3D Print Expo and Chocolate Printer by MakeItLab

    Not even a day has passed since I returned from the 3D Print Expo 2014 exhibition, and I already want to quickly merge everything I saw into a hub

    For those who are not on the topic - from February 13 to 14 in Moscow, Sokolniki Exhibition and Convention Center hosted a very significant exhibition of the achievements of 3D printing industry. Our hackspace MakeItLab was invited to this exhibition.

    Of course, one way or another, we should have visited this exhibition. All the same, 3D printing is one of the main directions in our hackspace, and it was undoubtedly worth a look at what the modern world of 3D printing lives in.

    But the reason for our presence there precisely as participants, and not as visitors, lies in the “insidious” plan of the organizers. The thing is that these brave people had the idea to place a section of chocolate in the middle of the pavilion. Well, that is, classic chocolatiers who make chocolate fountains, dunk everything that comes to hand in chocolate, and generally do terrible things with cocoa beans. In the center of this section, it was thought to place something that combines all this chocolate and the main theme of the exhibition - 3D printing. Of course, such a thing was a 3D printer that prints chocolate!



    Two special participants were invited to implement this tricky plan: Choc Edge and our MakeItLab. Choc Edge already has a more or less tolerable commercial chocolate printer Choc Creator V1. We had to make a similar unit in a very short period of time. As always, 80% of the work was done a few nights before the exhibition :)

    We will talk about creating the printer itself later. Now I will tell about what I saw at the exhibition.

    Check in


    On February 13, we dragged two huge bags into the pavilion, reached our stands and set about assembling our miracle. In one there was a printer, and in the other his fantasy colleague - a bartender robot, already lit somehow on the hub

    Semyon began assembling his favorite creation.


    Here I am. I am happy to complete the assembly and satisfactory print results.


    Of course, the two bags were accompanied by our magic suitcase with robots and all sorts of useful things.


    By the way, we brought five syringes filled with chocolate in a suitcase from Yekaterinburg. I can’t imagine what the security officers thought when they saw a full suitcase of electronics and syringes with brown substance :)

    But I had to give the pliers during the search in the Ekb :( Well, okay, you yourself didn’t think about it. You can bite the wings off of the plane - it’s a dangerous thing.

    Our stand is far away. Journalists are filming the plot in Chinese!


    And here are our neighbors - chocolate craftsmen. Guys forced to eat chocolate all the time.


    Products


    But we managed to make chocolates on the day of arrival. The air temperature was about 22-23 degrees.



    image



    In the next two days, the southern Moscow weather, as well as the active work of 3D printers and visitors' bodies, led to an increase in temperature to 26-27 degrees. At this temperature, without a cryo-jacket, we were able to print only inscriptions and other flat images. But this turned out to be quite enough for visitors to the exhibition. They printed the names of someone's children, the nicknames of lovers, cards for mothers :)

    By the way, the Choc Edge printer did not come to the exhibition :( We were detained at the customs. I wonder at our customs officers. So, only our printer plowed the whole exhibition.

    Printers


    And now about the contents of the exhibition. The printers were different. Mostly those that we call "household". Let's start with domestic printers.
    Known to everyone by Picaso.


    And budget printers3D. Well done guys. Their printers are 2-3 times cheaper than Picaso.


    Orange Gorilla is also a domestic development. Has a large working field - 300x300x400mm.


    Well, all the rest. I will not describe them in detail.












    But we tested this printer in our hackspace.




    Replicator 2x, however. Dad of most Chinese printers :)


    Here is a machine that does not print, but rather mills. He cuts a three-dimensional model from a mass of paper. Manufacturers as a big plus point out that their product is environmentally friendly. I will not comment.


    For the first time he touched parts made by sintering a metal powder. At the booth, a nozzle from a Rolls-Roys aircraft engine was presented, sawn into four parts. Now I understand why the printed metal gun withstood several hundred shots.


    This printer is commendable. Still, the only delta printer at the exhibition. Yes, so damn tall! By the way, we are also now designing such a thing, only smaller in size :)




    And another unusual device that you have probably already seen on the Internet. 3Doodler is an extruder pen that allows you to write plastic in the air. Very funny little thing.




    But I will tell about these printers separately. A team from Spain brought their Witbox cars to the exhibition.




    Very powerful design. Open source drawings of the printer and software.

    Another printer, but at the dealership booth.


    It so happened that the foreigners were our first friends at the exhibition. Firstly, they were one of the first to come to our booth. And secondly, friendship was helped by a small disaster (for whom it is small, and for whom it is pain).
    Our blue four-legged robot was injured in the form of a broken leg. We would have printed it ourselves, but the trouble is that there was only a chocolate printer on hand :) I addressed these guys for help, and they didn’t refuse :) They printed a silver plastic part for us.



    Our experienced technician performs joint replacement surgery.



    By the way, it turned out they also dragged to the exhibition robots printed on a printer. These robots, like us, are created to instill technical creativity in children. That is so!



    They gave me a guide over them on the iPad (then I'll show it on YouTube).

    Scanners



    There were a lot of scanners. The most different, but mostly expensive.









    And here are the budget options that are suitable for scanning people.
    After scanning with the help of “kinekt” (let's call it that), we get amazingly clear models. Such models, being printed on a gypsum-polymer full-color printer, have huge similarities with the source. Well, just like alive. Such results spurred us to bring to mind our own scanner. So soon we will do the same.




    Another team scanning with the same technology.


    Christmas tree toy with a hostess inside, impressive.


    Plastic



    Finally, there were plastic manufacturers. We are not waiting for these people. Tired of already transporting plastic from across the sea-ocean.
    By the way, another manufacturer, who recently opened a line in our city of Yekaterinburg, didn’t get to the exhibition!





    Total


    I’m one hundred to five hundred times glad that we were invited to this exhibition. This is probably the first such large exhibition of 3D printing in our country.

    Communicating with colleagues we learned a lot about scanning, about printing with different materials. Got a lot of good chocolate tips from professional pastry chefs. We met with the developers of domestic printers. Met a lot of different smart interesting people!

    In general, another successful event in the piggy bank hackspace MakeItLab.

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