Budapest 3D Printing Days 2015 is coming next week!

On the 14th May 2015 the 3rd edition of Budapest 3D Printing Days is going to open its doors for a three-day extravaganza on 3d printing, additive manufacturing and associated technologies. Great speakers will build the core of Budapest 3D Printing Days’ outstanding line-up of conference sessions and interesting 3d printing or 3d scanning related workshops. Whether that business involves desktop consumer 3d printing, manufacturing or even hobbyist tinkering technology (maker culture), this years event in the heart of the Hungarian capitol will be the place to do the business.

© Design Terminal

The aim of the exhibition and thematic keynote sessions is to provide inspiration and education on all things designing and making – be that in an international aerospace and defense contractor or for homemade prosthetics for children and young adults. The 2015 line-up consisted of the leading lights from the companies that both provide and use the tools we’ve been covering for the last couple of years. The organizers have something different for this this year, but more of that later. The space for the show like the main exhibition area at Akvárium with the 3 halls, the conference hall at Design Terminal and the workshop space in Design Terminal’s pavilion were larger than for 2013 or 2014.

© Design Terminal

When I first visited the Budapest 3D Printing Days in 2013 there was a small and somewhat dispersed representation for the 3d printing industry, although as an exhibitor I absolutely felt happy and found some good friends and businesses during the 5 days of the show. The exhibition and workshops with working 3d printers have been really popular, the organizers decided to go bigger with the next years event. The Budapest 3D Printing Days 2014 has been the most prominent Central-European 3d printing event with a lot of exhibitor from the V4 Countries like Poland or the Czech Republic. For 2015, Design Terminal made a huge impact by launching the biggest and newest range of the regional 3d printing market, in this way the event wants to be even bigger: the region has its own leading cores and the organizers want to connect all the regional businesses around the local 3d printing industry. I really like the concept of becoming the place for regional desktop manufacturers to launch their awesome machines, for example the professional grade DLP 3d printer of Do3D, the super-affordable spider-like deltabot of Krak3n or the affordable industrial SLS 3d printer of a small company. Some ’traditional’-style desktop 3d printers will take place as well, like the CraftUnique 3d printer from Craftbot, which is already in production thanks to its successful indiegogo campaign.

Akemake at Budapest 3D printing Days 2014
© Design Terminal

The first day starts with the official opening ceremony, where all the companies will represent their products for the press and audience for a few hours. The conferences will take place on 15th May, the workshops will run continuously during the 3 days of the Hungarian 3d print show. Even you are a hobbyist or a professional, the most interesting day for you might be the conference day: the morning will kick off with some keynote speakers representing the longest-established companies in the industry like Arduino (Davide Gomba) or Makerbot (Alexander Hafner). Almost twenty speakers will take to the stage over the day, spanning the veterans and newcomers to share their vision for the technologies and application for the next couple of years. I hope I won’t miss the interesting lecture of Cristina Nan from Architecture Hafencity, and of course we really can suggest our dear friend David Pap from FabLab Budapest with their interesting workshops about generating custom g-codes for desktop 3d printers using grasshopper or 3d scanning techniques with photogrammetry or laser-scanning. How we make things today and how we made things twenty years ago has changed drastically thanks to the increased accessibility and power of computing solutions – will the same be true for the 3d printing technologies on the Budapest 3D Printing Days showfloor?

© parametric | art

GigamaX3D and parametric | art have been central to Design Terminal’s Budapest 3D Printing Days for some years now, retaining a central position and substantial double-stand since the 2 companies work together from the beginning. They will be having their main, twin-desk booth which will be in a central place of the main hall, where they will be demonstrating the consumer and professional desktop 3d printers and materials and the production applications of affordable and/or open-source 3d printing technologies – including end user parts as generative jewelry, lampshades and sculptures by parametric | art. If you are curious what you could expect from the two companies for 2015’s event, you’re at the right place because there will be 2 workshops for generative 3d printed jewelry design and DIY 3d printing, which are open for the public during the Hungarian 3d print show.

models by parametric | art and Virtox

GigamaX3D is going to be showing some brand new products and a couple of evolutions and improvements to already existing products. On the FDM desktop 3d printer side, they will showcase the Leapfrog professional 3d printer systems, the Creatr and the Xeed, and they also will run a fully open-source assembled K8400 Vertex 3d printer KIT, which also will be explained during the 3d print workshop on saturday. Some of he 3d printers at the booth will be 3d printing prosthetic hands for young people for the e-NABLE project with Joe Cross, who also will be a speaker and exhibitor at the Budapest 3D Printing Days. I am glad to spread the word about e-NABLE and how we can help in this area, because until recently, they did not have any e-NABLE volunteers working in Hungary.  Thanks to this event, they will be able to recruit new volunteers and help many children. The idea of desktop 3d printing being used at the point of need (or indeed by the person with need) to create healthcare solutions os something that will touched upon Joe Cross in his presentation. Honestly, I’ve never seen a project like e-NABLE developing such a great movement, so guys, if you have a 3d printer at home, don’t hesitate and support them with some prints you can afford.

© parametric | art

I hope I’ve made some attraction to the event and if you’re around you will visit us at the Budapest 3D Printing Days, the event also has a facebook page and a microsite where you can buy tickets for the workshops and register as a visitor. The exhibition and the conferences are free to attend for everyone, so don’t miss the opportunity to get the freshest news from the 3d printing industry! Actually, one of the headliners of the huge 3d printing new portal (3dprintingindustry.com) will be a keynote speaker as well! See you there next week;)

© parametric | art

3D printed generative jewellery with affordable desktop FDM printers

I remember that it wasn’t a long time ago that 3D printing was a little-known term of the high-tech industry. And now, today it is a household name and an accepted technology entering its next major development phase. Right now, we can see 3D printing and all the hybrid additive manufacturing solutions for production taking off and we believe will fundamentally change the world of manufacturing.

http://gigamax3d.com

In the last couple of years, the global media has given 3d printers a fair amount of attention and the industry now has great expectations placed on it. Perhaps the greatest asset of 3D printing is that it is an enabler . for both corporations and individuals. In fact, 3D printers is being used in three types of manufacturing and fabrication processes: personal manufacturing, augmented manufacturing and alternative manufacturing.

http://parametric-art.com

The oversimplification of 3D printing in the media and in conversations does the job of grabbing attention and drawing focus to the highlights of this fabrication process’ capabilities. That big picture has involved more and more people and attracted more interest in 3D printing than ever before. But of course, for an average customer, the details are missing. Without them, you can make poor decisions and you may conclude that 3D printing isn’t quite right for you. But you might know that the devils is in the details, and as the idiom indicates, getting to them may be a challenge for you.

http://parametric-art.com

The jewelry industry already understood the importance of harnessing the power of 3D technologies and additive manufacturing for the benefit of the industry in general – and training the next generation of jewelry designers. Parametric design processes like computational algorithms and data based design are the new tools for young designers, and the digital design combined with fully digital fabrication allows them to create some really amazing pieces using a CAD software or only coding.

generative lampshade designed by parametric | art 3d printed by GigamaX3D on a Leapfrog Creatr Dual extruder 3D printer

There are some breathtaking projects around, you have to check out Nervous Systems Kinematics Home app to create custom generative jewellery pieces which can be downloaded and 3d printed on your personal 3d printer at home. Of course, you’ll need a desktop 3D printer with a resolution of 50-100 micron to be able to make high quality prints, nobody wants to wear something barbed. Post processing might be necessary, ABS prints can be smoothed in acetone vapour to get a shiny finish (fine details and contours often disappear during the smoothing process).

http://n-e-r-v-o-u-s.com/kinematicsHome/

When it comes to getting the best out of 3D software and a desktop 3D printer, we can keep in mind that this technology is still a complementary tool, it supports and enhances traditional techniques (like lost-wax casting for example), not replacing them.  It’s a technology that gives the jeweler a new set of tools (both for design and fabrication), but it’s not a replacement for traditional skills. When we are talking to a designer and they want to design a conventional wedding ring, they would not need to take advantage of the things 3D printing offers because on many cases, traditional manufacturing techniques are better placed to do so. According to this, we can say that a 3D printer won’t put a traditional jeweler out of his job. The whole new process of 3D printing only saves designers from having to model the initial part of the design from scratch.

designed with Nervous System’s Kinematics Home App 3D Printed with pink and black PLA by parametric | art

designed with Nervous System’s Kinematics Home App 3D Printed with Laybrick (sandstone) by parametric | art

It is a really nice idea for students of for those trying out the technology, to push the technical boundaries of jewelry design and manufacturing with new digital tools as a pattern language. Fashion design, industrial design, architecture and jewelry already adopted the parametric design language which allows the designer to generate a huge amount of variations and iterations for a defined situation depending on fitness values and genetic algorithms. There are some open-source tools for generative design, which makes this game much more fun!

gyroid pendant by parametric | art

A dear friend of mine has designed the generative 3d printed jewelry pieces shown in the pictures I’ve inserted, I think they all look really unique, and they all came out from an affordable desktop FDM 3D printer. Most of them are 3D printed on a Leapfrog Creatr Dual extrusion 3D printer, some of them have been printed on a RepRap Huxley or the Velleman K8200 3D printer. In some cases, he has made some test prints on a Makerbot Replicator2 as well. I bet you’ll like all the stuff of the parametric | art 3d printed generative jewelry collection, for some design, there are already uploaded design files (.stl) on Thingiverse, so you only have to download and scale it, and then 3D print it!

‘chiselled’ bracelet by parametric | art

‘gyroid’ bracelet by parametric | art (rendering)

‘gyroid’ bracelet by parametric | art (3dprinted)

The illustrated 3d printed jewelry pieces are great examples for the quality which can be reached with a well-calibrated 3D printer and using premium quality 3D printer filaments. For the chiseled details and overhangs, you’d better print these kind of objects with high resolution (100 micron or finer) and use water-soluble PVA 3D print support material to avoid the trouble while removing supports manually.

‘vorocuff’ bracelet by parametric | art

If you want to design and 3d print your own generative 3d printed jewelry (for example like the voronoi bracelets on the picture above), you don’t need to buy any expensive stuff. You don’t need a professional CAD software which are really expensive, there are plenty of open-source and free tools which you can use as well. Just like I described in a former blog post about 3d modeling for 3d printing, you can use Meshlab, Grasshopper for Rhino and Meshmixer for the modeling work and Netfabb or similar software for optimizing and repairing you meshes before generating the g-code. If you want to learn this stuff, there are some really nice workshops offered by Gigamax 3D printing technology.

DIY 3D printer workshop
GigamaX3D x parametric | art

Actually a dear friend of mine runs gigamax3d.com and GigamaX3D facebook page.
They are the official european distributors of ESUN filaments and Velleman 3D printers. They sell nice quality ABS/PLA/HIPS/PVA 3d printing filaments with 1.75 and 3 mm diameters in 1 kg spools in 16 vibrant colors, which I’ve already tested on my Replicator2 and they are all good (I’ve had some serious troubles with 3d printer filament diameter issues before).

3d printed with purple PLA filament
http://goo.gl/eHuKrM

They also carry consumer and prosumer desktop 3D printers like the Leapfrog Creatr or the Tricolor Mendel RepRap model and also offer print on demand services and training/education workshops. A lot of RepRap parts and electronics are available on stock as well. Gigamax 3D printing workshops offer an impressive scope of standalone desktop 3D printing technology, the Leapfrog Creatr dual extruder model, tricolor Mendel, K8200, Reprap Huxley to name just some of the best ticket items being put to use and build by this busy little center.

GigamaX 3D Printing
http://gigamax3d.com