 Thank you, all right, so you may have seen this thing hiding in the foyer and you might have heard something about a raffle ticket. So this is the 3D printer that I'm familiar with hacking. If you haven't got your ticket yet, first of all, you can get one after this. Secondly, we've decided that if any LCA delegates over the next month want to buy one of these things, we will donate 10% to Cystic Fibrosis, okay? So it's something we make locally, we're big on local stuff, I mean it's part of the open source concept enabling people to do things locally. To maintain them all, we do not agree with no user serviceable parts inside stickers at all. It's open all the way, it's open hardware, GPL v3, and we believe in people being to upgrade it and hack it. So I spend a lot of time in the workshop hacking things, so that's what I do. And that's what my mum thinks I do. This is what my wife thinks I do. This is what the press thinks I do. So 3D printers traditionally have been used and yes, we've got to be able to print drugs and gems as well according to Morris Williamson MP. So 3D printers have been used to make bits to, you know, to hack things. I mean, this is from Project Re, which up cycles various bits and pieces using 3D printed components into allegedly useful objects. Of course some of the things that people come up with are not always very useful, an MG carrot, for example. So well, let's talk about hacking the printers themselves. So they were a hack from day one, of course. This is the one I built from Meccano to prove the concept that we could actually make a 3D printer that worked, you know, just sitting there on the desk in an ordinary room. Couldn't find an ordinary room, used my workshop. And this was also known as Vic's Mechanical Glue Gun Destroyer, and I think we got through three glue guns anyway. This was totally mechanical and this was done in sort of pre-Arduino days. So, you know, the mechanical hack at the time was the easiest one. But things have moved on. It's open source, it spreads around the world. It spreads into far corners of the world. Here we have in Togo some guys who take our eWaste and they hack this eWaste together to build 3D printers, which of course once you've built one 3D printer you can make a whole load more of 3D printers with it and so they can start propagating this technology across rather impoverished countries. And it's not just Togo, it's anywhere where there is limitation on people getting hold of hardware, so, you know, Palestine, Cuba, places like that. And it gives them a sort of local ability to scale up and fix things, which is really kind of cool. That's what we want to encourage. A little bit further along, close towards Cape, we have Hans Fusch, who, apologies if I pronounced that wrong, who's built this wonderful printer. And he's actually used a screw driven feed to push plastic granules into the hot bit rather than the plastic filament that you can see being pushed into those ones over there. It's not as accurate, you can't back it up, for example, to stop it dribbling and things. But it lays down a lot of plastic, it lays down fairly quickly in really big, cheap, fast layers. And he has printed a lawn mower. It's a good one. Now he actually printed it quite fast, so he's moving at 700 millimetres a minute. Typically we move at 200 or 300 with that sort of scale thing. He's using a 2 millimetre layer height as opposed to about 0.2 millimetres with those, 3 millimetre diameter nozzle as opposed to about 0.35. And he can print this lawn mower in nine hours, which is a pretty impressive time. So moving towards the other end of the scale, we have another open source project, the little RP, which uses a resin printer. So those are the ones that use some form of bright light source to polymerise a commercially made resin. And these are probably famous for being of higher resolution than the squirting little snail drills of plastic affairs. So 0.05 millimetre layer heights coming out of this thing. And it's done using one of those DLP projectors, like we have a couple of up there shining into this resin to photoset it. Can't quite make microelectronics yet, but I'll show you what 0.05 millimetres actually means. There's a match head, closest one to the match head is 0.5 millimetres for this one away, 0.1 millimetres. The layers being produced by the little RP are half that thickness. So we're starting to get down to some really handy resolutions and, you know, with a little bit more work on the substrate, maybe somebody will be able to make some decent electronics one day. I hope. So speaking of conductive stuff, yes, they can do metal. This is a wonderful hack. Now there's a configuration called a delta bot, where you basically have three arms coming down to the print head, all right? And you can see the three arms there. They are pointing up instead of normally pointing down and having the print head hanging around under it. And so his print head, as it were, is, for those of you who haven't recognized one of them, a mig welder, which is a welder that's so simple a monkey can use it, basically. You pull the trigger and wire comes down, fuses, so you can use it pretty much like a print head, though getting the actual printed object off the base plate is a little more fraught than just chiseling it off with a palette knife. And it's not the sort of thing you're going to want to use in the living room. And for bonus points, you design it so that it doesn't drop sparks down into the electronics below. So there's a lot of hacking of 3D printers, the printer designs themselves going on. But while people have been using 3D printers to make parts to support their local requirements, their local artisans, hobbyists, I mean we've got there, the nice hot stuff is someone using 3D printers to print the cores for a mold. So this core is printed in bioplastic PLA, cased in plaster and then baked till it's red hot and all the plastic just evaporates. And then they pour metal into the resulting hole. That particular one is the Venturi Jet for a jet boat. We've got various jigs being made to hold things in places. So we're familiar with 3D printers being used to enhance tools locally. And that allows people to create a lot more, to create valuable products and compete with say farming things out to China and stuff. So what can you do when you start hacking your printer to do something else? Your hack doesn't need to be sophisticated to actually pull a good stunt off. Okay, so we've got a pen there, I've reinvented the plotter, great. But that pen can be loaded with etch resist. It can be loaded with conductive paint, load it with fire trailing if you want, but just doing a simple hack like that can achieve a good result. And well, it's a hack. Hacks don't all have to be actually practical to do that. All right, this is not recommended by the New Zealand Heart Foundation. Just click home to celebrate the new year. So let's sort of hack something. Here's the victim we're going to hack. This is a modified Wade extruder, a standard way of printing plastic on a lot of 3D printers fitted with one of the hotends that we make. Takes three millimeter filament in through a hole in the top, squirts molten plastic out of the bottom, Arduino controlled stepper motors provide the muscle to do the job. The plastic filament is pulled through the system by a rough patch in the middle of the screen on the bolt, all right, that bearing, a big shiny bearing at front, that's pushed up against the rough patch on the bolt. Plastic goes through the rough patch, it's pinched there. You turn the big gear around with the stepper motor and the plastic gets pushed out the bottom into the hot bit. Okay, it's a lot like a pinch wheel in a mig welder, if you're familiar with mig welders. So we can hack that. We will use a smooth bolt instead of one with a rough patch. We'll drill a bigger hole down the middle of the thing, literally with a drill and we put a piece of silicone tube down the middle. Now, if you picture a tube of toothpaste going into a mangle, all right, okay, now take the end off the toothpaste tube and try it again. As you turn the handle on your mangle, toothpaste tube goes in, toothpaste gets squirted out the end, all right, same principle here. As that silicone tube gets pulled between the smooth axle and the pinch wheel, it squishes the liquid out of the tube, it comes out of the micro-puppet tip, that's actually a crimp ferrule that we just pushed into the end of it. Now, there's 400 steps per rev on that stepper motor, that's 3 to 1 reduction gear. So you can actually dispense very small amounts of liquid very precisely with that. So it's a biohacking tool. And you can also run the thing in reverse, so it can suck liquid back up from a reservoir and then deposit it again somewhere else. So yeah, what we've actually invented, of course, is a very, very simple peristaltic pump. Now, if you want to start pushing large amounts of liquids around your 3D printer, you want to use that sort of design. Of course, we're talking 3D printing, so you can 3D print one, excellent. The problem is that kind of design requires a lot of torque, right? So you can get stepper motors with gearboxes on them to increase the torque. They tend to cost a bit, but again, it's 3D printing. So we can get really creative. We can actually put the peristaltic pump inside the gearbox, all right? That can actually only be assembled by 3D printing because you can't slide the gears through past one another. It's the only way you can actually make one of those. Right. 3D printers themselves tend to be made up from open source hardware. That thing's all arduinos and rampsports and everything, all type of open source. And because of the popularity of 3D printers and hobbyists, these sort of 3D printer parts are available from multiple vendors at a reasonable price. I mean, you've got LCD controllers. You've got stepper motor controllers. You've got temperature sensors. You've got high current drivers and all sorts of stuff. And it really just cries out to be hacked, doesn't it? So I mean, you can go to real extremes. I mean, this guy has built an air hockey table. It's just using the stepper motors and controllers and everything to drive the air hockey table. And one of those was at the PS2 camera things to spot where everything's going. And that quite successfully humiliates puny humans at their favorite pastime. And you can do some nice hardware hacks. This is using a CD and DVD drive mechanism to provide the movement of the axes. And hiding behind everything, there's a little motorized syringe affair. Now, you're familiar with Jell-O shots? You make little jellies and glasses usually using a high percentage of vodka or something like that. They're sort of found at maker parties. So what this is doing is it's using a hypodermic needle as a print head. And it's moving that needle around inside the Jell-O shot. And while it's doing that, it's putting food dye into the Jell-O. So, all right. So you can print things inside the Jell-O shot. All right. Now, you know, I haven't got a thing about jelly. There's just so many cool things you can do with jelly. And this is some serious jelly. All right. Now, this is an extruder which is loaded with sugar glass. All right. It's great fun. It's on Wikipedia. You can download it and make it. It's the stuff they make stunt glass out of. So when people hit one another over the head on the movies with glass bottles, it doesn't leave much real blood. So, a chap called Jordan Miller from the Tissue Microfabrication Laboratory at Union of Pennsylvania. He's a founding member of Hive 76. And he's also a rep rap core developer. Now, what he's done is quite clever. He's used a sugar glass extruder to make these little objects. Now, those little objects are then subsequently put inside agar jelly, you know, the nutrient stuff that is in biolabs, all right. Now that's sugar. And when you put sugar inside jelly, which is mostly water-based, the sugar dissolves in the water in the jelly and disappears. So you're then left with a whole load of little cavities inside nutrient agar, which this guy then turns into blood vessel networks in 3D. That allows you to do a whole load of biological emulation, which much more closely resembles the way that things work in our bodies than does, say, stuff growing in a little 2D petri dish. So he's using something called a barracuda extruder, which is the thing wrapped in yellow tape up there. It's pneumatically based, and the yellow tape is something called caton, which is heat resistant tape. And that's what everybody sort of, it's your high-temperature duct tape for wrapping stuff up with when you're bodging it, right. So it's pneumatically operated. It's filled up with sugar glass. Pressure causes sugar glass to go out when there's no pressure. Sugar glass is fairly thick stuff, so it doesn't dribble much. So we had a crack at making one of these things. Here's the guts of our system. It's got a little relay there, so it can flip between driving these two solenoid valves, all right. So we have compressed air coming in one tube. This valve lets it in, and it comes out the pipe and goes into the syringe and pushes whatever is in the syringe out all over the desk, or, well, when we fit it in the printer, it goes up the print bit. And the other valve is closed, all right. So that's how you extrude. Clever part is you want to stop extruding at some point, okay. If you just turn the air supply valve off, the pressure inside the syringe will cause everything still to fall out for some time. So you close off the air supply, and then you open the other valve, and that vents the pressure out, so you can turn the thing on and off fairly quickly, all right. So that's how that barracuda extruder works. You can also do it the obvious old school way, which is to have some kind of push and drive mechanism operated by a stepper motor and use a syringe, it's, you know, no brainer, but it's a bit bulky and it's not really hacky enough for me, okay. So you can, you can have some remixes. We all know remixes, yeah, we take a couple of ideas, slam them together, and something weird and wonderful comes out, all right. So what do you think happens if you cross coffee with a 3D printer? Deliciousness. Deliciousness, yes. A hyper 3D printer, or you end up, oh, sorry, back, okay, I'm going back. Thank you. We call? Excellent. All right. I haven't been drinking coffee. No, no, no, not me. It wasn't coffee, it was water, water, water. So you end up with the Textpresso, all right. Now this was made by Zipwhip actually to promote their SMS gateway system, but it's quite cool and it uses a lot of 3D printer hacking. So you have an espresso machine and a mechanism over the espresso output, which is an ink, what they call an ink shield. Now this was developed when we were mucking around with 3D printers. It uses an Arduino to drive an inkjet cartridge, all right. Now it's a bit hard to get unchipped cartridges these days, but they do still exist. And yeah, you have one of these things filled with some food safe colorant, and you have a couple of servos to move your beverage around underneath the espresso machine, and then you can print the name of the person who asked for the espresso on the top, all right. So that's great. Now this does have other applications. The original inkjet shield was actually done so that you could print biomaterials. They have to be careful to get the right cartridge here if you're going to play this game at home, because there are two kinds of cartridge in inkjet world. One of them uses a piezoelectric element to push the ink out of the little holes. That's great, that's the one you want. Okay, the other one sort of passes an electric charge into the ink and vaporizes it as steam, and that steam pressure pushes the now cooked biomaterials out of nozzle. You don't want to use that one. All right, let's do another remix. Okay, a tattoo gun and a 3D printer. I think we can see what's going to happen here. No. Yes, a dermal printer. It's a thermal printer. So this is by appropriate audiences. Yes, it is real. It can't actually measure the contours of your arm while it's doing it, so you sort of model the arm and then tell the thing to go over the top of it, and it has a stab at doing it right. I got one of those and I'm not putting my arm in that thing. Okay, what else can we have? A griddle and a 3D printer. This is sounding promising. Yup, sir. Bacon would be good, wouldn't it? But this one is almost as good as pancakes. All right, so we're having custom pancakes. This is the pancake bot. These things are called electric frying pans down in this part of the world, but principle is the same. Another one of those pressurized extruders, wonderful. And if you're really feeling hacky, you can build the whole thing out of Lego. And then you can also build a Lego maple syrup dispenser to go by the side of it, which this guy has also done. Making me feel hungry. Okay, more food. All right, so we combine cold custard and a 3D printer. Any ideas for this one? No? Okay, ice cream printer. Yeah. There's a thing called an anti-griddle, which is basically a big freezer plate. And you can sort of compile food on this freezer plate. Serve tasty cold treats. And of course, cold custard is ice cream. So, yup, you can do that one. Oh, this one's going to make people wince a bit. Okay, another remix coming up. A vibrator and a 3D printer. Now, what could this be? No, we are not entering the realms of tele-dildonics. This is actually a powder printer. So, you put your powder in the little funnel thing. You have three little vibrating motors from, you know, like the phone that buzzes in your pocket. Right? Yup. And when all the little motors buzz, it causes the powder to fall out the little hole in the bottom of the funnel. And you can draw around with it. It's kind of cool. Okay, so we've got a vibrator making lines of white powder. It's a bit sus, but, you know. The powder doesn't have to be foodstuffs. It's sugar there. But I mean, it could be enamel, catalysts, whatever. They started off with one motor and discovered they needed three to make it work. Okay, this one was developed for New Zealand. So, whoa! And a 3D printer. All right. Is New Zealand appropriate? Yeah, absolutely. What do you think we're going to get here? We're going to get 3D loom. All right. So, this one actually puts a bit of sort of like hot glue on the outside of it so that you can actually make it stay in a 3D shape as you leave it around the forms. A toupee. A toupee? I don't need a toupee. I have plenty of spare. Yeah. Yeah, okay. All right, so there's some people who may wish to do that as a dead product. A project. So, we start wondering when we push the right button. Next slide, please. Hello. And we start wondering why my machine's locked up. Come on. X is still there. Yes. Okay. So, where to from here? All right. 3D printer in every home? No. Don't think so. Why? Well, in theory, everybody can sort of beat things out of metal if they want to. All right. It's not hard to do forging. Humans have been doing it for thousands of years. Even I can manage simple blacksmithing. Do I do it very often? Not as often as I'd like. Everybody in theory can get sewing machines, sew their own clothes. But they don't, all right. They don't actually understand what they want to achieve, how they want to achieve something. They don't understand the processes necessary to do it. So, they tend to basically get people who know what they're doing to actually do the job because designing 3D stuff is actually quite hard. So, I can see that you'll have sort of like the local hacksmith who will do all the 3D manufacturing stuff for you. Just like a copy shop. Look just like they used to have the old blacksmith in their smithy and days gone by. So, where will 3D printers go? Well, a 3D printer, when you think about it. It's just a 3D robot with a fancy end effector. You can reverse the process. You can have a robot arm and that'll make a perfectly acceptable 3D printer. People have sort of reprogram welding robots to sort of print pint mugs out of steel and things like that. So, the concept of what a 3D printer is, I think will change from these rather primitive little 3-axis boxes. We're starting to see the delta bots using the sort of three triangulated placed rods to move things into dimensions with cunning maths. What we're starting to see is people also working on complicated feedstocks. There was a recent news article in the Science Press about people who are now starting to coat little tiny spheres with DNA. And you know there's like two DNA strands that complementary, they stick together. Well, if you coat the different spheres with different brands of DNA as it were, you can cause them to assemble in certain ways to make three-dimensional structures. So, as the material that you're printing gets smarter, your 3D printer basically becomes a sort of more of a positioning system for smart materials. So, ultimately you'll get this feedstock to be smart enough to crawl into place on its own. I think that's one of the directions we're going to go in. But for the meanwhile, what we've got is the process of having anything that can move in three dimensions, potentially being a 3D printer. This is real. This is a quadcopter armed with a foam gun that shoots quick-setting foam. The idea is that this thing approaches a section of Chernobyl that still glows in the dark, builds a little wall around the bit that still glows in the dark and fills in the space, and then another quadcopter comes along, picks it up and takes it away for disposal. So, we've seen people doing hexbots that have got little deposition nozzles on them and they walk around and they build structures in different places and move between places to construct things. It's possible for this sort of robot to build a structure and then climb on top of it and then continue building. So, this can go in a whole load of different directions. Basically, it's been handed over to you guys, so go for it. I saw some stuff in the news about 3D printers being used to print prosthetics and casts and things like that. Are they actually making things better or are the rough casts that they do in orthopedics still better than the printed ones? Yeah, printing prosthetics and casts is a great application. The casts are handy because they sort of allow a lot of ventilation of, say, your arm. It doesn't get sweaty and sticky on it. You can actually put your finger under there and scratch that itch, which I've done that before. The prosthetics, it's really useful. You see a lot of them done for small children. Now, small children, I don't know how many of you have got small children. I had them long ago, now they're helping run LinuxConf. Small children tend to lose the occasional shoe and they tend to break things. Now, if they lose a prosthetic limb, this is really expensive. Kids are very good at losing things. A prosthetic limb can cost thousands of dollars. The other thing kids do with shoes is they grow out of them, and they grow out of them really quickly. You can't afford to spend thousands of dollars every time a kid needs a new prosthetic limb. Being able to 3D print a prosthetic limb at relatively low cost is great. Plus, when the kid breaks their finger, they can just print a new one. If only you could do the same. If only I could do the same. The prosthetics are real. It's got to the point where we actually stock the printing filament in a variety of skin tones. We thought, okay, that's just used for the grown-ups. The young ones, they actually want a red, yellow and purple prosthetic hand. They think that's really cool. We've got one kid running around with some prosthetic fingers that are printed in glow-in-the-dark figure. It's a really good application of this kind of technology. They seem to work better than the expensive limbs in some cases. We have another question. I don't know if anyone else has any other questions, but if they don't, do you maybe want to talk about some of the unique design decisions you've made in designing your printer? Yeah, how are we doing for questions? Okay, go for it. This is the official version. New Zealand has a lot of wood and a lot of aluminium because we've got a lot of hydro, so they use that for making aluminium. Wood and aluminium feature strongly in this thing. We wanted to make as much as we could locally because importing stuff in New Zealand is a bit of a hassle. The more we can make here, the better. We've got a CNC machine actually made in New Zealand as well, which is great, sporting the local economy. We machine the frame and these little bits here which could be printed, but we actually find that printing these pieces takes a while. If you're trying to make quite a few of these things a week, you want to machine as much as you can with a CNC machine because it just happens quicker. We still put all the plans up there, so if you want to print your own part, you can print a replacement. We've made the bearings from acetal rather than importing bearings, so we can change the design. The bearings are also the white bits there. They're actually part of the structural, part of the carriage. We've simplified the design so there are as few parts as possible. There are only four bolts holding the frame together. They're about a year long, but they hold the whole thing in compression. It's really easy to take apart and put back together. We've carried that philosophy through. If you actually look for screws and little things holding stuff, you won't actually find very many of these boxes. They're held together with two bolts each. The aluminium tube here is just held in place with a wood screw going through the top of it. We've really tried to keep it as simple as possible, and of course, all open source. I've got a question as well for you, Vic. I understand it is possible to stop the extrusion halfway through and change colours. Is there any possibility of making multiple hot-end printers so that you don't have to keep changing if you want to change colours? Yeah. Multiple hot-end extruders have been around actually for a while. Every so often, somebody will come up with a new version. I think the current record is five independent colours into the same extruder. There are a few problems with having more than one nozzle on the machine. Primarily, while one of them is printing, what's the other one doing? The usual answer is it's dribbling plastic over whatever you've just printed. If you want to put two filaments into the same nozzle, you have to make sure that heat doesn't propagate back up the filament that isn't going into the system and make it too soggy to actually push through the system. Once you make it soggy, it becomes very rubbery, friction increases. It's very hard to push through the guides and things like that. It's very warm, not soggy. Warm, yeah, warm, soggy, yeah, same thing. When you've got multiple filaments coming in, people think, alright, you'll have a red one and a green one and a blue one, and then you can mix them to make all colours. No, actually, things don't tend to mix very well. It's a very viscous material in there. There's no turbulence to stir the colours up, so you push red, green and blue in. It's a very interesting effect you get. Red over that side of the object, green over this side of the object, blue over that side of the object. I'm mixing colours of light, not pigments, aren't I? Red, yellow and blue, cyan, magenta and all that. Then you also discover that there are things like white. You can't mix colours to make white, so I need four input things. Then you discover that when you try and make black, it comes out turd-brown, so you actually want to put a black in there as well. Then you realise that there are transparent filaments as well, so you end up with this sort of octopus thing in the middle, and it starts getting large and unwieldy. Really, what you want to do is sort of, you remember that inkjet head thing? If you printed a layer of plastic, then you could go over it, print the colour on it and stick the next layer on top. There are other ways of achieving that effect. I dimly recall a few years ago there was a lot of work or a contest about creating filaments on the fly, making it from scrap plastic, something like that. What's the status quo on that sort of investigation? Making your own filament can be done, certainly. We have a filament production line, it's about 10 metres long. Trying to do it on a desk, you're going to have to make a few compromises. Basically, it's going to go a lot slower. You have to cool the filament down after it's come out of the extrusion machine, so if you run these things too fast, just end up with a floppy noodle that does its own thing. Most people think, ah, I have one of these machines, I can recycle my old printed objects. You don't want to do that. For starters, you've just maltreated the plastic by heating it up quite a lot and squirting it out. There is a limit to the number of times you can heat plastic up and squirt it out and reuse it. Secondly, when you've printed it out into the real world, it tends to acquire things like the paper tape you printed it out on, fluff, cat hair, that kind of thing. When you put that into your hopper to make plastic filament come out again, you end up with plastic filament that has bits in it. Guaranteed any bit in that filament is going to find that little hole in the end of your nozzle and clog it. So you think, OK, I will get virgin plastic granules and I will put them into my filament machine. That's great. Have you ever tried buying just a few kilos of plastic granules? It sort of comes in in 800 kilo containers, which you probably wouldn't even get through the front door. If you speak very nicely to the supplier and they're used to supplying you, they may send it to you in 25 kilo pre-packed bags, which are sealed in nitrogen to stop the granules absorbing water vapour. So while it can be done, it is a lot of palava. Now that said, if you're in a part of the world or you haven't got anything else, go for it. So how far can you scale that up? Can I buy one that's big enough so I can't get it through my door? Yeah, that's actually one of the limitations for the next size up of this machine. We make one that's 240 x 250 x 195. We do one that's 400 x 400 x 250. Local industries use it for printing those jet boat nozzles and things. The main factor on that one is the width of a standard doorway. It's as big as we can make them and still get it through the door. It's also as big as we can make them and still get them into the back of my four-wheel drive, which is another issue. So yeah, they can be made big. There's a bit of work going on with suspended print heads. So you sort of have three guy wires coming in to a suspended print head. And by shortening and lengthening the wires, you can make the head move around quite a large area. So yeah, you can scale things up in various interesting ways. Sorry? Print in buildings. Yeah, I think the Chinese got one that does a 10 meter cube. They also have a 10 x 3 x 3 which does laser centered titanium. And they use that to print the structure of their latest generation of jet fighters. So any more? Or are we done? We're done. Thank you to our resident mad scientist.