3D Printers at SC14

[Hank Dietz]

I just got back from the little, 10000+ attendee, IEEE/ACM SC14 (Supercomputing) conference in New Orleans, LA.

There were several 3D printers on the exhibit floor, including our MakerGear M2 in our Aggregate.Org / University of Kentucky research exhibit. We've been using the M2 mostly to make custom camera parts in support of our computational photography research, but at the show were primarily printing a simple "3D print" keychain shaped like Kentucky with a raised UK logo on it. All went very well; there was a little strangeness with the laptop driving it going into sleep mode that wrecked a couple of prints, but the M2 didn't even need the bed adjusted despite the trip from Lexington, Ky to New Orleans, LA in the back of a minivan. The table it was on shook a lot while the printer was running, but the prints worked fine.

The most striking difference between the various printers at SC14 was how much faster the M2 was printing compared to the other printers there. We were running at 140mm/s with 0.25mm extrusion most of the time with print quality at least on a par with Lulzbot and MakerBot machines in other exhibits running many times slower. The live view from the camera we mounted on our M2 was also fed to our big rear-projection display, which made it look even faster.  ;-)  Oddly, we were the only ones printing stuff we designed; the others were printing stuff they found on the WWW. The M2 printer itself looks less "consumer" and more "machine tool" than the others, which oddly had people assuming it was more expensive... well, that and the faster print speed.

Anyway, thought folks might like to know. Here's the printer in our exhibit:

[Rick Pollack]

Hank - thank you for taking your M2!

Rick

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Rick Pollack
MakerGear
23632 Mercantile Rd. Unit G
Beachwood, OH 44122

MakerGear 3D Printers are Designed & Built in Beachwood, Ohio, USA

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