Shapeways
This week in class, we had a guest speaker from the company Shapeways. Shapeways is a company that focuses on big 3D printing projects. The speaker gave us a virtual tour via webcam to show the 3D printers they used. The scale of these printers were very big and definitely looked more industrial.
Prototype
After the guided tour and guest presentation, our group was given a good amount of time to finalize a prototype of our semester project. We finalized to go with the “assisted coffee pour-over” design, so we began to finalize sketches.
Pictured above is a sketch of what a normal coffee pour-over maker looks like. The design we had wanted to incorporate a similar design, but make it so that water could be completed filtered through without the manual pouring of water. This would mean that the contraption would have to be a lot bigger to store the water.
Others things that came to our concern was the durability of the material we choose to print our object. Since boiling water would have to be filtered through plastic, we wanted to somehow make it so that there would be an insulated material between the plastic and water. We found out that the FabLab has aluminum sheets that can be cut by laser to precisely fit our measurements.
Hey Ernest!
I’m excited about your group’s idea as I myself am quite the coffee enthusiast and would love to have a device that would make pour-over coffee, without the trouble of having to stand there pouring the water slowly over the coffee. I, like Ria, am also quite impressed by the high quality of your drawing, it’s able to give us all a good idea of the direction for your project. I’m glad your team is looking into other materials to line the product with since PLA doesn’t do very well with extended exposure to water. My group is also tackling this issue since we are doing a hydroponic farm that requires holding a large amount of water as well.
Hi Ernest,
I really love the prototype you came up with! It helps to have the right artistic skills to really bring a vision to life. I’m also glad that you were able to think of a way to modify your design materials in order to make it more functional– my group’s project is a solar-powered food/beverage heater, so we will also have to work with materials beyond plastic to ensure consumption safety.