3D Print Show

The wristband of power. And a Lego watch

Another reason to go to London, apart from the Augmented Reality event yesterday, was to drop in on the 3D Printshow that was taking place in London this weekend. Ultimaker, the company that made my 3D printer, were there and I wanted to drop by and see how they were doing. I also wanted to see what was going on in this area. The answer is rather a lot. We arrived before the show opened, but there was already quite a queue snaking around the courtyard waiting to get in. Fortunately we weren’t waiting long and soon we were inside marvelling at the way this technology is moving forward. And boy, is it moving. I counted five 3D printers I’d never seen before, all printing away merrily in front of throngs of fascinated folks. Autodesk were there too, along with lots of other companies, some I’d heard of, some not.

The folks at Sculpteo will take your designs and make them. You can even design your artefacts on their web page.

They can even print in colour, and the quality is lovely.

There were some lovely examples of printing

This is a great piece of art. The heights of the keys show the popularity of the web sites behind them.

This was a very clever piece of 3D art. The cylindrical mirror in the middle shows a perfect image of a hand, reflecting the seriously distorted sculpture.

They had a band, and of course all their instruments had been printed…

At the Ultimaker stand they had a seriously impressive dual extruder printer which had turned out some incredible prints.  

One major bonus was these folks being at the show. Formlabs might just have the future of 3D printing in their hands. They’ve built a 3D printer that uses an optical technology and special syrup that solidifies under UV light. The resolution is streets ahead of anything comparable at the price. Only snag I can see is that the raw material is a bit pricey, at 130 dollars a litre, but with a bit of luck this will drop over time. Some of the things they had printed were astonishingly good and because there is no messing around with hot and sticky plastic, their printer has a good chance of making it as an appliance.

There were lots of people selling ready made printers and claiming that they have a device for the mass market. I’m not convinced of this. I’d love to be proved wrong, but for now I still see it as a tinkerer’s toy. Ultimaker sell their machines as kits and I think that this is actually quite an honest thing to do. Once you have built the machine you end up with a pretty solid understanding of how it works and how to fix it when it goes wrong. And I reckon all the current crop of printers will go wrong I’m afraid. In a few years time, when the technology has settled down, maybe we will see it in the home, From the interest that I saw at the show, this is just a matter of time.

Creating Augmented Reality in Education

Audience shot. Thanks for being a super bunch.

I was up bright and early today. Well, early anyway. The taxi was picking me up at 5:45 to get me to the station for a train ride to London. I was giving a session at the “Creating Augmented Reality in Education” event. By 5:55 the taxi had still not turned up and a panic phone call to the company revealed that the driver was out there in the mist looking for my house. So, I told him where we could meet up and then, pausing only to step in a deep puddle, fill my shoes with muddy water and say a rude word loudly for the whole of the street to wake up to, I headed for the cab.

We made it to the train with minutes to spare and I got there just in time for the first session. There was a great range of stuff, from descriptions of work in Health Training to eye popping demos of flying dragons and Mars Rovers to thought provoking discussion of just how this stuff is going to change the way we interact with computers and also the world around us. The consensus would seem to be that the stuff is coming, it will change our lives, but we don’t quite know how yet. Perhaps our kids will tell us. The sessions were videoed and should be available at some point. Well worth a look.

I did a session on how the Kinect sensor works, and how the data it produces can be used to get interesting behaviours and applications. My finest moment was asking the chap at the back why he was waving a piece of card with the number “3” printed on it. “Because you have 3 minutes left” was the rather sensible reply.

Anyhoo, all the demos worked, and my shoes and socks dried up fine. You can find the slide deck for the presentation here. You can find a more detailed presentation with code descriptions, along with the demo code, here.

Biggest. Three. Thing. Game. Ever.

I spent tonight entering all the names of the teams into the master spread sheet and sending out the “welcome” emails. If you are in a team you should have heard from me. Turns out that we have 40 teams signed up and around 120 students taking part.

Going to be huge pizza order on Saturday Night……

3D Printing at the Rather Useful Seminar

Una getting star billing

Some time back I rather rashly promised to bring my 3D printer in for a Rather Useful Seminar. Well, today was that day. The weather was horrible. Just the kind of torrential downpour in which you want to carry your high precision printing device. Partly made of wood.

Anyhoo, thanks to help from Adam, a blue Ikea carrier bag (just about a perfect fit) and a big bin liner I managed to get Una the Ultimaker into the lecture theatre and so I started the seminar. As usual I’d prepared a slide deck and so I stated working through the background to 3D printing, talking about the different technologies and how they worked. Then I glanced at the audience. Nobody was looking at me. They were all staring transfixed at Una, who was sitting on the bench doing nothing.

So, that was that. It was straight over to the PC, draw something in Sketchup (a really great, free program), export it to an STL file, slice it with Cura and then get Una printing.

People love watching 3D printers do their stuff. In a world where pretty much everything has been made “Ho Hum” by technology there is something rather magical about a device that makes something appear from nothing. Una behaved herself very well. Once she’d printed the silly design I’d made in Sketchup we went on to print a tiny rocket, and she handled that with aplomb. Then it was back into the bag for the trip home. I’ve just unpacked her and she seems none the worse for the trip out.

I really like this device. It is well thought out and works a treat. And everyone seemed to really enjoy seeing her in action. I’ve put my slides on the Rather Useful Seminars site, but you would probably learn more by just searching YouTube for videos of Ultimakers…

Phone Home

A student brought me a mobile phone which they found in the lecture today. It was an Android device with a lock screen. I couldn’t do much with it, so I just took it home and waited for it to ring. The first few seconds of the call were interesting as I was a bit worried that the caller might think they were talking to a phone thief and that outside a SWAT team were waiting to burst through the door, spray the room with bullets and prise the phone from my dead and broken fingers.

Perhaps I’ve been watching too much Person of Interest.

Anyhoo, names were exchanged and with a bit of luck they’ll get their phone back tomorrow. One way we could have avoided this would be if the owner had put contact details on their lock screen, so that I would have known who to call. This is not hard to do but it is fiddly, because you have to edit the background image and add the text, and if you change the background picture you have to do it all again.

Of course if it had been a Windows Phone they could have just installed the Lost Phone app on their device, which does all the hard work for them.

This is also a very interesting application because the author, Scott Hanselman, wrote version 1.0 in six hours and also produced a really good blog post about the process and described some good practice when you are writing Windows Phone applications.

Update on Wednesday, October 17, 2012 at 08:23PM by Rob

The owner dropped by and picked their phone up this morning. And then (and this is the spooky bit) someone left their wallet in another lecture, which I had to get back to them. Not had anything handed in for years, and now two in two days.

I wonder what I'll get tomorrow. I'm hoping for some keys to a Ferrari.