We invited a handful of members of the 3D printing community that we have been featuring for #3DThursday or on our weekly 3D Hangouts live show to share with us their thoughts about the past year, what they each shared, and what they are looking forward to for 2015.
Matt Stultz is the founder of HackPittsburgh, 3D Printing Providence, and Ocean State Maker Mill. He’s a 3D printing experimenter, maker educator, and a regular contributor to MAKE.
A few of his recent projects:
- “Raspberry Eye” Remote Servo Cam
- DIY Rotocaster
- Research Findings Related to Soluble Support Material
Q: TOP THREE PRINTING MOMENTS FROM 2014?
- Nasa puts a 3D printer in Space, first 3D printed tool created on the ISS.
- Major SLS patents expire and multiple SLS printers start heading to market.
- Print the Legend comes to Netflix pulling back the curtain reveling the inner workings of some of the largest desktop printer companies.
Q: WHAT’S A 3D PROJECT YOU SHARED THIS YEAR?
I was super excited to share my rotocaster project. I wanted to show a way that you could go from a 3D printed prototype to small scale mass production in a maker friendly way.
Q: WHAT ARE YOU MOST LOOKING FORWARD TO FOR 3D PRINTING IN 2015?
I think we have seen new tools coming the market that are making 3D printing easier for everyone. I’m hoping this expands and from the experts to the novice, we can stop working around our tools and instead have tools that take our designs to the next level. I’m also not confident but hope that this year we see a lot more of a return to community in 3D printing. The scramble for the cash grab is drawing less and less attention to the open source community focused projects that tend to push the technology. Giving those projects the attention they deserve and creators giving more back to the communities that brought them up could easily make things better for everyone.
Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!
Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!
The Adafruit Learning System has dozens of great tools to get you well on your way to creating incredible works of engineering, interactive art, and design with your 3D printer! We also offer the LulzBot TAZ – Open source 3D Printer and the Printrbot Simple Metal 3D Printer in our store. If you’ve made a cool project that combines 3D printing and electronics, be sure to let us know, and we’ll feature it here!