Chris Gerty – re:3D | Life-Sized Affordable 3D Printing

SXSW 2015: Round up

As the re:3D team wraps up and recovers from what has been an amazing South-by-Southwest experience, we wanted to provide this special update on what we did, who we met, and address some questions people had about re:3D, Gigabot and OpenGB. re:3D’s coverage at SXSW was primarily during the five days of SXSW Interactive, and came immediately after one of those “too good to pass up” speaking opportunities at the Forbes Reinventing America Summit in Chicago.

While Samantha was speaking on the Forbes panel, the rest of the team was preparing at two venues in Austin: SXSW Create, and SXSW Gaming. As a bonus we were also able to score enough of a footprint at Create to unveil our new Open Gigabot prototype, and launch our Kickstarter on the first morning of SXSW Interactive!

Katy & Patrick Launch OpenGB live on Kickstarter at SXSW Create in March

Starting with the most groundbreaking news first, after less than a week of being live, we are now halfway funded on Kickstarter for the new, experimental, Open Gigabot! The Lead Engineer for the OpenGB project, @PatrickFinucane, was on-hand to answer tons of questions, show off the touchscreen in action, and of course, lose his voice like the rest of us after 3 days of talking and sporting those swanky new re:3D flight suits. Stay tuned to the Kickstarter page, as Patrick and the OpenGB team will personally answer some questions that came up about the design process, delivery, and our unique approach to the alpha/beta testing program in the FAQ section and weekly updates.

Taking a step back for a moment, you may have remembered that Gigabot was showcased at SXSW Create for the first time last year. We printed hats and swords, and mostly spread the news that we were now taking orders on our website after a successfully fulfilled Kickstarter campaign. This year was different. We were out in full force in our backyard, engaging with multiple communities in order to better understand our current and future community. In addition to the Open Gigabot Kickstarter launch, our team was invited to a very special event at SXSW Create: A Handathon, organized by the amazing folks at Hanger. Together with some other very well-accomplished 3D printing companies like Lulzbot we printed models of open sourced prosthetic hands provided by our friends at Enabling the Future to be assembled and presented to kids in need. We met some great pioneers in the prosthetic and 3D printing industries, but it was most moving to see the reaction of the attendees who might not yet have realized this great potential application of 3D printing. Open source movements have never been too shy to tackle big problems in the world, and this is no exception. We’re proud to help this movement grow and evolve with the help of the medical industry around the world.

Leading up to SXSW Interactive, we also had the opportunity to print some hands with our friends at Austin Rocks and Toy Joy, who added some local flair to the prints. Gigabot loves showing off in the store front window and generating pre post SXSW buzz. With a half a dozen hands complete, Gigabot took a stroll down Sixth Street to join our Capital Factory sister company, OwnLocal, as well as the Knight Foundation for the 2nd annual News and Schmooze, a mixer for media startups, investors, and companies at Firehouse Lounge. Some great conversations around social impact were generated and we were thrilled to cross paths with our friends at 3D Hubs. The next day Gigabot had the chance to hang out at Speakeasy with our friends at Falkon Ventures, Goldman Sachs, and Collision.

Just two blocks away, the Capital Factory Gigabot was hard at work creating bottle openers live at the Google Next Wave for Entrepreneurs VIP lounge. Todd did an amazing job interacting with influencers including the Huffington Post and Rep Swalwell while Rebecca rocked a roundtable with on women in tech with Rep Morrison.

Now, let’s pick up a 12-sided die and move down the riverfront to the Palmer Events Center. Gaming at SxSW was a new community experience for us. Most of us consider ourselves familiar or even experts on certain genres of gaming, but we were blown away by the diversity of gaming experiences at the event! At SxSW Gaming, we partnered and shared a booth with Advanced Imagination, an innovative company about to release their own Kickstarter for a tabletop3D game, called Boardcraft. Our booth had a combination of a 2D version of the game, “Necro-Virus”, laser sintered models from a $100K+ machine, contrasted with models printing out live on our $9000 Gigabot – a fused deposition manufacturing (FDM) printer that could fit well in a home or local makerspace. It was really great to be exposed to the vibrant and diverse gaming community, and hopefully they enjoyed seeing the Gigabot in action with @gerty.

Saturday was also a big day for community engagement. In addition to engaging his fans at SXSW Create, he took time out to facilitate the SXSW 3D Printing Meetup. To hours later, @samanthasnabes shared our Start-Up Chile experience at our first panel titled “Building a Start-Up Ecosystem from Zero“. That night, we had some beers with our Chilean friends at a Start-Up Chile reunion. Along the way, Jimmy Kimmel took a selfie with some 3D printed moais from Sketchfab we gifted to our Start-Up Chile co-panelists.

Sam reunites w/Start-Up Chile Alums & Staff after speaking on their SXSW panel

Our last special appearances didn’t include Gigabot, but did involve some big prints. On Sunday morning we were honored to attend the IDA “Business Leaders Breakfast” with Ireland’s Prime Minister to reunite post Web Summit with Enda Kelly and take another selfie on a Gigabot printed chair.

Just a few short hours later, we were out again with a 6 ft, 3D-printed Saturn IV rocket, as well as the world’s largest 3Dprinted Snoo (aka, the Reddit Alien!). Snoo was a big hit at the Reddit/ Daily Dot event, and has consequently been kidnapped in exchange for for Karma!

To wrap up the event, @katyjeremko attended the SXSW Innovation Awards on behalf of the OpenGB and our Innovative 3-DIY nomination. We didn’t win, but were thrilled to see Project Daniel | Not Impossible labs accept the well deserved award. The next day @larajeremko was at yet another award ceremony where she rocked a pitch at the Austin National Hardware Cup, and our friends at Curb Energy took first place.

Now that we have had a chance to catch a few hours sleep, we’re taking a moment to followup on the conversations we had and to capture the feedback you provided. In talking to our community, we encountered a few common questions. The most consistent questions were:

“Why are you doing another Kickstarter?”

The answer lies in our pursuit of continuous innovation. As a small hardware company, it would be easy to get bogged down in finding the best way to manufacture and support the active life of our current product, and be driven only by specific customer suggestions on how we can improve the next models. At re:3D, we have the added challenge and benefit of being a bootstrapped company (in a funding sense). This means that an R&D budget is not won in a boardroom, it is won in front of our customers. Kickstarter is the natural way to get in front of our customer as early as possible with a set of advancements, and ask if this package of features are something the community wants and needs. Judging by discussions with our customers, partners, SxSW conversations, and our current funding level after 7 days on Kickstarter, the early indication is a resounding “YES!”

Another question came up a few times was actually from Gigabot owners and people considering buying our current two-week-lead-time machine:

“What is the difference between Gigabot and Open Gigabot and can we expect OpenGigabot to be a regular product offering”

Currently OpenGB is an experimental Gigabot that we’re co-developing with the community. As a backer, you’re getting the first edition production model and are part of an exclusive beta-testing group. @MikeBattaglia, our Customer Service Guru and OpenGB Usability Engineer sums this up best from a customer email earlier in the week: “We are definitely not the type of company to leave existing customers in the dust!”

We listen to our entire community as we decide which features to develop and incorporate into our large format printers. Once these offerings are past beta testing and have installation instructions and video tutorials, we will consider migrating them over to our flagship Gigabot offering based what the community prioritizes. We also choose some beta testers from time to time in our community, so if you are interested, please email us at engineering@re3d.org!

This has been a longer update than anticipated when it was started, but there has been a ton going on in the past week and you need to hear it all. Between SXSW, OpenGB’s Kickstarter, numerous speaking engagements, partnership opportunities, and a constant focus on the well-being of our rockstar employees and customers, I’m personally amazed every day at what we can accomplish together, and can’t wait to see what lies around the corner!

How to take your Gigabot Off-the-Grid

One of our values at re:3D is to provide 3D printing technologies to communities around the globe, many of whom don’t have the resources we take for granted. Access to plastic feedstock, a consistent power infrastructure, and reliable shipping services have always been a requirement to play in the 3D printing space. We want to change that. One of the microsteps in this direction is to find other ways to power our 3D printer, the Gigabot, while still allowing multi-hour (and sometimes multi-day) prints to emerge from our 600mm X 600mm (2ft X 2 ft) build platform.

I started experimenting this past week using a 40W solar panel and a car battery, and had some success printing a small test print. I’ve gotten some questions since then and wanted to explain a little more about my setup, and also find out if there were any other (successful or not) attempts to take YOUR 3D printer off-the-grid.

MY SETUP

Our Gigabot takes 110V or 220V mains power, but then immediately feeds that to a 24V power supply to power the motors, hot end, sensors, USB comm port, and display. The only part that makes use of the mains power is the heated bed (the one that can fry an egg). Since using PLA as an input material usually eliminates the need for a heated bed, I started there.

Disconnecting the power supply completely, I wired the 12V battery directly to our controller board and internal cooling fan. I later learned that this cooling fan was a great audible indicator of voltage levels – but more on that later. 12V is at the very low end of what our controller board can take in, but the real question was how long could it print for?

THE PHYSICS

I like to equate electricity to water coming out of a hose (like in this great tutorial from SparkFun), so to follow that analogy, I had to figure out if I could hold enough “water pressure” (voltage) to keep the controller alive, a large enough “holding tank” (car battery) to last for the entire print, while using solar panels to add enough “water” (power) to the system during the print.

After testing with a multimeter, I saw that the Gigabot draws about 5A at the most, and less than an Amp when idle (to keep the controller and comms alive), and on average about 3 or 4 Amps while printing (since the heating element cycles to maintain a constant temperature). Judging by the rating on my car battery of 70 Amp-hours, I could count on about 14 hours of power.

I should add that we often exchange Amps and Watts freely when comparing power levels. They are only interchangeable if the volts of the system remain constant (12V or 24V for Gigabot, 120V for USA Mains, etc.), since Power (Watts) = Current (Amps) * Voltage (Volts).

Or per the above analogy: Ability to Remove Mud From Car = Size of Hose * Water Pressure.

THE EXPERIENCE

The solar panel I bought from Fry’s was impressive, but at 40W I know it wouldn’t get to the levels I needed, and I could only afford to experiment with one. Plus, pausing a print when the sun goes behind a cloud just isn’t practical, since it would leave many marks of semi-melted plastic along the way, and the stepper motors would lose their homing location. I knew that the final solution would at least rely on some battery power.

We all know what happens when our car battery is suffering when you try to start it: the lights get dim, you turn off everything electrical, and pray that it turns over and you can get home that night. Instead of a gasoline powered motor and alternator to keep the battery alive, I had a solar panel – and it had to last the entire print. So I had some questions – and like any former space station flight controller, I took lots of data.

THE QUESTIONS

Would 12V be enough to power a system that we have been used to operating at 24V since the very early days? Would my Gigabot’s hotend pull down the stepper motors too far on battery power and affect the success of the print? Could I use all of the available power in the car battery to make a large enough object without any transient errors? Could I turn on and off the solar panel or battery charger during a print without interrupting it?

THE RESULTS

At first things looked (and sounded) gloomy. The first few attempts failed, and it seemed that the battery just didn’t have enough power to drive the hotend, motors, and electronics to keep the voltage levels high enough. Even the fan noise sounded sickly – a lot worse then when I had it set up without the multimeter.

The multimeter! That was it!!

I had wired my multimeter in line with the positive line off the battery to read a super accurate space-rated amp-draw during the entire print. I had wanted to measure exactly how much was going in and out of the solar panel, and the battery. The measurement itself was actually resisting the flow of electricity (the equivalent of bending the water hose to hear if water is rushing past the fold in the line). Once I removed the multimeter and tracked only the voltage across the battery terminals, I was able to get over 13 hours of continuous printing time out of my Gigabot – enough to print this 300mm (12-inch) tall vase! Here are the (manually entered) data points for that one:

The solar panels are pretty straightforward, and work very similar to the battery charger I plug into the wall, so for the purposes of my experimentation in the garage, I’m alternating printing on battery power with a charger on/off, solar panel connected/disconnected, at varying voltage levels of the battery. I think I have found the limits, since my prints start failing at just about 11V on the battery now.

Also, ever since I automated my data taking process, I get much more sleep at once, without needing to wake up for data takes with pen and paper (and help from Google Sheets). Check out the new and improved version with a little help from plotly!

An interesting part of this method of gathering data is that you can start to see the cycling of the cartridge heater very clearly as the extra current draw pulls the battery voltage down each time the hotend is full-on. This will be useful in tweaking my PID values no doubt, and could also lead to better methods of insulating the hotend so it doesn’t need to heat up as much, thereby saving valuable amp-hours!

NEXT STEPS

Clearly there is a little more work to do before we have a brownout-proof or solar-ready Gigabot out of the box, but I think these experiments prove it’s within the realm of possibility to create 3D objects anywhere – given a robust enough printer, and a light bulb’s worth of energy and imagination.

3d printing 3dprinting america Design Education engineering gigabot Open Source prototyping re: Tech

How Community Catalyzed our Young Startup : A Partnership with ArchDaily

Rewind to late 2013.

re:3D was in the middle of Kickstarter fulfillment, focusing on our backers, and building the core mechanics of our company, all the while introducing ourselves to the 3D printing community. The architecture community was one of our emerging markets for large format, affordable 3D printers, and through a fortunate introduction via Start-Up Chile during DemoDay, we had the honor of partnering with Arch Daily. Through the guidance of our rockstar designer, Lorena Quintana, the ArchDaily 3D Printing Challenge was born, and we yelled far and wide: “Calling all designers and architects – model your favorite masterpiece from modern architecture, and we will 3D print it on our Gigabot!”

The response was pretty impressive. ArchDaily has a very wide reach, and models from around the world came in to be judged by editors, Sketch-Fab, re:3D staff, and the global community via Internet voting. When all was said and done, 19 finalists with high quality .STL models of the most amazing buildings on the planet were waiting to be brought into the physical world.

There were two winners who very deservedly were awarded large versions of their models. Elijah Wood created a model of the Lotus Temple in New Delhi, India which included the striking landscape surrounding the building, and Luisa Lense created a model of Villa Savoye, a nearly century-old basis of modern architecture near Paris, France.

I could easily and quite accurately end this blog post here, with “and we printed these great models for Eli and Luisa on the Gigabot”… but there is so much more of a story than that.

At the time of the challenge, re:3D was fulfilling a promise to Kickstarter backers that included a large 60cm x 60cm platform on their Gigabot, but not a heated bed. In fact, so much emphasis was on the Gigabot itself that the heated bed was a relatively low priority. Up until this point, we were printing enlarged models from the open source community: Large vases, skyscrapers, hand tools, and a thousand smaller items. We honestly did not print much that would push the limits of the highly forgiving PLA filament.

Enter into the mix a 2-foot square landscape surrounding the Lotus temple, containing 50,000 triangular faces and covering the entire bed. The results were challenging and stressful, to say the least! One night a co-founder (who shall remain nameless, but here’s a hint) slept next to an ongoing Lotus print in the Houston office so that she could stop it if it curled. It did, and she woke up immediately to the sound of crunching plastic. The direct result: heated bed development was accelerated, a feature that every backer and pre-order customer was asking for from day one. The heated bed today works like a charm – so powerful it can even make you breakfast!

Throughout the process of attempting to print the Lotus building and interfacing with the model’s designer, a wonderful thing happened — Eli Wood wanted to come to work with re:3D!!

So our Design Lead put together a plan for a summer design internship, and Eli joined a team of champions who brought our idea-to-model workflow to the next level. Everything from printing human-scale objects for a Gigabot photo booth, to a Saturn V rocket that stands taller than most visitors to the Houston office, to the beginnings of experimenting with some prosthetic models for amputees – this design team catalyzed some long-awaited variety in the myriad of applications of our Gigabot.

This brings us to the second of our ArchDaily winning models. The Villa Savoye is a beautiful building. Its second floor seems to float above 15 relatively thin pillars which surround its smaller first floor. I remember when I first saw the model and was amazed, and then my heart sunk. It had straight, blatant overhangs of 90 degrees across three of the four sides, small pillars, and of course, the need to print over a large portion of the bed, something that we were already having trouble with on the Lotus temple. Using support material was out of the question, since the support would be just as large as the pillars themselves, and could not be saved when we removed the support. It was very quickly clear that this model needed to be split into pieces.

Splitting a design file for a designer is not hard, but the original file format is needed, and usually the original designer who is familiar with the software it was designed in. Luckily we got everything we needed from the wonderfully patient Luisa. With the models, and some huge help from another member of the Design Team this past summer, Robert Legans-Johnson, we were able to successfully print the Villa Savoye in parts and send them to Luisa.

We would also be remiss not to mention that in parallel to the other challenges with these large prints, for both the Lotus and Villa Savoye, we ended up realizing that our primary slicing software algorithms weren’t quite working out, given the extremely unique models we were dealing with. This was just the beginning of seeing our community contribute models – if this is how complicated they can become then we need to find a way to accomodate. This drove the company to look deeper into a partnership with the makers of Simplify3D. Their software is a full-featured slicer, gcode rendering engine, and printer controller that can handle the big demands of larger prints, in a very user-friendly way. We now offer Gigabot owners the option to use Simplify3D, and offer tailored customer support since it’s what we now use on most of our Gigabots in the office.

Partnerships and are so important for small businesses — particularly self-sustaining, global, and community-based ones. During the past year we watched this one partnership with ArchDaily facilitate both product development and another partnership, which enabled an entire team of self-motivated unpaid interns to do amazing things for the vision and direction of our small business, which is opening up doors never thought possible one year ago. In short, if there was ever proof that we are better because of our community, this is it. Stories like these are what brought re:3D to our $1M revenue mark, while we kept sight of the original social focus that brought our group of friends together in early 2013.

Our advice to any young startup wishing to grow within their community: find a partner who is willing to take a chance with you, and yell far and wide. Maybe its human nature for people to have more interest where they see active cooperation taking place. Or maybe it’s the shared reach of the two diverse groups that catalyzes the conversation. In this case it was almost certainly the faith that ArchDaily had in the very early stages of our socially-minded 3D printing startup, that brought us to new heights over the past 12 months.

To our friends at Arch Daily, Sketchfab, the Santiago Makerspace, Start-Up Chile, those that submitted to the 3D Printing Challenge, and the community that voted, we offer our sincerest thanks. Your support, patience, and ability to challenge us drives us forward every day!

Un Abrazo Fuerte,

The re:3D Team

Turn Your Logo into 3D Printed Awesomeness

It’s one thing to have your company’s or school’s logo on a T-shirt, but have you ever wanted to make a 3D model of your logo to use as a keychain, business card, or maybe a coffee table? In this blog I’ll show you the process I use, and how (kind of) simple it can be. No, really, I’ll keep things basic and in all cases rely on much smarter people and tools than I could muster up myself.

Of course if you have any other suggestions for a better method, corrections/clarification to this method, or are skilled in the “complicated” ways of doing this, please leave comments on the cross-post on our Facebook page or G+ Community.

So, let’s get started.

Step 1: Find a logo

Say you have a really cool company and one of your co-founders is a ninja of design. Chances are you have a great 2D logo that is just screaming for access to that 3rd dimension. In this example, we’ll use Katy’s re:3D logo. Make sure you have your file saved locally as a .png, .jpg, .gif, or .bmp. These filenames are of the “raster” variety (think pixels on a TV). The clearer the image the better, because we’re about to convert these raster files to vector files (think connect-the-dots meets color-by-number).

Step 2: Convert your image to a vector format.

There are a bunch of ways to do this in expensive (and probably inexpensive) image processing packages, but I found a pretty solid online converter that does enough to get us by without knowing anything about layers and paintbrushes. Go to http://image.online-convert.com/convert-to-svg and upload your image file where it says “Upload your image you want to convert to SVG:”. Select the “Monochrome” checkbox to help prevent it from getting too confused. Click on “Convert File”. Your .svg version should download to your default directory. Note where this is since you’ll need it in Step 5.

Step 3: Create a new 3D model using Tinkercad.

Go to https://tinkercad.com/ and sign up for a free account. I guarantee you’ll use it again. Once you have an account, and have either skipped or run through the actually pretty useful tutorials, start with a fresh palette using the “Create a Design” button from the dashboard.

Step 4 (optional): Customize your palette.

You’ll be presented with a blank grid, and a random name will be assigned, like Ominous Seapod or something. Click on the “Design” menu, and then “Properties”. Change the name to “3D Logo” or something similar and more original. Choose the visibility and license you want, and then save changes.

Step 5: Import your vector file.

On the right side of the screen you should see an “Import” section. If it’s not already expanded, click on the triangle to do so. Then click “Choose File” and point it to your .svg file created in step 2.

Step 6: Genesis!

Here’s where you need to experiment a bit. Depending on how much resolution you kept in your original file, the model may completely overwhelm the design space. For now, choose values of 5mm for the height and 20% for the scale. This will make sure that you can at least tell if your model ended up on the canvas (and it doesn’t just cover the entire field of view with a single face. For rescaling, if you want to maintain the 5mm height, it’s much easier to just re-import at a different scale, rather than scale with the Tinkercad tools on an over/undersized model.

Step 7: Tweak your model from within Tinkercad.

This is where the tutorials from Tinkercad are useful. Use the zooming and pan/rotate tools via your mouse or trackpad to analyze the model, making sure that all of the detail you need is there. If you see too much missing or some jagged lines, try to find a higher resolution image to start with, and go back to Step 2 and try again.

Adding bits: Tinkercad will also let you add a platform (or anything else) on your model. This can be useful if you have letters in the logo that float free when converted to 3D. Those free-floating insides of “O”s and “A”s will float right off the final product when you 3D print it out, so best to find some way to tack it down. The easiest way to do this is to create a “Geometric” shape from the right sidebar that is an approximate shape of the logo (rectangle, circle, etc.), and give it a dimension of 2mm high. Place it on the platform next to your logo, size it right, make sure it has the same bottom level, then move it right on top of your logo. When both pieces look like they fit, select both at the same time (by simply dragging a select box around the entire thing), and click on “Group” above.

Subtracting bits: If you needed to put a hole somewhere on the model for a keychain, cup holder, etc, all you need to do is follow the above process, but make it a hole instead of a “color”. Use the buttons at the top right to do this. When you “Group” your logo with a small cylinder that spans the height of the model, voilà! It’s a pendant!

Step 8: Export as an .stl file.

This step couldn’t be easier with Tinkercad. Click on the “Design” menu, then “Download for 3D Printing”. Select “.STL”, and the file will start downloading immediately.

Step 9: Find yourself a 3D printer.

They’re popping up everywhere these days: your local library, makerspace, Earth-orbiting laboratory… wherever you are, you’re probably not too far away from a 3D printer with some spare time on its nozzle. If you can’t find one nearby, you can of course order a 3D printer of your very own (we recommend this one, especially if you go the coffee table route) or have someone else print it via a service such as Hubs or Shapeways.

Step 10: Don’t stop customizing!

The skills you’ll learn and feeling you’ll get by going end-to-end in making something that never existed before is like no other. Welcome to the world of mass customization, where you don’t have to make 10,000 of something in order for the act of designing it to pay off. Make some new models.. iterate, experiment, and most importantly, share it! If you make something awesome consider posting it on a model sharing platform such as SketchFab and sharing the link here in the Facebook or G+ comments.

3d printing 3dprinting Design gigabot