This week was the Ultimaker Build a Printer event in the BIF atrium. While we didn’t have a lot of outside students building the printer with us I thought it was a pretty successful event because many students were stopping by the scanning station and learning more about our Digital Making Seminar! I saw a few of my friends stop by the tables to watch the prints of our sample busts in the Ultimakers, they were really interested in watching it! There were three stations at the event; the construction of the new printer, the upgrade of the Ultimaker 2, and the scanning station.

I began the event at the construction of the new printer. We had purchased a wooden kit from Ultimaker and had two teams build the frame and the central part of the printer. After helping construct part of it, I moved over to the scanning station to be a sample model for one of the bust prints. The scanner was something I had never worked with before, and I expected it to produce a very pixelated image however it was able to produce a pretty accurate scan of my head. The image was then saved as a “.obj” file and opened in Cura. In the program we shrank the scan to .1x however for some reason it still did not print by 5 PM. I think in the future we will have to decrease the quality or shrink it even more. My final group will most likely not use the scanner however now that I know how it operates it will be a great tool to use when doing future projects at U of I!

I was a little nervous about this event however now that it has passed I wish we reached out to more students that were sitting in the atrium. There were a few tables that were studying however most people there were socializing and it would have been great publicity for the course if we had a loud speaker or projector screen in the future. Next year, I will be sure to stay in contact with Vishal and suggest any ideas I could to help spread the word of the digital making seminar to other business students!