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| Max and Christina of Wikifactory |
In october 2013, a famous design school in Paris, ENSCI les Ateliers, hosted a workshop organised by the French Ministry of culture. The idea was to use images, videos and sound fallen in the national pubic domain and use them in a sort of “Mashup”. The event was called Public Domain Remix.
The students had one day (8 hours) to pick their digital material and transform it, hack it or remix it.
Le FabShop, was invited as a digital manufacturing expert to help the students realise their project.
After a short brainstorm, all the teams came up with similar ideas, except one, who really went out of the box with their concept. They had this silly idea of making a machine that could automatically create tattoos taken from a bank of images. They learned from le FabShop's representative that their concept was more than feasible. It could be prototyped by themselve, using the school's equipment.
In one afternoon, they managed to hack a Desktop 3D printer and enable it to trace on skin, using a pen instead of the extruder. The crowd was amazed and the Minister of culture even came to see the projects, but the young designers didn’t want to stop there. They wanted the machine to make REAL tattoos, on REAL skin, so they kept working on the project during their spare time, with some help from teachers and other students.
They borrowed a manual tattoo-machine from an amateur tattoo artist and found some artificial skin for the first tests. They chose to draw a simple circle. The perfect shape to test the precision of the process. It worked! But now they had to find a volunteer to be their “guiney pig”…
Somehow, they had no difficulty. A lot of people where excited by the idea of being the first human tatooed by a “robot”.
The big difficulty was to repeat the same exercise on a curve surface and on a material that has much more flexibility than silicone. Many tricks were tried to tighten the area around the skin ( a metal ring, elastics, scotch tape...) but the most effective one was a scooter’s inner tube, open on the area to be marked.
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| Parts printed inside the heated enclosure on the left, and ABS part printed without heated chamber on the right with warping. |
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| The enclosure with printer inside it |
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| Lasercut thermal vents. They can be done with simple hand tools also |
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| Heater made from simple hair dryer |
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| More advanced version of the enclosure with fumes extractor |
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| Project includes various types of printable hinges that hold cut foam pieces |
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| Cyndi Tetro |
This is the Nomad, a new design I'm working on for a travel UAV/FPV airplane. This version has a wingspan of almost one meter, so it's relatively small. After I've completed and test flown I plan to make a 30/50% larger version to carry a GoPro camera in the nose for aerial photography.
The airplane is meant to be modular, the nose and tail sections are joined to the center section with nylon screws, the wings and stabilizers are detachable and even the wing panels can be kept separate to simplify repairs and testing new design ideas.
- The wing sections are meant to be printed in a "Spiral Vase" mode, the internal spars and/or printing settings should be adjusted so that the printing head makes the spars by moving in from the bottom of the wing until touching the inner surface of the top of the wing, so there is only one seam at the bottom.
- I have carefully modeled the fuselage parts so that most of them will print as a two perimeter shell using a 0.4mm nozzle, except where more thickness is needed.
- The wings need two carbon fiber tubes, 8 and 3 mm diameter, the stabilizer also uses a 3mm carbon fiber tube spar.
- The plane will use one brushless motor mounted on the tail with a 6" propeller.
- Things left to do: flaperons, rib between the straight wing panels and the tapered external panel, optional nose wheel, camera turret and internal brackets and supports for servos and electronics.
The Pico is the first 3D printer of its kind to use a solid state UV LED light source. The LED lifetime is up to 50,000 hours and is not classed as a consumable, unlike other systems. The result is consistent curing from layer to layer, day after day, year after year. UV light allows broader materials choices, such as water-clear and pure white materials.
The Pico now has an improved resolution of 39 micron pixel size with a build envelope of 40 x 30mm (X and Y), and a build height of 75mm (Z). With the ability to grow parts in 1 micron increments in Z, the Pico is ideal for high resolution applications such as dental, jewelry and hearing. When building at 50 micron layers, the Pico achieves a build speed of approximately 6mm p/hr.
The GRID II is a third generation printer from mbot3D. This sturdy metal frame 3d printer has one of the biggest build sizes on the market for desktop 3D Printers, 260x230x200mm. It is available in single head or dual head configuration.
The new printer features an automatic build plate calibration system that guides the user through the setup and then at every print probes the surface and uses the calibrated distance.
The printer also features a glass build plate , and a magnetic build plate holder making it a breeze to remove your build plate to remove your prints, which ensures your build plate calibration is kept in top condition.
The mbot3D GRID II also feature single or dual print fans to make sure your PLA prints are perfect every time!
The printer is bundled with a SD card, and an exclusive tool box with the basic tools need for maintenance of the printer.
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| Comparison of Lathon vs. Replicator 2x vs. CubeX Duo |
PRINTING TECHNOLOGY
The printer is T.Black based stereolithography technology - the selective polymerization of the liquid resin with light. Unlike other inexpensive printers like MakerBot and RepRap, the Trimaker printer does not use a power head for depositing material during the printing process. Instead of using a head, the T.Black constructed by drawing the print object layer by layer with an optical projection - each layer of the object is actually a photo of each cross section. For each layer, the Trimaker projecting a light pattern on liquid resin solidifies and thus the parts constituting the object. The remaining resin can then be used as input for the next printing.
AdvantageI'm not sure what technology tehy are describing in "control of color" part ... probably just a single tone of color in the resin ..
More reliable technology. T.Black technology is much more reliable because the control of complex mechanical movements is the part that usually fails. · High Resolution. Whether using light to build the object layer by layer allows a degree of much finer and more precise control. The resolution of your printer is more than 10 times higher than other inexpensive printers based on the technologies FDM (fused deposition modeling). The print resolution is one of the most important features that makes the difference between something with the quality of the prototype and the quality of the finished product and this is the main advantage of stereolithography technology. · Control of Color. use of liquid chemicals allows very flexible control of color printing. The user can change color very accurately by adding the proportion of dye which gives exactly the desired color. · Control of Multiple Properties. stereolithography process works with a variety of inputs. The designer can choose from a variety of materials with different degrees of hardness, density, transparency and other properties.
MADE IN ARGENTINA
The fact that both the hardware, software and materials develop in the country, are a great advantage for our clients when thinking about the after sales service, spare parts, supplies and personalized attention. Delivery times, technical support and input supply is greatly reduced on options imported printers today are available in our market. Finally, being a company Argentina, we will make all our releases, product testing, lectures and trainings, first in this market.
