Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “The Ultimate Guide to 3d Printing 2015: Our Selection Process”.
So my name is anna kazunas, france, i’m digital fabrication, editor for maker media and i’m from providence, rhode, island. So we’ve seen a lot of things change in the field. I think the first and foremost is kind of the commercialization industrialization of 3d printing. So the machines in the past, as i mentioned previously, have been a lot of laser-cut plywood, a lot of prototypes that people have assembled. You know 3d printing isn’t new, but what’s new now is that it’s on the desktop that innovation has occurred, because people have taken machines that were previously extremely expensive and they’ve made them something that people can afford in their homes and in their workshops and their offices And so we’re seeing a lot of really professional packaging.
Now, where previously 3d printers used to be kind of, you know tossing a box a lot of packing peanuts or you know you pick it up from the guy down the street. We had a lot of hand delivered printers last year and this time they come a lot like a laptop, where you have kind of a cardboard piece around it with little foam inserts to keep it very securely fastened. I’M sure most of you are familiar with that, and so that’s a real change, even real shift from even last year to see that so um that’s been very interesting. There’S been a lot of changes in the appearances of machines. There’S a new focus on you know: attractiveness um, you know size and fitting them on the desktop and just a real push for mainstreaming. So there’s real push for ease of use and there’s a lot of discussion that 3d printers are easy.
You see that a lot in the marketing materials they’re easy to use easy to maintain and we’re here to test that out to see, if that’s true, the biggest thing that you can do in an event like this, because it’s short, so you have a lot of Machines we have about three days, and so you know when you’re testing, you know 23 plus machines actually 24 in uh in three days. You really need to do a lot of upfront planning, so the things that we’ve learned in the past two years that we’ve really applied this year is that we really want to target. We really want to be able to measure and we need to be able to adjust on the fly, so we designed very specific test geometries that would test both mechanical and software features of these printers, and these target geometries were all then printed in the same filaments. They were consistent across the models and we’re testing for overhang retraction, bridging a lot of very common either problems or success, points for 3d printers um and many numerous other topics as well.
So we print out these test models and we can really see how they compare um on a very direct one-to-one basis and in addition, what we really found valuable this year, that we couldn’t do as much as we wanted last year is the data collection, so we’re Collecting data on the fly, we knew what we were looking for and as we’re doing the tests we’re filling in the data, and we can see these results in real time kind of what printer is coming out ahead, almost like a horse race. In a way, you know who’s doing well whose prints are scoring high and that enables us to adjust on the fly. We’Ve been testing support the entire time. We know that’s important to many of these new groups, especially to new users.
If you need help, will they help you? We actually started that before the test, we’ll be continuing it after and we’ve also, you know kind of generated personas for these groups, so, while they’re represented we’re also thinking of brand new users and beginners, it’s no small thing to be able to test these machines in This amount of time, one of the ways that people can get involved, we will be putting out calls and ideally creating sections of our site that enable people to share their data, and especially with these test probes. I think that that’s huge that we’ll really have a way to kind of compare across all these different printers in a meaningful way. As opposed to you know, here’s just a model that i printed off of thingiverse. We will be able to have people record their settings and show their prints, and you know with things like the overhang test. We have exact angles marked on the prints. You can see the exact angle where it failed.
I think that’s really key for data collection. You know so if we get one that stock settings where it failed very early and then a finely tuned profile um, that’s an excellent way to contribute in terms of being on the test team, it’s tricky. We need to balance a few things. We need to have user groups represented um, and we also need to be able to. You know bring key testers back that have participated some for all three years, some for two um, there’s kind of a synergy that you get that you have to do it in a very short amount of time. We want to make sure that we are, you know, getting the information to everyone and that we are getting reviews in. So it’s a it’s core and it’s key for the data collection. So if they’re interested, they can always contact me and um i’d love to discuss it with them, how they can participate further we’d love to build this out.
For me, we want all of your input and your data to make this better for everyone. You .