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Article TCT 2017 - Behind the Scenes with E3D It’s mid October 2017 and here at E3D we can’t quite believe how fast the year’s flying by. With the launch of Titan Aero nearly 6 months ago, along with supplying our HotEnds to many open source 3D printer manufacturers (Lulzbot, Prusa, Dagoma to name a few), we’re delighted that the E3D ecosystem has become synonymous with reliable, high performance 3D printing. A highlight so far, as always, has been the TCT show in Birmingham, UK. This annual trade show and conference has become a key event in the industry calendar, and it's been an honour to see the growth, refinement and impetus driving additive manufacturing. It’s fantastic to both watch and be a part of. The show always gives us a chance to catch up with the whole community, and to show you guys what we’re spending all of our time doing (other than making HotEnds of course). We thought we’d share a taste of the show with you for anyone who missed it! Here’s the E3D version… Behind the Scenes Setting up for the show is always peppered with major and minor calamities, usually related to the disproportionate E3D staff to Hi-Vis vests ratio. This year the problem was exacerbated by the new office pet, who insisted on having his own to wear. [caption id="attachment_397" align="aligncenter" width="436"] Roary was in a huff because Health and Safety wouldn't let him climb the ladder[/caption] We were joined this year by Tim from Filastruder, a prominent stateside E3D reseller and thoroughly nice chap. He probably wasn’t expecting to actually build the stand he’d be attending, but there’s nothing better for bonding than having your face in a team-members armpit as you both wrestle with the overhead banners. Sorry, Tim. [caption id="attachment_440" align="aligncenter" width="501"] Building the stand is all part of the fun...[/caption] People The industry we're in is so young that many of its founders and key influencers tend to be at many of its trade shows around the globe. Perhaps one of the biggest influences on E3D, and certainly the reason we exist in the first place, is Dr Adrian Bowyer of Bath University who of course started the entire Rep Rap project. Although RepRap Pro have closed their doors, Adrian's still a key figure at the forefront of research. His social updates are a joy to follow and we enjoy the rare insights he gives into his innovative world. So, of course, a prime photobombing candidate. [caption id="attachment_407" align="aligncenter" width="757"] Clare photobombs our two favourite heroes of the industry[/caption] But it wasn't just Adrian in attendance, and if you were attending the show it was almost impossible to miss bumping into at least one familiar face. We were lucky to have Tom, RichRap & 3DMakerNoob all joining the E3D stand for a while, but here are some other faces we found in the crowds. [caption id="attachment_411" align="aligncenter" width="412"] Richard Horne aka RichRap joined us on Tuesday, signing copies of his updated 3D Printing for Dummies[/caption] [caption id="attachment_404" align="aligncenter" width="410"] 3DMakerNoob, another great 3D-printing-focused Youtuber, meeting the press on the E3D stand[/caption] [caption id="attachment_414" align="aligncenter" width="411"] James Bruton aka the awesome X-Robots introduced us to The Maker of BB8 #ExcitementOverload[/caption] [caption id="attachment_410" align="aligncenter" width="553"] Richard Horne is joined by Dr Andrew Dent, co-founder of Faberdashery. Little known fact - a large portion of the current 3D printing industry as we know it can be traced back to a workshop at Bath University which brought these guys together, along with Adrian Bowyer & Josef Prusa.[/caption] Duet Duet are good friends of ours and we hope to be doing a lot more with them in the near future. You'll soon be able to find the very popular DuetWifi on the E3D store. But what really impressed us at the show was this crazy 3D printer: [caption id="attachment_431" align="aligncenter" width="557"] E3D got very excited about this beautiful print on one of the Duet machines. If you look carefully you can spot 5 Titan extruders and 5 V6 hotends incorporated into this genius 3D printer. Some clever coding results in a completely random colour per layer throughout the entire print.[/caption] [caption id="attachment_396" align="aligncenter" width="561"] The team behind Duet[/caption] Quality time with our Partners... [caption id="attachment_429" align="alignright" width="431"] E3D + Prusa 2Gether 4Ever[/caption] We always enjoy spending time with our many partner companies that build printers with E3D parts. It gives us the opportunity to understand them as more than just a company, and to learn what we can do to help and support them. This year we were fortunate to spend time with the team at Prusa Research - as you'll know, they make an incredible machine. It's been enjoyable working together on projects like hotends for reliable multi-material printing and it's always great to bounce ideas back and forth with their whole engineering team. But while there’s all that, it also turns out that the good people at Prusa Research are a jolly fun bunch, and that Jo Prusa is surprisingly adept at giving lions face-tattoos (more on our new lion-friend in a moment). Next stop is an E3D visit to Prusa HQ in Prague (which of course will need a whole blogpost in itself), to check out the facilities they’ve recently moved into, and to get a peek at the print farm being put to the test with all those pre-orders for the recently-announced Prusa i3 Mk3. An Open Sauce Dinner It's an easy jump from 'open source' to 'open sauce', and it was an obvious choice for the naming of our new (maybe annual?) dinner. Lacking a gathering of purely open-source goodness, we decided it would be fun to get back to grass roots whilst we were all in one place. The inaugural location was a burger joint, naturally - the fuel of many a print session. In all seriousness, it was a real honour to have so much of the community together. We could endlessly list names here, but instead why don’t you try to spot who’s in the crowd? [caption id="attachment_416" align="aligncenter" width="1112"] Open Sauce 2017[/caption] From 'just grabbing a burger', the Open Sauce dinner grew into a gathering of over 60, partying until 3am. Both a casino and a scary stretch of dual carriageway were involved, but the good news is that nobody perished, no money was lost (worst casino customers ever!), and the show continued the next morning with only slightly weary faces (and only a little more caffeine than usual). [caption id="attachment_403" align="aligncenter" width="505"] JellyBox and Lulzbot were just a couple of the companies at the inaugural Open Sauce[/caption] [caption id="attachment_393" align="aligncenter" width="508"] These 3D printing types...[/caption] [caption id="attachment_401" align="aligncenter" width="459"] Late night 'networking'[/caption] The King of the Jungle Introducing Roary, the new office pet. Stunningly designed by Louise Driggers, Roary is the king of beasts. Quite fitting for our legendary ecosystem of HotEnds and parts! We'll be writing a lot more about him and his modeller, Loubie, really soon. [caption id="attachment_392" align="alignleft" width="312"] E3D's co-founder Dave adds his pawmark[/caption] [caption id="attachment_437" align="alignleft" width="310"] Tom Sanladerer from Toms3DP channel[/caption] [caption id="attachment_387" align="alignleft" width="262"] 3DMakerNoob flew in from Malta to check out TCT 2017[/caption] [caption id="attachment_398" align="alignleft" width="250"] RichRap joins the list of dignitaries ;)[/caption] [caption id="attachment_400" align="alignleft" width="268"] James Bruton (X-Robots) had a go at smashing the E3D stand whilst he was with us![/caption] [caption id="attachment_391" align="alignleft" width="313"] World Record breaker, Daniel Melville! Along with Open Bionics, his Deus Ex prosthetic hand has recently achieved Guinness World Record status[/caption] See you all next year at TCT 2018!
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Article Snap to it! With MatX and Scaffold Snap Following the success of spoolWorks Scaffold and Edge, we're proud to bring you our newest optimised filament pairing: MatX and Scaffold Snap MatX is a drop-in-replacement for ABS applications that provides generally improved properties across the board, with increased layer adhesion and a much improved surface finish. Where ABS prints to a dull gloss, MatX has a lovely shiny satin finish. Due to its exceptional flow properties MatX offers highly accurate printing, making it a great material for printing detailed parts with tiny nozzles, right down to our 0.15mm nozzles. As an added bonus, it offers about ten times the weathering resistance and resistance to ultraviolet radiation of ABS, higher long-term heat resistance, and resistance to chemicals like cleaning products. [caption id="attachment_365" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Yes that is a tiny, tiny vase[/caption] Scaffold Snap is a new, easy-to-use support material for desktop 3D printing, designed to work perfectly with MatX. These guys go together like peas and carrots, as the saying goes, but to delve into why this is requires a little bit of a chemistry lesson. Bear with us, there are pictures: MatX (an abbreviation of 'Material X' - MatX's original super-secret pre-release name that somehow stuck) is an ASA-based material composed of little particle-balls of acrylate rubber bound with an acrylonitrile-styrene copolymer chain matrix. Snap is styrene-based support material. [caption id="attachment_368" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Snap is the wind beneath MatX's wings[/caption] Whereas the copolymer chains of MatX are long, tough and strong, the styrene chains in Snap are short. This makes Snap quite a weak, brittle material that produces easily crushed and removable supports. This is a significant difference from conventional HIPS (High-impact Polystyrene) which is tough, impact resistant and hard to break away. Snap is a very high-flow material which prints smoothly, allowing you to print perfect support structures alongside MatX (and other styrenic materials like ABS too!) [caption id="attachment_369" align="aligncenter" width="300"] You can't see it in this picture, but the styrene molecules are holding hands.[/caption] Snap has none of the cross-linking and crystallisation difficulties that plague PVA-based support materials like Scaffold, and can be left in a hot idle nozzle for long periods without causing blockages. This makes it ideal for home dual-extrusion printers like the Ultimaker 3 (but more on that later). [caption id="attachment_370" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Styrene molecules love other styrene molecules...[/caption] When printed alongside MatX, the two materials adhere together, with Snap firmly supporting MatX. The styrene molecules in Snap form a weak but effective bond with the acrylonitrile-styrene of MatX, meaning that they print cohesively. [caption id="attachment_371" align="aligncenter" width="300"] ...but they break up as easily as teenagers[/caption] Once the print is complete, Snap cools back to its clear, hard, brittle state and can be broken and peeled away from MatX. Snap breaks rather like weak glass, shattering into fine, almost powder-like shards* that can easily be removed from the print. The MatX-Snap interface bond breaks cleanly and easily. This means smoother underside-surfaces on prints that have been built on Snap supports, as the two materials can be printed closely upon each other yet still break away cleanly. Because Snap breaks into small fine fragments it can even be removed from hard to reach places that would normally only be possible with soluble supports, although you do still need to be able to reach the material with a tool or similar in order to fragment and extract it. This puts even more complex, beautiful geometries within reach. Snap makes for a much quicker support material removal process than soluble or traditional supports. Once parts are cooled and off the printer the material can be shattered and peeled away in just a few minutes. None of the mess and waiting of soluble supports, and none of the laborious picking and cutting of conventional supports. Print, crush, peel - done. [caption id="attachment_364" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Print yourself a nice smooth table for your frog.[/caption] To test just how easy MatX and Snap are to print together, we used a human guinea-pig in the form of Elzabi, our digital marketing assistant, who had never tried 3D printing with support when we gave her a spool of MatX, a spool of Snap, and an Ultimaker 3 to play with. Essentially we wanted to see if someone comfortable with, but by no means expert in, 3D printing could use these materials without too much trouble. For her first attempt she simply loaded the two materials onto the printer, used the default support settings in Cura, and hit 'print'. The results were surprisingly decent - the materials worked together, but adhered too strongly. This meant that the supports couldn't be pulled off, and had to be crushed to a powder to remove completely. Far more effort than we were happy with! The next few tries involved getting to grips with some of those settings that Cura automatically hides, working to get the perfect formula for a satisfying snap and easy peel-away. The resulting slicer profile is available through our wiki, but is essentially as simple as: Lowering the support infill density Using a support infill pattern like 'concentric' or 'zig-zag' Adding, and then increasing the size of, a support interface with a grid pattern Lowering the support interface density to between 50% and 75% Slightly increasing support X/Y distance and prioritizing it over Z distance Everything else was more or less cosmetic fiddling that varied depending on the model to be printed. *which can be sharp! We highly recommend wearing gloves and safety goggles while breaking it away from your prints. It really, really does SNAP! As an added extra-special bonus, our tests reveal that Scaffold Snap even works with spoolWorks Edge, a PETG-based filament. Now you truly can print ALL the things. [caption id="attachment_366" align="aligncenter" width="300"] The proof is in the Yoda.[/caption]
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Article Open Source, Design Patents, and E3D Recently we’ve been taking another look at how we license our products here at E3D. There’ve been a few questions about licensing and what it means to be open-source as a hardware manufacturer, so we wanted to state our position clearly and openly for the benefit of all involved. The current process: E3D currently registers designs for most of its products under what in the EU is called an “EU Community Registered Design.” In the US this is what’s called a “Design Patent.” They are slightly different legal concepts but effectively fulfil the same purpose of letting the world know that we’ve designed a Thing. These are not full blown patents (legally known as “Utility Patents”) of the type that patent an idea or concept. Instead, a registered design/design patent protects the “cosmetic appearance” of a product and prevents others from making and selling exact replicas. This was intended to help us remove clones that violated the Creative Commons Non-Commercial (CC-NC) license that we had used previously. Moving forwards: Recently we have decided to move more towards fully open source design. As such we’ve completely open sourced the E3D-v6 and have released the designs under the Open Source Hardware (OSHW)-compatible General Public Licence (GPL), finally making the E3D V6 a well and truly and open source product. While not every one of our products is included at this time, we are reconsidering licenses for a range of products and we expect to be applying the GPL to many more of our products going forward. The recently-released Titan Aero, for example, is GPL licensed. After all, we're confident that what makes an E3D product truly worthwhile is more than just its schematics. Not only are our products manufactured with quality materials to a high standard on modern machinery, followed by a rigorous testing and QC procedure on each batch. Every single one of our heat breaks is individually checked and cleaned by hand, and we offer long-term customer service and support that is hard to find elsewhere. Buying an E3D product also means you are supporting continued innovation in the form of R&D for future E3D products. And Haribo. What is GPL? A GPL is built around maintaining design freedom. It offers the freedom for users to modify, tinker, and recreate hardware. However, a GPL also has the aim of protecting users from having the freedom to modify hardware taken away. Under a GPL licence, everyone is free to use and change our GPL-licensed product designs, and even sell the resulting creations. However in order to comply with the GPL, they must also make these re-worked designs open source. From now on, for our GPL licensed products, the only use of our design rights would be against those who are not complying with the terms of the GPL license. This gives us a concrete way to enforce the open source license, which is often hard to enforce on its own (try explaining to eBay that someone is violating a clause of an open source license and should be taken down - it’s nearly impossible!). What we promise: Going forward, E3D products that have both an EU ‘Community Registered Design’ and/or a US ‘Design Patent’ AND a GPL assigned to them, the GPL takes precedence and GPL'd products are truly open-source hardware. Unlike some other entities which have made wishy washy promises of maybe-probably not enforcing patents for those they interpret as 'acting in good faith', E3D is making a legally binding promise to not enforce design rights on those who comply with the terms of the GPL. Those products we apply a GPL to are absolutely and unequivocally open source. So what does this mean in practical terms? • Those selling derivative or cloned products must host and release their own source, even if there are no changes from our source. We consider engineering drawings and CAD to be the “source” in this case. • Those selling derivative or cloned products may not use our trademarks anywhere on their products, listings, descriptions etc. This includes “E3D” as well as the names of our products (e.g ‘Titan’). Our source does not include the occasional embossed version of our trademark or logos (such as the E3D logo on the Titan casing). Derivatives and clones must not replicate our trademarks on their products. • The same goes for copyrighted material such as product images and descriptions. These are not acceptable to duplicate without authorisation. TL;DR: Go forth! Create, re-create, and modify! But don’t rip us off, please.
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Article Introducing T-Fill: Proper British tea from E3D At E3D we work hard to push the limits of what's capable with at-home 3D printing. With our range of professional and experimental filaments we go beyond what's expected in material extrusion. T-Fill™ is not only the next step in filament innovation, but a loving homage to our homeland. As proud as we are of having a global customer base, there's something about England's clear, blue skies and delicate untouched beauty that cannot fail to delight. T-Fill combines two of our greatest joys: high-quality professional-grade 3D printing filament, and tea. We've taken pains to source the very best in local produce. We choose our tea from the green fields of Oxfordshire, the perfect tea-growing climate. We then dry the tea and delicately grind it into a fine powder. Traditional tea companies may scoff at this use of tea 'dust' but that is only because they're jealous and have to use 'tea strainers' or 'tea bags'. These primitive implements use a mesh to prevent leaves remaining in the cup once the tea is brewed. They are unable to grind their tea as finely as we do as it would escape the mesh and create a highly 'dusty' cup of tea. With T-Fill™, these concerns are a thing of the past. We suspend the ground tea leaves in food-grade plastic, which is then extruded into ready-to-use spools of filament. The result is as simple as it is effective. Simply 3D print yourself a cup of T-Fill™, pour in boiling water and in a few minutes you will have a fresh cup of tea that tastes like nothing you've ever had before. Nothing could be easier or faster. T-Fill™ is available from Saturday April 1st, 2017. Enjoy! And now introducing SugarFull™! Filament 100% comprised of fine sugar, so that you can print your own sugar cubes!
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Congratulations to #London which is now the world's #1 #3Dprinting city according to @3DHubs ! 🍻🏰🏦🌧️☔️👌😎 @3DHubs_UK Get it together SF! https://t.co/E9lyHoqPPW
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New! Upgrade your #Prusa i3 with the Titan Aero from #E3D 🌟A 2-in-1 HotEnd and Extruder for precise #3Dprinting https://t.co/DXKCkErEoz https://t.co/QhVgTcHn1o
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Titan Aero: The new 2 in 1 extruder and Hot End from E3D!
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