The Month of June in 3D Printing
As tradition has it, we bring you the month of June in 3D printing. It’s has been a very interesting month that brought us some more crowdfunding projects, a wonderful Metal Month at i.materialise and a 3D printer that helps you make your own burrito! Yes, you’ve read it correctly… So let’s dive straight into the juicy details.
Let’s start this month off with a well deserved unlocked achievement by Materialise CEO Wilfried Vancraen: Get Chosen as the Most Influential Figure in Additive Manufacturing by industry professionals around the world. Read all about it here.
Metal Month at i.materialise brought new materials, design challenges and more...
And of course there was the Metal Month at i.materialise. It brought two design challenges that are currently still ongoing, new metallic materials and finishing processes with a nice increase in the items available at our gallery. During this period our community could also enjoy a nice 10% discount promo code called metalmonth2012 on all metallic orders (still valid till June 30th!)
At the same time we saw a great collaboration design challenge with Tinkercad come to life for father’s day. Tinkercad provided the software and we the 3D prints. The result was a wonderful 3D printed Father’s Day gift.
Another 3D printing company that announced a new set of materials was Objet. They now offer up to 107 different materials as mentioned on their blog. Mind you, these materials are obviously not as different from each other as for example polyamide and stainless steel, but they still contain a wide variety different properties.
Then as we often keep seeing each month again and again, crowdfunding projects are very much alive within the 3D printing community. Countless entrepreneurs take a shot at creating the next great 3D printer and showcase their creations on websites such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo. As a result we’ve seen the B9Creator (which we covered in our month of May in 3D printing) reach a staggering $513,422 of the $50,000 they were asking. That’s more than ten-fold! Another 3D printer that’s following the crowdfunding way is the Taiwanese Miicraft, an affordable high resolution 3D printer that has raised $13,848 of the $100,000 goal with 26 days to go (as I’m writing this).
When done correctly (like with the B9Creator), crowdfunding can have amazing results!
But wait, there are more of them. Yes, 3D printers taking a shot at a successful launch are popping up left, right and center. Another of these success stories is The Vision on Kickstarter by Matt Underwood (easily reached its $25,000 goal and there’s still more time left). Another one is the Open Source 3D DLP Printer by Ron Light and so forth… will all of them make it? Most likely not… but what we do see is a continuous growth in new 3D printing projects getting successfully crowdfunded. So if you’re convinced that you’ve got the next best 3D printer in your mind and know how to bring it to life… the time is now and the place is Kickstarter or Indiegogo.
Just a small piece of the massive 3D printed Northwestern University Campus
What we’ve also liked this month was the massive 3D print of one of Northwestern University’s campuses with the use of Minecraft and Mineways. Northwestern University student Ben Rothman spend a nice 6 months working on this project as you can see here.
And for all you Mexican Food loving people out there… 3D printing is being nice to you too! Now you can sit at home and print yourself some nice customized burrito with the Burritob0t. Yummy!
