Author: Ryan Priore

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3DPPGH Goes to Steam Studio

Location: Steam Studio

Our friends at Steam Studio hosted our monthly meeting with an open house. We hosted 3D printer demonstrations for the public. Some of our printers on display included:

  • Monoprice Select Mini
    • based on the Malyan M200
    • with a few mods: glass bed w/ Kapton tape, Z height adjustment, & knob extension
  • FlashForge Creator
    • Makerbot Replicator 1 Dual Clone
    • with a few mods: glass bed w/ PEI film, aluminum arm stiffeners, & acrylic enclosure
  • The (Unofficial) Replicator XL
  • Custom (Unofficial) MendelMax Wide

Click here to go to the Google Photos Album.

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3D Modeling with Tinkercad

Location: HackPGH

It was great to see such a large crowd tonight! I stopped counting after 25, and I realize that we were at standing room only…  I appreciate everyone choosing to spend some time with us on a Wednesday night when I am sure you all have so many things on your plate.

Thank you to Eric Fogle for the excellent primer on Tinkercad. Here are a few links to the various 3D modeling tools that we discussed:

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Introducing 3DPPGH

Location: HackPGH

3DPPGH is officially a go! At our kickoff meeting, we talked about the goals of our new group and looked for content guidance from our new members. So, what exactly is 3D printing? For a very detailed article, head on over to 3D Hubs. Otherwise, check out our brief overview below.

The following topics were proposed (in order of priority) to cover in future meetings:

  1. 3D printing tips and tricks of the trade
  2. Building your first printer (i3 style)
  3. How to design objects for 3D printing
  4. What to look for in a printer (key features and benefits)
  5. To kit or not to kit?
  6. 3D scanning
  7. Which plastics or resins are best for which jobs?
  8. How to build the lowest cost printer
  9. Pittsburgh 3D Printer Night (Boxzy, Polygon, etc.)
  10. Delta printers
  11. Hotends
  12. Dialing in your printer
  13. Resin printers
  14. 3D printer issues
  15. Slicer software showdown (Repetier vs. Cura vs. MatterControl vs. Simplify3d)
  16. RAMPS (or any) controller boards
  17. Popular printer add-ons
  18. Paste extruders (food printing)
  19. Reprap printers (the family tree) and the open source culture
  20. 3D printing for high precision metal casting
  21. Exotic filaments

One benefit of hosting the meeting at HackPGH is to experience the projects at HackPGH. Gino entertained the crowd with his Tesla coil playing the theme from Back to the Future:

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Midwest RepRap Festival (MRRF) 2016

3D Printing Pittsburgh (3DPPGH) came about during a typical conversation between Ryan and Chris at HackPGH. They attended MRRF 2016 with the intent of demonstrating a Printrbot BigE… It worked- eventually. They were able to get this bad boy capable of printing an object up to 1 m3 in volume to print a 20 mm calibration cube. The lead-up and attendance of MRRF made it very clear that Pittsburgh needed a 3D printing hobbyist group. We were a couple of white chubby dudes doing this stuff in our basements, and we were sure there were more than us out there.

So, we created 3D Printing Pittsburgh (3DPPGH). Ryan is the Chief Bed Leveler, and Chris is the Chief Hot End.