Tuesday, May 28, 2019

Day 9: An introduction to 3D printing on the ZHAW campus

Today we were given an introduction to 3d printing from Michael and one of his colleagues who runs the rapid prototyping lab (RapLab) on the ZHAW campus.
Today we were given an introduction to 3d printing from Michael and one of his colleagues who runs the rapid prototyping lab (RapLab) on the ZHAW campus. One of the coolest 3d printing technologies we saw was digital light projection (DLP), shown below.


It works by projecting an image onto a vat of printing liquid to cure an entire layer at one time. Think of it like a normal projector with the projected image being a cross-section of the object to be printed. We also saw a print from the larger printer to the right of the DLP printer, which has incredible accuracy, able to print the tiny castle shown below.


After this 3d printing introduction we worked on our robots, using this new 3d printing knowledge to print the 3d models of the robots we’ve been working on since yesterday.


Finally, once night rolled around, we hung out with some Swiss students at the Frackwoche (Tailcoat Week). They are all very kind and love to chat with us about their experiences at the school and in Europe in general.



-- Ben H.