Black Marble 3D Printing Magic

 

These are most of the two groups,carefully stitched into almost successful panoramas, and with Una the Ultimaker in the foreground, as it should be.

I love doing talks like this. The folks above are all Sixth Formers from schools around Black Marble, who have invited them in for some computer based inspiration. They had talks about cloud computing, encryption, built some systems using Gadgeteer and then had a session from David and myself where we talked about university life and showed off some 3D printing.

I’d taken along Una the Ultimaker and, despite me nearly breaking her during the first session, she behaved in an exemplary fashion, printing out the weather forecast in 3D and then, during lunch, a couple of tiny owls.

I reckon that 3D printing is going to change the future and have a huge impact on the way we do things. I made the point that when I was the same age as the audience a printer was someone you gave things to have them printed for you. Nowadays everyone has ready access to high quality colour printing on cheap inkjet devices.

We are moving towards a world where cheap 3D printing is going to mean that physical objects can be customised and built on demand. There will be no reason why the things around you shouldn’t be just the way you like them, and completely unique to you. I told the audience that learning a bit of 3D design skills would be a good idea, along with some programming smarts so that you can write code that will build designs for you, and let you create objects from any kind of data that you like, including of course the weather forecast.

Thanks to all the folks at Black Marble for setting up the event and to David for doing the serious stuff.

I’ve put the slide deck here.