3DPrintBeginners

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Noisebridge 3D Printing for Beginners

The focus of this page is on understand the layout of Noisebridge, getting beginners up to speed. If you are interested in adding to this group you can contact Romyilano

Rough Draft

Noisebridge 3D Printing workspace

3D printing space

The Noisebridge 3D printing workspace is in the "front" next to the HackerStackers. I was just informed by a friendly Noisebridge member that they are shifting the space around and expanding it. It is sort of taking over the side corner and leaking out the way that Manhattan's china town is eating up little italy. There are no hard feelings and it is all good vibes.

Existing 3D Printing Wikis

_I'm going to start out with a rough draft, linking existing highly excellent existing Noisebridge wiki pages that already exist. I was actually pretty surprised at how extensive and friendly some of the 3D printing pages were--the only thing is they just aren't all consolidated in one place -- Romyilano

RepRap Wiki Page

RepRap is the open-source 3D printer and should always get first priority. Many of the great 3D printing private companies springing up now that the 3D systems patents are expiring have lifted their designs directly off the open source RepRap community.

This page is out of date. I will do my best to update it

  • I see remnants of a RepRap party at Noisebridge
  • RepRap might be a challenge for beginners - the community does have a right to feel a little under siege and exploited, and these are intense hobbyists who might be like the comic book guy in the Simpsons. However, I have had mostly good experiences with RepRap people when I hung out at the TS in San Jose.
  • Like all open source projects, the emphasis might be not so much on easy usable great products that are simple.

Makerbot Wiki Page

Really one of the friendliest! I'm not sure what's going on because the last update from May 2013 says that the Makerbot is no longer working but we have seen people use it. This is a private company, I don't feel like doing free documentation for them, so I will update this onyl as much as I have to unless someone else is willing to do this.

Up! 3D printer

This is an easy to use 3D printer. They are from China and have been extremely aggressive about hiring people from the hacker community to evangelize, but I haven't seen people be very open about this. They have good firmware, it is produced by elite university students. They are not part of the open source community.

Type A! Machines

Nice 3D printers produced in the Bay Area. They visit noisebridge a lot - I feel since it is a private company with noisebridge connections it is in their best interest to handle all their documentation, marketing, training themselves. If you want to do this free work then erase this entry and start wiki-ing away. I'm not really going to do free work for this. They are nice people and they need to do this if they want to become a successful scalable business.

Other

Good Patterns

  • Getting beginners up and running
  • Explaining really dumb and obvious things like "how to turn on the printer" - for some reason a lot of smart 3D printing companies do not feel it's important to do this. =D
  • Updating the equipment list so that even beginners can figure out what is going on

Anti-Patterns

  • Too much discussion of private funding / someone's private or non profit 3D printing project business
  • Endless videos of neat 3D printing projects by the military, governmental organizations, multibillion dollar corporations