Even if it was quiet here, and no one has heard from me, I have never really been away.
It just happened a lot in the meantime and I did a lot of other things and didn’t find the time to blog anymore. Now I want to change that again.
In the meantime I have been working a lot with Arduinos, developed an exciting sensor to detect transparent tubes in transparent tubes and hoses, sounds funny, but there are actually applications for that 😉 and developed a laser stabilization for CO2 lasers, that might be something with my DIY-SLS printer, but you could also use it for laser cutters like the K40, which is in my basement.
At the same time I fell in love with Python and became immersed in it. I have written several smaller and larger projects. The whole thing was driven by my interest in Big Data, Computer Vision, Machine Learning and Deep Learning. In this area I have now completed two further education courses and realized various projects. I fell in love with the parallelization software Apache Spark and write almost no Python program without accessing Spark.
I’m still working on a current machine learning project in the field of art, but this will take a while, because it’s very time consuming and I could use some better graphics cards 😉
In the meantime I have also photographed a new art series and had a small exhibition in Zurich. Pictures can be found on www.belichtet.ch.
As you can see, I haven’t become bored at all.
Nevertheless, 3D printing accompanies me almost every day, both privately and professionally. Privately I am very happy with my decision 3 years ago to invest in the Sharebot NG FDM-3D printer. Even though it’s probably from the first series, the thing just runs and runs.
This even goes so far that we have now switched to Sharebot in the shop and can now even put the second printer into operation. The Leapfrog XEED was truly an absolute failure and didn’t bring us much except trouble, although it cost at least 4 times as much as a Sharebot NG. But maybe another time more about that.
But now we don’t only print using the FDM process anymore. We have also been operating an SLA printer from Formlabs Form 2 in the business for a year now. After initial difficulties, we are now really happy with the printer, which opens up completely new possibilities for us.
I was so impressed by this that I invested privately in Sparkmaker’s Kickstarter campaign for the DLP printer SparkMaker FHD that I’m looking forward like a toddler to seeing it finally arrive.
Professionally we also use the SLS process (Selective Laser Sintering) or the Multi Jet Fusion process from HP, for which we use external service providers.
In the future I would like to write a series with blog posts about my experience with the Leapfrog XEED (spoiler: don’t buy!!!), the Sharebot NG, the Formlabs Form 2 and the SparkMaker FHD. In addition, I would like to present you a series in which I would like to make advanced 3d-printing techniques palatable to you and convey tips and tricks that we use in daily use.
I’m already looking forward to your feedback.