3D Printing News Briefs: December 19, 2018

In today’s 3D Printing News Briefs, a maker has published a free 3D print management app in the Play Store, while Formlabs works to continue accelerating its growth in the Asia Pacific region. America Makes has announced the winners of two Directed Project Opportunities, and a chemist employed by Sinterit has won a prestigious award. Finally, an engineer with a thirst for vengeance used 3D printing and a lot of glitter to get back at the people who steal packages from his porch.

Free 3D Printing App for Filament Management

A new app, simply called 3D Print, is now available to download for free on the Google Play Store. The app was published by a maker who goes by paratiDev on Google Play, and was developed to help other makers better manage their filament.

“It has happened to all of us, you want to print a piece and not to know for sure if you have enough filament in the coil to print it. If you have only one coil of that filament, you have only two options; you can use another filament that has more quantity or risk and print it,” paratiDev writes.

“In the first case it forces you to use another filament different from the one you wanted while in the second case you run the risk that there is not enough filament and the piece remains halfway, assuming a loss of money, filament and time.”

The app allows users to visualize how much filament they have left, view the history of 3D printed pieces they’ve made, and can also generate invoices and quotations for 3D prints. The free 3D Print app also allows you to create projects that group together several pieces, and will visualize the wight and total cost of the project.

Formlabs Continues to Grow in APAC Region

Today, Formlabs announced that its growth in the APAC region is continuing to speed up. The company, which first entered the China market in 2015, is planning to open its new APAC headquarters in Singapore soon, and has also completed a new warehouse in Shenzhen, China for more efficient processing and shipping. While its physical presence in the region is growing, so too is its headcount: Formlabs also announced that David Tan, previously the APAC director of strategy and programs for Oracle Cloud Platform, Alliances & Channels, has been hired on as a new general manager for its own APAC team.

“Formlabs has long set its sights on making 3D printing processes more accessible. Part of this strategy has been completely rethinking 3D printing technologies from the ground up. The second is bringing the technology to market,” explained Max Lobovsky, Co-Founder and CEO of Formlabs. “There is an immense amount of opportunity in Asia Pacific, we’re looking forward to what David and these new locations can do to improve our growing success in the region.”

America Makes Announces Directed Project Opportunities Winners

America Makes has announced the award winners of two Directed Project Opportunities, both of which were funded by the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), Materials and Manufacturing Directorate, Manufacturing and Industrial Base Technology Division. The first is the acceleration of large scale additive manufacturing (ALSAM) project, with the objective of getting past the shortcomings of SLM 3D printing, and America Makes awarded $2.1 million to GE Global Research, in conjunction with GE Additive and the Applied Research Laboratory (ARL) at Penn State. With at least $525,000 in matching funds from the team, the total funding for the ALSAM Directed Project to develop an open source, multi-laser manufacturing research platform will be about $2.6 million.

The second is the advancing AM post-processing techniques (AAPT) project, with a goal of improving process control and lowering costs for qualifying complex parts made with SLM technology. The first awardee is Arizona State University, in conjunction with Quintus Technologies, Phoenix Heat Treating, Inc., and Phoenix Analysis & Design Technologies, Inc., and the second is led by the ASTM International AM Center of Excellence collaborative, in conjunction with Quintus Technologies, Carpenter Technologies Corporation, Aerojet Rocketdyne, Rolls Royce Corporation, Honeywell Aerospace, GE Aviation, and Raytheon. America Makes awarded a total of $1.6 million to the two teams, which will also contribute at least $800,000 in matching funds. Both projects are expected to begin next month.

Sinterit Chemist Makes Forbes List of ’25 Under 25′ Poland

Desktop SLS 3D printer manufacturer Sinterit is proud to announce that its chemist, Paweł Piszko, has been selected by Forbes and the Warsaw office of McKinsey & Company as one of the prestigious “25 Under 25” in Poland. There are five categories in the awards, with five winners in each, and the jury appreciated Piszko’s work on increasing the efficiency of energy collection from renewable sources. When asked by his employers what his goal was, he answered that he wanted to have “an impact on the architecture of society.”

“We are delighted that Paweł chose Sinterit as a place where he can develop his skills and check the results of his scientific activities in practice,” Sinterit wrote in a blog post. “As part of his work, he researches the chemical processes that occur during the sintering of polymers, which allows us to improve the materials that Lisa and Lisa Pro, our flagship SLS 3D printers, print from.”

3DPrint.com congratulates Paweł on this exciting achievement!

Engineer Uses 3D Printed Component to Make Glitter Bomb

Revenge is a dish best served with glitter and fart spray…at least according to a mechanical engineer and evil genius Mark Rober. He spent nine years working at NASA’s JPL – mostly on the Curiosity Rover – and later founded a company called Digital Dudz. He was upset when someone stole a delivered package right off of his porch, and decided to employ all kinds of technology to take revenge.

“I just felt like something needs to be done to take a stand against dishonest punks like this,” Rober said in his YouTube video.

“I spent nine years designing hardware that’s currently roving around on another freaking planet. If anyone was going to make a revenge bait package and over-engineer the crap out of it, it was going to be me.”

Over the course of several months, Rober sketched his idea out, then finished it in CAD before getting to work on the physical prototypes. The package contains a 3D printed component that’s contoured in such a way that four hidden phones inside can capture package thieves opening the box and getting hit with a giant cloud of colorful glitter and continuous blasts of fart spray. Check out his video below to see how things turned out, though be warned that there is some bleeped out profanity. To learn more about the details of his build, check out his friend Sean’s video as well.

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