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In this Make: Workshop, Caleb Kraft takes a First Look at the Cerambot Eazao 3D ceramics printer now on Kickstarter.
Caleb backed the first Cerambot. Here, he looks at the improvements that have been made since the last offering and describes the strengths and weaknesses of the new machine.
The advent of crowd funding has opened up an entirely new model for bringing innovative products to market. And with the added advantage of 3D printing, crowdsourcing products as a path to the consumer market has become more effective, efficient and successful.
While there are multiple options and websites that function as crowd-sourcing platforms (i.e. asking customers to pre-pay or fund a new-to-market item before it goes into production to cover the upfront investment costs), Kickstarter is undoubtedly one of the most popular and utilized.
As part of their rules and regulations, Kickstarter requires a visual of the prototype along with a description and use guide. They also note that a graphical or computer-generated image of a product is specifically prohibited. Kickstarter requires that companies present a looks-like, functional working model as a prototype to both explain the product and to entice potential backers.
This is precisely why 3D printing has been such an effective and essential tool for companies looking to crowd source projects through Kickstarter. Other techniques for creating a working model may require substantial financial investment upfront, and/or increased working hours. Tooling, mold making, sculpting by hand as well as less effective techniques like “kit bashing” (mixing and matching parts from existing products to create something new) all lack the advantages 3D printing provides – custom-designed, precise and affordable models that can function as prototypes and final products.
So what type of products benefit from 3D prototyping for Kickstarter? The simple answer is – almost anything. 3D printing is not limited to any one category or industry, and can offer different benefits for different types of Kickstarter product pitches. Here are three examples from three different businesses that utilized 3D printing in their Kickstarter campaigns.
Boulton Eyeware ran a successful Kickstarter campaign where they received a total of £35,000 ($26,000) to fund their pre-production costs. Their unique concept was based on one simple premise: every human face is different. Just as customers have fitted suits created for their bodies, Boulton felt there was a market for custom sunglasses for each individual’s face.
3D printing excels in customization, which is why Boulton Eyeware turned to this process, not only for their prototype, but for actual production as well. In order to create a working prototype to use on Kickstarter, Boulton went through 70 different concepts refining and changing their materials and finishing until a satisfactory model was achieved. It was the ease of use, cost effective process and robust selection of material that made 3D printing the right choice for their custom product.
The ability to experiment with functionality is another major advantage to using 3D printing for Kickstarter prototypes. Fellow started as a class project that blossomed into a startup business based in San Francisco. Their simplistic goal: to create the world’s best cup of coffee.
Dubbing themselves “coffee loving nerds” the team at Fellow led by founder Jake Miller found inspiration from across the globe and throughout history. They reviewed coffee pot designs from as far away as Scandinavia, as well as mid-century industrial designs.
Where 3D printing came into play was in the functionality
aspect. In order to find that perfect
design that would brew and pour the coffee of their dreams, Fellow engineers
made hundreds of 3D prototypes, constantly changing, modifying and updating
their design to achieve the ideal result they wanted.
Using 3D printing not only provided a cost-saving measure with the ability to constantly change designs at a low cost, but it allowed them to see how their product would take up space in kitchens and countertops. By working in 3D, their designs could be reviewed both functionally and aesthetically in the real world. It became much easier to review a physical model because it was to scale, letting designers hold, manipulate and brew coffee using their 3D printed models.
Turning to the toy category, Bobby Vale, a former designer at Hasbro, saw a hole in the consumer market for 6” highly articulated action figures that represented military soldiers and the different divisions of our service men and women.
Aiming to please the discriminating “adult collector” who looks for features such as sculpting detail, paint deco and above all a large amount of articulation points (for posing and display), Bobby was set up for success. He modeled his Valaverse military figures off of the successful Marvel super hero products he worked on in his previous position. 3D printing became the key tool to show off these features to potential funders on Kickstarter.
Both the durability and flexibility of 3D printing were important factors in creating the Valaverse 3D prototypes for Kickstarter. In order to show off the high level of articulation, each part needed to assemble and work just like a mass-produced action figure. The materials offered by 3D printing not only permitted his prototypes to articulate, but they could assemble and function exactly as finished products would. This permitted the most accurate and true-to-final prototype to illustrate his Kickstarter concept to potential backers.
3D printing is becoming more and more the go-to technology for prototyping visual models for crowd-funded campaigns.
At Shapeways, we offer 3D printing benefits that go above and beyond what consumers may find elsewhere. In addition to a vast selection of materials (over 75!) and the best quality checks by 3D printing engineers, printing with Shapeways requires no equipment to purchase or maintain. We handle all of the fast turnarounds and deliver exactly what you need to succeed for your campaign.
Whether you are looking for customization, to test out functionality, or demonstrate features that work like finished goods, 3D printing can be your best solution. The Shapeways team is here to provide all of your 3D prototyping needs in one place.
The post Kickstart Your Innovations With 3D Prototypes appeared first on Shapeways Blog.
For over three decades Atlas Games has been in the business of fun. As a game innovator, their focus has been on tabletop play, including traditional card games, board games and roleplaying games.
Their latest endeavor Dice Miner is a dice-based game that for the first time in the company’s history was pre-sold through a Kickstarter campaign. Because of the high expectations Kickstarter funders have, an early visual of the product was necessary to show off the new game to potential backers.
In order to create these visual components, Atlas Games sought out our 3D printing services to prototype the game pieces they needed, and were able to utilize 3D printing for fast and cost-effective solutions from early prototyping to final-stage designs.
Jeff Tidball, Chief Operating Officer of Atlas Games, has a deep passion for games. For a look behind the scenes at Atlas Games’ newest creation, we interviewed Jeff to find out how the advantages of 3D prototyping was critical for Dice Miner’s Kickstarter success.
Could you give us a quick summary about Atlas Games as well as your latest game, Dice Miner?
Atlas Games is a tabletop game publisher with a 30-year history and deep catalog of board, card, and roleplaying games. We’re best known for card games like Gloom and Once Upon a Time. Dice Miner is a dice drafting game with 60 custom dice and a unique mountain component that organizes the dice across each game’s three rounds, showing which dice are available to choose at any given time as the game unfolds.
What was the purpose of using Shapeways to make prototypes for Dice Miner?
Dice Miner’s Deluxe Edition will have a plastic PVC mountain, so we used Shapeways to prepare early prototypes of that component. We used Shapeways for two purposes. First, to playtest using components as close as possible to the final version, to make sure they performed as we expected at the table. Second, to evaluate their producibility while holding physical objects, as opposed to needing to evaluate them only on screen, or in our imaginations.
How did you come to the decision to use 3D printing instead of other manufacturing methods?
Other manufacturing methods, to produce only one or two copies of a component like Dice Miner’s Deluxe Edition mountain, simply do not exist. (Maybe we could have hired someone to hand-sculpt one? I don’t even know.)
Did you already have technical knowledge in 3D printing? If not, was there a learning curve to getting into this technology?
Prior to Dice Miner, I had done very little 3D printing for a previous game’s miniatures prototype, also with Shapeways. However, we had the help of a consultant we had hired to create our plastic components, so we were able to use his model directly to produce the prototypes we used. So there was not much of a learning curve, but that’s because we had hired folks to help us already.
What material(s) do you print in and why?
We went with [Versatile Plastic, which are] cheap and fast for our game components. We were looking solely at form and function, rather than having any particular materials requirements.
How much time and/or cost were you able to save by prototyping with Shapeways versus using another method?
I don’t really have anything like that [to compare], since the other options don’t really exist. I suppose you could think about the complete disaster that would arise if a $3,500 mold was created wrong — having a physical prototype can help avoid that instance. Although it’s a small change, spending one or two hundred dollars to hedge against that downside seems pretty reasonable. Creating early prototypes also helped us get an advanced copy to an outside previewer, which helped illustrate to potential campaign backers how the game is played. Waiting for copies of the game from the production line would have simply been impossible. Without a preview of the game, I suspect fewer backers would have been comfortable joining the Kickstarter. Again, no hard-and-fast metrics, but I suspect we’d have left money on the table without being able to preview the game in that way.
Not only was Atlas Games able to succeed on Kickstarter, but they surpassed their goal by almost $80,000. Our 3D prototyping solutions were instrumental in this process by providing a simple and cost-effective means to creating a visual preview of the game.
And more importantly, game fans would now be able to “draft the dice” in Dice Miner with the empowerment that they helped make the game happen by supporting it on Kickstarter!
Are you creating a new game or product for an upcoming Kickstarter campaign? Find out how Shapeways can help with your rapid prototyping needs today.
The post How 3D Printing Helped Atlas Games Achieve Kickstarter Success appeared first on Shapeways Blog.
Just a few months ago, we learned from 3D°Hex that it would soon be launching a Kickstarter campaign for a new, highly temperature and wear resistant tungsten 3D printing nozzle, called the Tungzzle, that it had been working to develop for about a year. The startup, based in the Ruhr region of western Germany, is focused on designing and manufacturing better 3D printing materials and components in order to solve some of the current problems in the 3D printing industry, and started with the Tungzzle, which, as you may guess from its name, is made of an alloy with 95% pure tungsten content, and not a combination.
We’ve just learned from 3D°Hex that the crowdfunding campaign for its Tungzzle is now live on Kickstarter.
“The most affordable wear and high temperature resistant 3D-Printing nozzle on the market, made completely of tungsten heavy alloy,” the 3D Printing Tungsten Nozzle campaign’s headline claims. “While many new, cutting-edge 3D-Printing nozzles hit the market every few months, there is a huge disparity in their respective qualities. If you want something that is reliable and durable, you need to put some effort into selecting the right technology. You want something that is affordable, of course, but you want also something reliable, that will produce high quality as well.”
The nozzle is the last piece of your machine that touches your print, so it’s important that it can perform reliably. 3D°Hex founders Christopher and Paul explain on the Kickstarter campaign page that when you need an individual printer nozzle for specific tasks, you may be shelling out a high amount of money for something you’ll be using on a lower cost desktop printer. But they say that the Tungzzle combines all the important benefits of these different nozzles into one. This allows the startup to, as it told us in April, create “the ultimate balance between performance and price.”
3D printed part made of carbon fiber-reinforced filament, printed using the 3D°Hex Tungzzle.
Tungsten is an extremely dense (19.3 g / cm3) and hard (7.5 up to 8 on Mohs scale) metal, with high wear resistance and thermal conductivity, and features the highest critical melting point of all refractory metals. All of these properties mean that the Tungzzle, which is made of 95 WNiFe Tungsten heavy alloy, can print with highly abrasive materials, like carbon fiber, without the inside of the nozzle being damaged, and that it can also work with high temperature materials such as PEEK and nylon. Its excellent thermal conductivity allows for better extrusion performance out of your printer, in addition to better temperature calibration effects.
“With steel with a coefficient of 10.8 to 12.5 and brass with a coefficient of 18 to 19, tungsten has one of the lowest expansion coefficients with 4.5 and does not experience an extreme tempering effect, which means that its properties are retained even at long high-pressure temperatures,” the Kickstarter campaign states.
The Kickstarter campaign has plenty of available rewards left, such as the €12 Supporter pack, which comes with a Tungzzle sticker set and a carbon fiber 3D printed 3D°Hex logo, and the €15 3D°Hex supporter t-shirt. The Ultimate Tungzzle Super Early Bird reward is just €29, which saves 55% off the RRP and comes with the Tungzzle itself, which features an M6 thread, 0.4 diameter, and works with 1.75 mm FDM 3D printing filament. A double Tungzzle pack is €74, while a triple pack is €107, and you can purchase a pack of five Tungzzle 3D printer nozzles for €160.
(Images courtesy of 3D°Hex)
The post Wear-Resistant Tungsten 3D Printer Nozzle Launched on Kickstarter appeared first on 3DPrint.com | The Voice of 3D Printing / Additive Manufacturing.
Ukrainian company D3D-s was founded four years ago by father and son team Leonid and Denys Nazarenko, and last year they successfully raised $250,000 through Kickstarter for their first desktop 3D scanner. The duo built the structure, and the accompanying software, for their highly accurate scanner from scratch, and are now in the middle of another crowdfunding campaign for a jewelry LED-line desktop 3D scanner that promises retina resolution for even large models.
“Our D3D-s scanner takes advantage of LED-line technology, combining incredible accuracy and a price you can afford. Our sophisticated software achieves exceptional results when scanning jewelry,” the Kickstarter campaign page reads.
Most 3D jewelry scanners use projection technology, which typically requires components like projectors and cameras that are by no means affordable to the average amateur consumer or self-employed jeweler. The Nazarenkos list, for example, the B9 Scan350 jewelry projection scanner, which offers only two motion directions, a 1.3 MP camera, and costs a hefty $15,000. But the new D3D-s scanner uses a high-quality 5MP resolution camera and an inexpensive LED projector, which offers six motion directions, emits only one line, and is available to Kickstarter backers for just $4,000 – still expensive by my standards, but definitely a much more reasonable cost.
The company’s website explains how it was able to achieve this feat:
“The scanner is made of parts that are used in 3D printers and can be purchased one piece at a time. Only a few parts, such as the projector, mount, etc., are manufactured to order in small batches. Thus, we don’t have to make a huge batch of scanners. This significantly reduces our costs and investments.”
The D3D-s is a turntable 3D scanner, and its vertical accuracy reaches 0.010 mm, with a 0.015 mm horizontal accuracy, which is very helpful in terms of discerning small details on jewelry. Its moving step resolution is 0.000625 mm – over 84 times the resolution of projection scanners. According to a press release from the company, developers actually had to “limit the maximum resolution in order to get clients a finished result within 7 minutes.”
The scanner’s external dimensions measure 600 x 300 x 420 mm, and it weighs about 10 kg. It uses Windows software, LED light 945 Luminous Flux (lm), and 2 x USB 3.0 connectivity. It is a mono-color 3D scanner, and while the scanning process is fully automated, a computer connection is required for autonomous scanning.
The D3D-s scanner had electronics specifically developed for its use, with a four-layer circuit board that efficiently distributes heat and an electric motor controlled by a L6472PD microcontroller, which makes it possible for the scanner to smoothly accelerate and slow the motor. Once you select the size of your scan and click the button, it’s smooth sailing, and you’ll get an accurate STL file at the end. Due to refined algorithms and mathematics, jewelers can successfully achieve a precise, highly accurate 3D model; to see some examples, check out D3D-s on Sketchfab.
One thing the D3D-s doesn’t offer is speed, but the company doesn’t think this is too big of a problem:
“Our scanner is one of the slowest in the world, but it will make you one of the fastest people! It does your work for you. You simply put the model on the table and that’s it. You can work on something else while you leave the D3D-s to handle all the hard work. No other scanner offers such luxury! Scanning with amazing accuracy, the D3D-s processes a huge amount of data and isn’t as fast as other less refined scanners. That said, it is more accurate and thorough than handheld scanning. Let the scanner scan!”
Did you know that for microscanning even temperature has an effect? This how we test it. pic.twitter.com/WojYpS0RLE
— D3D-s (@d3d_s) July 11, 2019
There are still over two weeks left in the Kickstarter campaign for the new D3D-s scanner, and the company has already raised over half the necessary funds. There are still some early bird rewards left as well. With its last crowdfunding campaign, D3D-s fulfilled its original commitment to the Kickstarter backers, and even went above and beyond by providing an updated USB 3.0 camera and advanced scanner body with new electronics. So if you’re in the market for a slow but accurate, less expensive jewelry 3D scanner, the D3D-s may be what you’re looking for.
Discuss this and other 3D printing topics at 3DPrintBoard.com or share your thoughts in the Facebook comments below.
The post Kickstarter Campaign Continues for High-Resolution Jewelry 3D Scanner appeared first on 3DPrint.com | The Voice of 3D Printing / Additive Manufacturing.
Longer Orange 30 LCD Resin 3D printers are now available on Kickstarter. Super early birds can pledge for the printer at $199, while early birds can pledge for the printer at 50% off retail price.
Longer3d, based in Shenzhen, China, is a company specializing in additive manufacturing. Its product portfolio includes hobbyist desktop FDM (fused deposition modeling) printers and industrial metal machines for professional standards. Owning a factory gives Longer3d’s R&D staff the opportunity to repeatedly test the performance of its machines. To achieve mass production requires not only supply chain support for a product design, but also experienced factory operations to reduce non-performance rates through quality control processes.
As a new SLA resin 3D printer, the Orange 30 is an affordable proposition for professionals working in high-detail industries such as jewelry, dentistry, architecture, industrial design, model making and art.
Orange 30 uses LCD-based UV shielding technology; uniform UV LED array light source and special optical path design can achieve high contrast and uniform distribution of surface light source, avoiding debris during printing. This ensures that the print details are smooth.
Smart support is another feature of this printer. It can automatically detect the suspended parts with one button and automatically add cross-linked grid support to improve the success rate of complex model printing, which avoids the loss of support at critical times. Moreover, Longer provides professional-grade slicing software.
In terms of design, the Orange 30 features a sturdy, all-metal and one-piece design with a UV-resistant orange cover for high visibility. It offers a fairly large 120 x 68 x 170 mm build volume, which is larger than the equivalent on the market. And the 2.8-inch full-color touch screen provides users with instant feedback, making it easy to select files for printing and view the process.
The Orange 30 brings a other enhancements to the printing experience such as high temperature warning: Real-time detection of LED operating temperature during printing enables the printer to automatically pause or stop when temperature is abnormal, and automatically resume printing when the temperature normalizes.
Orange 30 offers a 2K LCD screen of 2560*1440, 47.25μm, and it offers superior detail compared to many other FDM printers.
Longer’s new line of resins complements its affordable 3D printer, with up to 6 colors of resin to choose from, making it easy to print a wide range of applications.
If you want to take advantage of the super early bird deal visit Kickstarter to learn more about the affordable and capable Orange 30.
