October 2017 | re:3D | Life-Sized Affordable 3D Printing

First off, can you tell us about yourself and your company, Risu?

Hi! My name is Maria Clara Nascimento and I am the Co-Founder and CEO of Risu, a company developing technology that combines artificial intelligence, robotics, and 3D printing to revolutionize the dental restoration industry. Risu will be the first 3D printer that makes dental prosthesis with a realistic look and feel, as well as strength and durability. I have also co-founded a humanitarian NGO that provides dental services, food supplies, and free medical assistance to remote indigenous villages in Venezuela and the Amazon region. I define myself as an incurable fan of road trips in any language, and enjoy a 100% real smile, turbulence on planes, sleeping on chairs, and sitting at tables. I received my BA in Social Communications from the Universidad Arturo Michelena.

What program are you in that connected you to re:3D?

The Young Leaders of the Americas Initiative (YLAI) Professional Fellows Program is a U.S. Department of State initiative funded by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, implemented by the Meridian International Center, and applied in Austin by the International Office of the University of Texas. I will be working together with re:3D to gain essential skills through mentorship in business, organization, and social entrepreneurship in a four-week fellowship. Upon completion of the program, I’ll return to Venezuela to apply these new skills towards creating a significant impact in my country.

Why were you matched with re:3D?

Like finches in the Galapagos, we all continue to evolve, and what better way to do that learning from the very best. re:3D has a very successful business which I will learn to build during my time spent with them, together with the leadership skills and scalability of the company. But most important, Risu was created to improve the quality of life of the indigenous people in the Amazon region, and re:3D is a business focused on creating a transformative change with the technology they have developed for those who need it the most. Other than the technological aspects of the Risu Smart 3D project and its connections to re:3D, we were matched due to the social impact we want to achieve through our work. I will absorb all the knowledge, energy, and passion that this amazing team has shown me so far, and channel it towards making a positive difference in the indigenous communities.

What will you be doing for re:3D and what do you hope to learn?

I will be working on selected projects together with re:3D, where I will use the experience I have and couple it with the new skills the team will be teaching me. I want to understand the deeper layers of what makes this team a successful one, how have they managed to rise above all the challenges that early startups face daily, and the skills required to be a leader. In the technological aspects of re:3D, I hope to learn about the thought process behind the building of Gigabot, how to scale the business accordingly with the growth of the company, and how to sell an idea to investors that may be interested in financing the project. I would also love to learn how to navigate through the difficulties of being a young entrepreneur and a woman in a world and country where a leader with those qualities is hardly accepted or recognized.

What is your favorite 3D printing project that you’ve done or seen done in the past?

I have so many! But the one I liked the most was a 3D-printed pizza, made by NASA for astronauts that will be sent to Mars. It’s still in development, but the results so far have been great (and hopefully delicious – I haven’t tasted it yet). The reason I like this project so much is that it goes on to show that 3D printing is the future of humanity, where everything we need will be manufactured in our own homes. Other projects that I have adored are the ones related to medicine and prosthesis.

HP is also developing a 3D-printing technology that will shape the future, the Jet Fusion 3D Printer. They claim it can create a multi-color product and change the material’s properties. It’s a very unique printer, although it is still in development, and I like the very challenging aspects of the project and how it can disrupt the entire 3D printing world.

What is your filament of choice?

The PEEK filament. It is biocompatible and has high-quality mechanical, physical, optical, and thermic properties. It is one of the top filaments with great tensile strength, and it’s currently used for cranioplasty implants, dental case models, and hip and leg prosthesis, among other uses. Thanks to this filament, the lives of thousands have changed for the better, improving their quality of life and enabling them to reinsert themselves into society.

What would you print with super large-format Gigabot+10,000? (10m cubed–it’s bigger than a football field)?

The question is “what wouldn’t I print.” If I had a large-format Gigabot like the one described, it would never catch a break. It would be printing stuff forever. The first order of business would be creating a spaceship. The second, a ginormous robot. The third, a lot of smaller 3D printers that will also be printing smaller objects at the same time the big Gigabot is printing large-scale things. The filament I would utilize for the spaceship is one that probably doesn’t exist yet, as it would have to withstand the heat of the Sun. The moon is so last century, the Sun is a real challenge. Forget about the moonshot, I’ll make a sunshot.

It’s the Great Big Gigabot Giveaway Time Machine Edition–if you could give the 1,000th Gigabot to anyone in any epoch, who would you give it to and why?

Leonardo da Vinci. He was a creative genius, a strategic visionary, and a person who would do anything it took to create the machines he had imagined. I am sure the world would never be the same if he had a Gigabot in his hands, and it definitely would be a world where I would like to live in. The possibilities are endless.

Morgan Hamel

Blog Post Author

Chuck Grant wasn’t with the Magnolia Fire Department in 2011 when the Riley Road Fire happened, but the effects of the massive blaze on the department he now works for as Assistant Fire Chief and Chief of Technology are still visible.

The fire took 10 days to contain and burned nearly 19,000 acres in Magnolia, Texas, northeast of Houston.

“The fire was in such a size that it knocked out cell service in a lot of areas,” Chuck recalls. This meant that the department’s typical public alert methods using Facebook, Twitter, and other cellular-dependent mediums were off the table. They had no easy way to communicate with the community they were trying to help.

What the firefighters found is that when residents didn’t know where to go or what to do, they came directly to the fire station to try to get information. But in a large-scale disaster like this one, that was a problem. “There was no one in the fire stations because they were all dealing with the emergency,” Chuck explains. The fire exposed a serious communication problem they realized they needed to remedy.

When Chuck joined the team, he began working with the Fire Chief to devise a solution to this problem.

What they came up with was something akin to a tool that many businesses use for public messaging: LED signs. The signs would be out front of each of Magnolia’s nine fire stations to display updates and actions during large emergency events, with the ability to change the information quickly and from the field.

The next order of business was aesthetic – they wanted to add a symbol of the fire service to the signs to make them their own, something that would look good for the community.

When they settled on the idea of a large fire hydrant statue on either side of each station’s sign – two at each location meant 18 in total – the next challenge became how to get them made. They started investigating options like fiberglass and bronze casting, but quickly realized that everything was far out of their budget.

That’s when they found Gigabot.

The sign project in conjunction with other potential uses for 3D printing at the station made getting their own Gigabot and fabricating the decorative hydrants themselves the most cost-effective option. Chuck already had a background in 3D modeling, so designing the hydrants was no problem. “It was just a matter of scaling something up from, say, an inch tall to 99 inches,” he said. “And the Gigabot was able to do that for us.”

The build volume of Gigabot was the original draw for their sign project, but in order to make the purchase financially worthwhile to them, they wanted the bot to have a second, longer-term use. This is where the RFID tags enter the story.

Fire stations operate under a system of strict regulations: a truck must have a certain amount of equipment before it can respond to emergencies, and this equipment has a variety of imposed lifetimes that need to be tracked. Chuck explains, “When I started 35 years ago in the fire service, no ax had an expiration date on it – either it worked or it didn’t. And now that’s all kind of changed. So the need for technology has really, really ramped up.”

On top of this, equipment must cycle in and out of the repair room as it’s damaged. A tiny crack to a mask takes that mask out of service until it’s fixed. Keeping track of what equipment is damaged, what needs to be replaced on trucks, where damaged equipment is in the repair process – they’re all more processes that need to be tracked.

All of these components add up to quite the logistical headache for fire stations: monitor the ticking clocks on your equipment to make sure active tools are not outside their expiration dates and take things out of circulation when they are, keep track of damaged items in for repair, and ensure your trucks have all the equipment they need to be ready to respond to a call at a moment’s notice.

It’s quite the operational feat for organizations whose main function is to save lives and battle fires.

In the interest of allowing firefighters to do what they do best, stations are looking for ways to manage all their equipment tracking in the most efficient way possible. Magnolia Fire found a solution in RFID tags from Silent Partner Technologies. The small radio frequency identification devices have an adhesive on one side to affix them to objects and they can be scanned from a distance and tracked via software on a computer. Chuck explains, “It very quickly gives the firefighters the chance to scan the truck and know that the vehicle is ready for them to respond to a call the minute they come into work.”

The problem was, Magnolia quickly realized that the harsh firefighting environment in conjunction with the wide variety of materials they had to tag was proving to be too much for the adhesive tags. “Because the fire service is a tough place to be a little tag, the adhesive strips on the back don’t hold up as well as they would in another application,” he explained. Heat from fires, water from hoses, and the general physical battery that the firefighting tools endure took their toll, and the department found themselves returning from events sans many of their RFID tags.

A solution, they realized, lay in 3D printing.

Using Gigabot, Chuck has been printing small compartments for the RFID tags to fit into which they can then mechanically fasten to their tools. 3D printing the tag holders provides a uniform material to which the adhesive can adhere, while also tucking the tags away where they can’t get bumped off. And they can do this all without altering the form and function of their well-designed equipment.

“All of our items have been well-designed, they’re well-engineered, and so for us to just take something and stick it on the side of it isn’t really a great option,” Chuck explains. What they’re doing is replicating a certain component of an object and building a pocket into it where they can hide a tag. The clip of a flashlight, for example, is replaced with its 3D printed clone, plus one RFID tag that you wouldn’t know is there. This becomes infinitely important when when you’re in a smokey room with thick gloves on, where a foreign part on a familiar tool can lead to dangerous confusion.

If the sign project was what led Magnolia Fire Department to Gigabot in the first place, creating custom RFID tag holders for their equipment is what kept them coming back. It’s proven to be the long-term justification they wanted in order to get their own 3D printer on-site.

“We certainly had this sign project that’s important…it’s going to be the thing that people notice the most because it’s going to be out in front of the building,” Chuck says. “But long-term, to get the most out of our investment, we need that secondary…task for the Gigabot to do.” The ongoing RFID project checks that box.

Gigabot has also proven itself as a problem-solver for issues that weren’t necessarily originally on Magnolia’s 3D printing radar, as the department now has the ability to produce any sort of custom-made pieces they desire. “Instead of going into the marketplace and kind of having to mold to what is available, we can meet our own needs by drawing our own parts and printing them,” Chuck explains.

An example of one such piece is an ingenious yet simple part to hang the firefighters’ masks inside the trucks, keeping them off the seats and floor where they’re more likely to get damaged, and hanging them in a way that doesn’t put stress on the facepieces. The clever design fits into the masks where the firefighters’ air tanks connect; with one twist they lock onto the piece so they can’t fly off en route.

The station’s service room is lined with equipment in for repair, including a table full of dinged masks. Much of the damage was due to them being tossed around inside trucks or hung in a way that puts undue stress on the temples of the masks, causing them to crack over time. This new piece, they explain, solves these problems and was infinitely simple for them to manufacture.

Clessie Hazelwood, Battalion Chief at Magnolia Fire Department, originally saw the design 20 years ago at a different fire department. Chuck prodded him to talk about how much effort that department had to go through to produce one. Clessie sighed, “Oh…they had to do machining, set up dies and everything.” It was a long, costly process.

When Magnolia got their Gigabot, Clessie came to Chuck to see if the part was something he could print for them. Chuck chimed back in, “From the time you told me about it ’til the time you held it in your hand, how long did it take?” Clessie paused.

“Less than a week.”