We have heard a lot about synthetic 3D printers for home use - now we are entering the home use metal age! A US startup wants to make metal printing available at a small cost and is presenting its project on Indiegogo, where you can get the  MiniMetalMaker already from 500 $ on.

https://vimeo.com/78961565

The MiniMetalMaker prints 3D objects from digital files in metal clay, such as copper, bronze, steel, silver and gold but also ceramic and porcelain clays.

For now, the printable size is still quite small compared to the synthetic 3D printers:  the object can have a size of max 6 cm x 6 cm x 6 cm. The extrusion trace is around 0.5mm. Nevertheless the team around founder David Hartkop states on their Indiegogo project page that with the monies raised this will be improved. This shouldn’t be a problem now as their campaign has currently raised already more than 15.000 $, which has been 1.5x their actual goal.

From now on you can get our Fritzing Creator Kits also at the Reichelt elektronik online store! Reichelt sells them in English language version as well as in German.

German Edition: www.reichelt.de English Edition:  www.reichelt.de

Reichelt elektronik is one of the largest electronic distributors in Europe. A big plus is that you can order from Reichelt also in very small quantities without any disadvantage concerning the price - it will stay the same per item, whether you buy one or hundred.

Check it out!

Today, we got a visitor in the Fritzing Lab: Our neighbour, Charles Oleg, came by to show us his new creation. Charles is working on a project to bring more light into his flat by using a rotating mirror system.

This system includes, besides two mirrors to reflect the sunlight, also some planetary gears driven by a 1 to 10 Watt motor. The system knows its position  via GPS signal as well as the current position of the sun and can move accordingly.

Charles showed us two of his planetary gear prototypes: one was laser-cutted and one was 3D-printed out of PLA.

He told us that those kinds of systems that track the position of the sun and move corresponding to it to receive as much sunlight as possible are currently used in solar parks  as well as in telescopes. These are large projects with huge gear-wheels, whereas Charles aims at making his lighting system affordable and open source - so that everybody can use it.

Charles scripted the gear-wheels in python and has uploaded it on GitHub. So if you want to build your own solar light system, check out his blog or his GitHub folder.

Here you can find some more pictures of the gear-wheels.

Fritzing at the MakeTechX conference 2013 – for the first time Fritzing had a booth at the „conference of tech things that matter, where those who make a difference meet, think & create.“ What a nice slogan, and nice it was indeed.  For me it was the first conference I could attend with Fritzing and so I was superexcited and curious what would await us there. We met in the morning at our „headquarters“ to pack some last things and finally hailed a taxi at 9 a.m. to drive to the Platoon Kunsthalle in Berlin Mitte where the conference would take place. This was already a great start to the day, our taxi driver seemed to like entertaining his passengers and gave us a lot of secret insights into the Berlin taxi business and we will definitely follow his advice to not only try Red Bull with vodka but also with cherry brandy.

So, as you can guess, maker mood was in the air! Stefan and I prepared the booth with six Fritzing kits as we had prepared a little workshop to make the visitors familiar with Arduino and Fritzing. Soon after the first conference attendees arrived and the speakers started their talks – we then asked ourselves how we should do a workshop while being placed almost on the stage ourselves? Luckily the organisers Lizzy and René Herzer had thought of everything and used a concept I hadn’t experienced before – they handed out headphones to the audience and so everybody could listen undisturbed and to their own volume. Though I couldn’t listen to the talks anymore at least we now had some peace and quiet to do the workshops (besides that it is really awesome to go to the toilet and still being able to listen to the speaker on the stage…). At first I was a bit nervous in assisting in the workshops without being a real Fritzing crack yet, but in the end it wasn’t necessary at all. Stefan took over the harder-to-explain bits wonderfully and I learned a lot myself by explaining how it all works. We had a very interesting mixture of workshop participants – some knew the Kits very well already and, after solving our tasks in a mere minute, grabbed our Fritzing book eagerly and started contentedly getting lost in the more complex exercises. What made me very happy was that there were also a lot of people who never came in contact with an Arduino before and discovered how easy and fun it actually can be while saying before „No, no, this is really not my strength, I could never do it in physics lessons.“ So we left in the afternoon to go back to work, armed with tasty bread rolls and a very good mood, with the feeling of not only us but many more people having had a very interesting and enjoyable Fritzing day.

André explaining the old story

Our friends form Make-Munich are inviting to a christmas maker event. It will take place December 1st [1. Advent] and combine a Creativity-festival, a X-Mass-Market, fancy Maker Exhibitions [e.g. Chocolateprinters or 3D Printed cookie forms], Art, Music and Creative Workshops for everybody to join.

Link: X-Make.