun
these materials are really great to work
with you can
do all kinds of surface treatments to
create incredible results
right from those you know bright
plastics that you're printing with
and
it it really makes a difference when you
can hand some something to somebody that
is say
uh like with uh cosmos uh piece there
that that bronze looking uh horse head
is a 3d printed object it's actually
it's tremendous
he had he has a background in
architectural detail
and exploring ways to get surface
treatments onto items that would be on
the edges of buildings and that kind of
thing so he's spent so much time looking
into
how things weather and change and there
is a lot of stuff out there to explore
so you can take those surfaces change
change them and produce a result that
really feels like a different material
it's great for interacting with it and
for giving it as a gift
and also using it as a you know proof of
concept when you're trying to make
something that would be extremely
expensive to to make and test
um let's see
and as you will see from 3d printer
village and but also
online reading news about
where these things are going there are
more and more
tools and
for printing
different materials and more printing
materials that can be used in existing
tools to allow you to try some really
interesting things
i was trying to check earlier i think
over in maker shed later today there's a
talk by matt stultz about 3d printing
materials it's pretty fun
because he's been testing how to use
a typical
off-the-shelf desktop 3d printer and a
lot of the new
new feed filaments you can put into it
to print
in in like nylon and
wood materials and similar
but
while there aren't that many things like
this yet here
there are a lot of bio printers
being developed right now and while
you can read about a lot of really
exciting things happening in research
labs and that sort of thing there's also
a lot of these things sort of happening
behind closed doors i think we're about
to hear soon about a lot of new things
you can do
with these kinds of tools
there are so many resources to learn
about 3d printing here and
and through through may and spend some
time
walking through the shed to see all the
crazy options that they have just
even just for accessories for 3d
printers
and
last year i helped put together the
ultimate guide to 3d printing
buyer's guide with with gareth and
there's a new one this year that's
coming out in november and i got to
participate again this year as well and
it it was very exciting because
so many of these printers are that
have new models and and new sort of
tweaks for old models they're printing
better and better really
i won't give away too much by saying
that there's just options now it
i look forward to sharing that with you
because you're going to get really
excited about
the new options you can choose when our
when our reviews come out
and i'm really committed to trying to
help people explore design and find ways
to make the things that they want to
make so i'm working on a book design and
modeling for 3d printing and if you're
curious about that i'm actually going to
give a little sneak preview parts of it
at 12 30 right here
but thank you guys very much for coming
you