Halves X 2

Over the past 2 weeks we’ve given not one but TWO ”halves” presentations. I say ”halves” because due to scheduling conflicts, these presentations fell after the halfway point in the semester.

Our first presentation was to the faculty at the Media Dome, and served as our official ETC ”halves presentation”. Although the audience was smaller than the average ETC presentation audience, we got a lot of interesting questions and points of advice. It was actually quite nice to have an extended Q/A session!

Our Media Dome presentation turned out to be a great excuse to practice and elicit feedback for our second big client presentation. At our first client presentation, we pitched several of our initial ideas and were able to get a better sense of where to take our project. This second one was meant to be a check-in to show HP how our ideas developed and our progress so far. In addition to showing off our work, explaining our project schedule and discussing our challenges, we also had to make it clear why and how our ideas could benefit them. So after adjusting our slides and polishing our lines just a little bit more, we headed off to HP early Monday morning (November 14th).

Overall our second presentation went very well! The people at HP were very happy with the progress that we’ve made so far and can’t wait to start playing with the prototypes that we are working on! (man, that’s a tease if I’ve ever heard one! We’ve done all this cool stuff but can’t tell you what it is!) So now we’re back to the grind– making the best use out of our remaining time!

Look What’s Cooking

Take a look at what we’ve got running in the printer!

We finally got a crossover cable so that we can hook our dedicated computer and get some of our own .stl files printed! We ran a few default test files to be sure the machine worked, was calibrated, etc, but here’s the first experiments with uploading content of our own creation. Look familiar?

Update: If you want to skip the process, you can go ahead and see the finished product! It printed beautifully, and was the easiest of all the prints so far to remove from the support material base. There were no hangups with our file creation, and even with the interface in Spanish, Matt was able to get it going quickly and easily. Now for something a little more complex, as we continue exploring the magic of additive manufacturing!

 

Houston, We Have a Printer!

The printer has officially arrived at the Media Dome!! It was accompanied by a support removal system (aka “the washing machine”), some consumables to test with and lots and lots of excitement.

We´ve found a water closet — literally — for the SRS to live in, and the printer has found a home next to our desks. It makes a comforting kind of hum when working, though it´s mostly drowned out by the air conditioning. It rattled off a test calibration print, which was successful, and the local connection is being set up so that we can get testing with something a bit more exciting…. Expect plenty more photos soon!