 Hello, my name is, I'm the founder of Ayut Nimbayu Fab Lab in Auroville, India, and I'm going to speak to you about the development of the open source portable cost 3D printer for Indian needs. Auroville is an international community based in nearby Pondicherry in South India. And as a Fab Lab, we started the development of sustainable technologies related to circular economy approach that are built locally that are designed also locally by our team. And essentially we work with a lot of volunteers that come from all over the world in India and work with us in developing technologies in a variety of different specialties. We not only design machinery but we also do training programs where people come from all over the world also and all over India to learn about the technologies and we try to provide follow up and and some consulting work when needed. And the idea is that we would like to develop the next generation of makers. In particular, the makers in this area of South India have to deal with special conditions which include the high humidity, dry forest areas with a lot of insects, for example, running around. And when you're dealing with electronics, when you're dealing with equipment, it needs to be very robust and it needs to be able to survive these elements, be low cost and easy to fix. So, you could say that South India in particular is a very good place to test equipment. And it's also, as it's a community that's been around for years. And we were always struggling to develop technologies. And whenever we didn't find the technology that was suitable, we had to develop them ourselves. So, in fact, FABLAB is a term that's more recent than the existence of Auroville, which is a community full of innovations. The project that we do has basically three areas that are we develop. One is the making. The maker space that we've developed is obviously an open source. Technologies that we are encouraging all the students to apply to use electronics that are open source to look around the world for designs that might be interesting and then adapting them to our conditions. A typical example is, for example, building recycling equipment that we looked at designs, but adapting them to the size and output that are needed for making an economic sense in this environment. And the other area is, of course, the research part, the R&D part, and we're working in developing new technology. So it's not only looking out at what's being developed, but sometimes we cannot find exactly what we need. And we have to basically develop our own applications. And there's many projects in Auroville that do this, but as a FABLAB, we've been researching mostly in CNC type of applications. We have computer numeric control applications for use in sustainable development objectives, especially rural areas. And then the equipment and the research need to be combined with trainings. We have trained many, many people, many individuals, many students that it comes to Auroville. This includes carpenters, vintage mechanics, use, recent graduates, entrepreneurs, etc. And they all come to learn and whenever they still longer, they also volunteer. And for this particular project that we're going to share with you today, it's how do we develop the next digital macy? It's a whole new environment, large format 3D printing, house printing, and it will require a whole set of skills that are maybe not yet combined fully, especially here in the world. The first printer that we made is actually like almost everywhere in the world, a small 3D printer that fits in the desktop. This was done around seven years back and we tested it, we tried it, we modified it. You could say that we went through 100 iterations and changes to try to make it better. And this is very common for almost all maker spaces. Then we decided that we wanted to do a large format 3D printer. And we ended up building a six meter tall printer, which is around 5.5 meters wide. And it's made out of steel pipes and clamps. And then once we used it and tested the machine for several years. We decided that after testing a lot of earthen materials and stuff like that, that we wanted to develop a another printer, a printer that will actually be portable. That could actually be moving from place to place easily and be able to print basically or house. And then in 2022, we actually developed a design during the summer of 2022. Through the last four or five years, we've also worked on designing and testing different formulations related to house walls that we would like to develop. We printed a number of designs and different materials. We're actually material elastic, meaning we, many people are using mixtures based on cement, for example. We are actually using a lot of line. Partially the reason is it's easier to obtain locally. And also it's a very good educational mix, meaning the mix doesn't set very fast. So we can reuse the mix several times. So these are the realities that we had. And we'll talk more about them in the presentation. The big printer, the first printer that we did, we call it the Big Delta. Six meters high is quite a big printer actually. As far as we know it's the only open source printer of that size. There are bigger printers but they're basically commercial printers. Ours is basically an open source development that we've made here. And it includes an auger system of feeding the nozzle. We didn't have money to buy a pump, so we just feed the auger by hand. The print area for the printer as a Delta printer is three meters high and about 120 meters in diameter. If you look at the right side here, for those that are not familiar with the Delta machine, it's basically a triangle. It looks like a Delta, like the Greek single Delta. And there's three columns. Yeah, and each one of these columns have a support and they're controlled by motors, precision motors, stepper motors or several motors. And each column works independently. So depending on where you want this center floating island to move, each one of these motors and repositions will change. So Delta printer, the advantages of Delta printer is precision, they're very high precision. They can actually work very fast. In our case, speed is not so critical. Yeah, but for most of the smaller Delta printers, they're very, very fast. And the other advantages actually since the head is moving where you're feeding the material, you don't need a bed. You don't need a moving bed, for example. Many designs of 3D printers, small and medium size have a sliding bed. In Delta machine, you don't need that. And for our purpose, that was actually important because we wanted to print rather large things that we didn't want to have moved. And you 3D print, let's say a mud part, then if you move it, it might fail and might crumble. So making a printer that doesn't use a bed, a moving bed was important. And also, of course, we needed something that was low cost that wasn't going to break the bank because we didn't have much money to develop it. So Delta printer that we built, the big Delta was quite an interesting technology and we took advantage of that. We looked around the world to see what people have built and based on that study, we decided to build our own design. What's the disadvantage of a Delta printer is you need double the height for just because of the supports, these floating metal supports that are connected to this center for loading a nozzle. It makes it so that you need twice the height. So our printer has six meters or six meters high, but it can only print up to three meters in height. Which six meters high is high enough that it didn't even fit into our workshop shed. So we left it outside. And because of the size, they become rather cumbersome to move. At least this large printer is rather cumbersome to move. We don't really want to move it. So it's not a portable system. It's a system that's fixed. It's a perfectly good system to do testing on, but it's not going to be moved from one place to the other. The printer is basically made out of steel pipe, marine grade plywood, has linear guide rails, which are made of steel. And we shot around and we made linear guide with supports was going to cost us the same as the money that we had for the project itself. So we built our own. We just bought the parts. And we use aluminum window sliding, citing as the bottom sports, and a piece of square pipe below it to make it rigid enough. And that whole assembly we made it local ourselves. So the system works with police and belts. And the assembly is actually assembled with clamps. So there's no welding. And this is important so that there's no warping on the assembly. The whole device is controlled by a ramps controller. So the ramps controller are Arduino open source controllers, and these are quite popular and common for small 3D printers. So we actually use the same controller as you would use in a small print. The only difference is, you don't use the small drivers for moving the motors, we need to actually connect it to external drives. Because the motors we use are actually larger motors we use for motors, stepper motors for this relation. And in order for the motors to be small, we need to make sure that the load on the motors is very limited. So we use some counterweights. And the counterweights are basically a PVC pipe full of sand connected to a pulley and helping support the weight of the extruder and moving parts. So then the motors can be small. So the students and volunteers that built the system were high school students and also young college students. So over the course of two years, two summers, we basically worked on the project and got it run. So this was a slow process, but it was a very interesting process for everybody involved. And we were very happy to make it run the very first thing. So they hear some pictures of the machine. So you can see the sides over here you have me standing next to the nozzle system, which is the center of this space. And you have the three columns on three sides you can only see part of just partial side of one column over here. And as I said, it's six meters high. So it's a big print. And I'll let Venkat explain a little bit about the machine. Now we are standing inside the 3d printer. It's a big six meter tall 3d printer delta type. And once we make the mix and then we transfer the mix to here and then we feed the mix manually for now. This is the auger and also it's also access and extruder. We feed the mix manually while printing and then at the bottom we print. We can print up to 1500 by 1500 mm size and it can go up to one meter tall. Here we have an example of the product of the printer which is actually these Adobe structures that we were building that this is actually a piece of a wall that we assemble later into sides of walls in the building right next to the printer. So here's again here's the nozzle system and the supports on the side. And then this box is the stepper drives actually. And over here is the stepper motor and these are the guide rails, the linear rails that are going up and down that are very, very precise way of moving the control system for the machine. And then the next project which we developed was the Polar Printer. This portable Polar Printer design that we've been working on it for several years. The first design is a design with a single pole. Simply it's similar to a crane, a construction crane. Yeah, that you see sometimes in tall buildings. So if you can see here in this diagram you have the pipes that are vertical and here there's a carriage and then the carriage you have wheels so the carriage can go up and down. And then horizontally you have some pipes and lattice system and you have a hose coming through and then the nozzle that prints. So the printer in itself, when it prints it can technically print round. You can also print square, you can print angle, you can print in whatever shape you want. It's simply the fact that it's rotating around an axis that makes the perfect circle, of course, but it's whatever is within the boundary of that area that you can print. Now, this is in our first design of the machine, we have a three meter radius so we can print actually up to six meters in diameter. In our next machine, after we test this machine, we will actually put a rail system below and be able to print like you could technically print forever. So as long as the rail is there and you can print one, let's say room after another room, another room after another room. So the idea is that the printer becomes very, very flexible and there's a lot of possibilities to build larger structures with that design. For some of you that maybe are familiar with robots. It's not like a Scara robot system, but simplified, let's say, because we're using very simple elements to generate this polar print. So why do we choose a polar printer? Essentially, you see around the world the different designs that people are using. And the Cartesian design is something that is quite popular. So that for the size of buildings that we need here in India, and for the potential of making a machine much cheaper and portable and lightweight, we felt that the polar printer was an ideal solution to 3D printing of rooms and houses here in India. So it would make it more affordable. We can actually promote smaller projects. And of course, everything is open source. So we hope to popularize this technology here and around the world. Everything designing the machine, testing the machine, this is an ongoing process. Probably the most important aspect of the project is really the training. We, in fact, started a training program before COVID, then we stopped because of COVID for other extra reasons. And little by little, we've been getting some funding in. We finished, but in any case, the idea was once the printer is running and tested, then the training program would start. And we want to be able to share the advances that we've made and be able to create like this new video digital machines that we're talking about. And for those that are techies, which I think there's a lot of you out there. This is kind of our test platform, you could say, of the servo motors controller, et cetera, over here. For the polar machine, we're using a more advanced 3D printing controller. It's a 32 bit controller. It's a design made in England. It's called the Dewey. We're using the Dewey Wi-Fi controller. And we're connecting these to these devices, which are server drives. So we have server drives connected to you see these servers over here, and also a stepper motor. So we've developed, I would say, a relatively high end type of application. We're trying to use the least amount of energy. And this is the state of the design of the system. We're testing them. We're almost finished with this. This whole box and device will be installed on the side of the printer of the new printer, the polar printer that we're finishing up. And we wanted to test the system before we assemble it. So this was our best stuff, this thing, you could say. This is actually the state of the development of the technology. We have our first polar printer. Here you can see these are vertical pipes. This is all made in aluminum. We wanted to make it lightweight, easy to carry, easy to take from one place to the other. These are all laser cut parts that are bolted together. And this is basically the carriage I'm pointing at. And over here we have wheels that are joined so that they can roll up and down these pipes. This whole system rotates. Of course, here we're missing the horizontal boom, which is not installed yet. And once the boom is installed, then we will be testing the printer. Of course, we also are adding motors. Over here we have one servo motor that needs to be connected to the polar, the theta axis. So as a polar printer, we have also three axis and normally you call them XYZ. In this case, the rotating system is called theta. And the system should run with this 3D printing controller. Of course, everything is open source. So the controller is open source. We could even make our own controllers if we needed to. In this case, we were able to use the controller as is and do our small modifications so they can run at this size printer. Of course, the motors can be more simple than servo motors. You can use stepper motors. We are using some stepper motors because we needed like a high torque requirements. Many of the motors have gearboxes. So the system is a little bit more complicated than the Delta printer, but essentially the learning curve is similar. So why do we build this is for portability or low power consumption theory. The system can be running even on the solar system and solar panels. And the system will have a battery backup actually also are here on the right. You can see the group of students, volunteers, engineering students that worked on this project. So this is for summer of last year. We finished 2022. This design we've been continuing the development of the machine. As you saw before, we have a controller that's being assembled and tested with the servo motors and our expectation is we will be finished with the assembly of the group of concept system. On March 2023 and the testing should be starting by May. So we'll be able to really show people what this machine can do. The trainings we've done over 700, we trained over 700 students. In the course of pretty much the life of me by you, we started training mostly for small wind turbine manufacturing for village mechanics and carpenters. That was a very good learning curve. You do trainings all over India. Not only in Oregon, Karnataka, Telangana, even in Nepal and going through a lot of areas and being able to show people how to build a relatively complex machine, but having the ability to build it locally so that they can be local support. Nowadays, we also have done 3D printing workshops, CNC carpentry workshops for CNC router. Of course, 3D printing workshops for Adobe printing with line and one dream that we have, which we would like to look for support from the community is to develop an online training for how 3D printing workshops. This would be something very nice and I think it would be needed in this field. Here you can see a couple of the volunteers that have tested. As you can see here, the machine and some big blocks that we printed and this was actually done before COVID, almost four years back. Here we have a video of the printer actually printing these mud blocks that takes around 20 minutes to print one of these blocks. We can actually only print up to 70 centimeters in height and the reason for this is because the mud collapses. If we try to print anything higher, we have problems with the strength of the material as it's being printed because it's wet. Once it gets dry, you can print above, of course, but the limitation we had was around 70, 80 centimeters in height. So basically the challenges that we face here in our climate and conditions drives the research and innovation that we do. So this is a place where we have, it's hot, it's humid, there's a lot of bugs called the butchies and essentially it would be amazed at where the blood is going to. For those that are familiar with the challenges of tropical environment and electronics, you will know that electronic equipment simply don't last as long as in other places in this type of conditions. We're also by the ocean. So we have salt there. So corrosion, so for example, parts of the 3d printer are anodized and also made in stainless steel. That's for obvious reasons for longevity and robustness of machine. In other areas, you might be able to deal with other type of materials like galvanized steel instead of stainless so you can make it a little cheaper. The other issue that we face is our problems because here, power is intermittent. You never know when the power will go out. And of course it will go out when you're printing. So all our systems need to have battery backup or generator backup. Ideally battery backup because your controller wants to know where it left off. And so we have to build in backup systems into the machines. In addition, we tried to reuse equipment. So we went to the second hand market near us and found some server drives, AC servers. And so we've adopted them to run the pump, for example, where we have the drive. So these are, I would say these are sometimes used. It's not so common. But what we wanted to do is use the most efficient motors we could get our hands on. And because our budgets limited, we wanted to try to also save some money. So we make challenges and we like to see what we can improve upon when we use as much as possible. And of course the system can run and we know when we use the system. The total energy use at this point for the system is maybe three kilowatts. We will know more once the system is running, of course. The mixer is running on a diesel. That's just too big to run solar system. But essentially most of the equipment can run on solar. So also the other thing is the inverter needs to be able to automatically start the generator. Because of course the battery bank that we have is not going to support for hours and hours of use. So the battery backup will be on and then when the battery level is too low, then it will automatically start to run or you have to stop. Next we'll have Sujita talk about design materials and discuss other areas of interest for 3D printing. Hi, I'm Sujita Maitrehi. I'm an architect here at Minvayo and we'll have a look at the application of 3D printing and automation in the field of architecture and construction industry. So you see here are some of the few samples of order V structures that we have made, which are in combination of natural materials such as lime, rice husk, mud and hay and all that. These are some of the examples of miniature models that we have been trying to accomplish. So before moving on to the Indian construction industry here, you can see that every part of manufacturing and production industry over the years have tried to accommodate the innovation of robotics or automation into their field. But when you consider construction industry in India, it does not be the same. It takes 50 years back and we're still putting things together one brick at a time. So where does this go to from here in case of the application of 3D printing technology and automation in the field of construction industry? So we try to aim to revolutionize the way we build instead of emulating the traditional methods of construction. As in not building a robot to lay one brick at a time, but innovating in a way that how you put, how you design and how you make the building together in itself is a whole another different process. We have the example of how biomemically can help us apply 3D printing technology in the field of building constructions. Replications from nature such as how the bone structure is formed where it needs to take stress and it leaves out spaces of hollow profiles in between. All of these can be incorporated into building a structure of a wall so that the building is more efficient, it doesn't waste any material and it's also faster to put in place. So here is a comparison of how a traditional construction differs from 3D printing technology. And what you see mostly here is the amount of wastage that goes into the whole process of building is reduced almost by 50%. So the process that goes into is you source all the raw materials, you produce the raw materials and it has to be transported to different part of the site and at different phases of the construction. And once it's all used, once it's all going to be demolished or dismantled, the waste that is being generated from it goes into the landfill. Whereas even though we are material agnostic, we are trying to look at sustainable materials that we can reuse even after demolition. And the whole wastage that is being produced throughout the process of construction is almost zero when you compare it to 3D printing technology. And here's a comparison of different methods of construction here in India and how it can give a very rounded sustainable approach. When you compare concrete with fire bricks or even sun-dried adobe, it lacks the speed or it lacks the ease of buildability. Whereas in urban construction, you get the freedom of form, you get the ease and you also get the sustainable aspect into it. And in addition to it, it will be affordable, which is the most required need of Fihar in India because we are in need of cost-efficient and low-cost construction and 3D printing would be the way to move forward. So here are a few examples of one-to-one wall sections that have been able to build using mud and lime and throughout the whole aspect of 3D printing technology in terms of construction. What are the key features that can help take this forward in terms of a social change and in terms of a step into the future in terms of sustainability? The project that we are approaching would be the first open-source portable house printer in the world with a modular design that allows both polar and co-optation configurations and the most important aspect of it, it will be developed via open-source tools. So in order to make something affordable, the technology that has been implemented to achieve it should also be affordable to the people that use them. So this is our end goal of trying to create a system where the building that we are trying to do is also affordable to the people who are going to build it. So we'll be creating digital machines by encouraging youth, women, minorities and upskilling them into the construction sector. Which in turn reduces the cost of construction, promotes low-cost housing, using material agnostic, sustainable materials. And the most important aspect of this construction technology is that it can rebalance the labour. Right now in India there are around 57 million workers and 50 million people who are employed at men and only 7 million are women. So when this CD printing technology is incorporated and the more women are encouraged to take part in it, it can bring down the, you know, population to, you know, the sector which goes into the construction as a balanced main field. So we'll send to architect Likanya. I personally feel that this kind of a technology should come to India and like should be developed further in India for local mud architecture because we need to revive the craft form in mud. There is a continuous progress to brick and concrete but without thinking of the place and the local stuff. So basically we need to use the local material, make it our own and make it faster and for the youth. And basically it even helps in the women empowerment because most of the construction sites, it's the women who is actually doing most of the work. So you can teach the labour, give them new skills and the whole construction process can be started and thought from a newer perspective using the local mud from the site. For all the techies out there who did not sign up for a class in construction and architecture, so what do we need now? There are various potential areas of development in terms of open source software that are in need to be used by architects. The softwares that aid in parametric design and 3D printing and softwares that can help control the printing aspects of the polar Cartesian all sort of printers and creating a knowledge sharing platform where advancements in the field of 3D printing in terms of construction and architecture can help us move through the field forward. And which in again can be sort of like a prototype which can be applied anywhere in the world which requires low cost and affordable housing. And thank you that's all for now and I'll pass on to my colleague. So how do we contribute? How can others contribute to this project? We have a good power account. We're also an Instagram and we have a website so you can always check what we're up to. You can volunteer. There's volunteer opportunities of course here in Oregon. And we will be coming up with ideas of how people can volunteer even remotely. As Sujita was mentioning just before, we will need applications, software applications or ways of improving the transfer of the knowledge from a very highly technical background of civil engineering and design to something that can actually be used by a labor person that's on the field working on a project. 3D printing the machine itself is not as complicated as creating a team of workers that can operate it. And in addition to that you have a lot of quality control issues regarding feeding the machine with materials. And if we want to transform the industry, we need to work with seamless integration of being able to prepare materials, sensors, feeding all that material into a printer in a consistent and high quality fashion. And this is just not existent at this point. There's a huge amount of work that needs to be done. In addition to making the printers work is actually training programs and support of the machine in terms of material feeding. And making, as Sujita said, the parametric software that we can use that could be useful for designing this document. For now, most of the software that's out there that's being used is still Fusion 360 and other applications that are parametric that are rather specialized. But it would be lovely to see applications that are open source that can be modified and applied to this technology and to this need. We will, we obviously have training programs so people can join those programs. Either for now, simply here in Oregon, but later on, probably also online. And of course, we need sponsors. So, if you're interested in volunteering or contributing in some way or another and becoming a sponsor also, we were very happy to receive your help. And as always, this is a community effort and everybody is welcome to contribute. And finally, I would like to give a big thanks to our volunteers, Sujita Venka, Tadavandu, Peter, John, Joshua, Jan, C2, Megan, and Zebra, and of course many others have been coming, going, visiting us and helping us in all kinds of different projects. Thank you all for all your help and collaboration. You can contact us, email, look at our website, and look forward to collaborating with the global open source community. Thank you very much for it. Bye bye.