Our first SEP class was postponed due to the ginormous about of snow we received here in Charlottesville (24 inches at my home!). So, digging into my research and thought you'd like an insider look at what it's like to be an up and coming personal 3D printing start up: check out this blog from Tiko, one of a bunch of small companies on Kickstarter trying to break into the under $300 consumer 3D printing market. Pretty honest stuff about production and product delivery barriers.

My 7Tech printing pen arrived a couple of days ago and I'll be putting it to the test for use in our 3D printing lesson plan. Right off, I'm so glad to have some idea about good practice when it comes to 3D printing design and Tinkercad because if you search Youtube, you'll see all kinds of false starts folks get into trying to use 3D printing pens. I'm going to start by using the pen to create objects on a template, then create the 3D structure assembling the parts using the pen as a solder to stick everything together! None of this writing into thin air and creating drunk looking spindly cubes! For example, for our SEP lesson plan, I'm creating snowflake templates that kids will use to build manual g-code (define the x, y, z coordinates that tell the human extruder using the pen when and where to start and stop the filament flow). They'll create the snow flake design on a horizontal plane, then create a separate "holder", then stick the created snowflake onto it to stand it up. And basically the same approach folks I've spoken to use when they design and 3D print complex project with lots of fine details. The UVa mech eng department created a Da Vinci cradle 3D print job (see my earlier post about it from Feb 2015), but they did not create the project from a single 3D design file. Instead, they broke the project down into 10 separate parts that they printed individually and assembled once all parts met the project requirements. And interestingly, if you go to Thingiverse, you'll find it isn't unusual that projects for download take this same approach (when you download, you'll find a zip file full of individual .stl files for each of the "grouped" design elements used to save the final project).

Check out my next post with my 3D printing pen results!