Exhibition 3D Print Expo and chocolate printer from MakeItLab

It has not been a day since my return from the 3D Print Expo 2014 exhibition, and I already want to quickly merge everything I saw into the Habr.

For those who are not in the subject - from February 13 to 14 in Moscow, in the Sokolniki Exhibition and Convention Center a very significant exhibition of the achievements of 3D printing industry was held. Our hackspace MakeItLab was also invited to this exhibition.

Of course, one way or another, this exhibition was worth a visit. All the same, 3D printing is one of the main directions in our hackspace, and it’s definitely worth seeing the modern world of 3D printing.
')
But the reason for our presence there as participants, and not as visitors, lies in the "insidious" design of the organizers. The fact is that these courageous people had an idea to place a chocolate section in the middle of the pavilion. Well, that is, the classic chocolatiers, who make chocolate fountains, dip everything that comes to hand into chocolate, and generally do scary things with cocoa beans. In the center of this section, it was intended to place something that unites all this chocolate and the main theme of the exhibition - 3D printing. Understandably, this is how something has become a 3D printer that prints chocolate!



Two special participants were invited to implement this cunning plan: Choc Edge and our MakeItLab. Choc Edge already has the more or less tolerable Choc Creator V1 commercial chocolate printer. We also had to make a similar unit in a very short period of time. As always, 80% of the work was done a few nights before the show :)

We will tell about creation of the printer itself later. Now I will tell about what he saw at the exhibition.

Check in

On February 13, we dragged two huge bags into the pavilion, got to our stands and set about assembling our miracle. In one there was a printer, and in the other his fantasy colleague - a robot-bartender, already illuminated somehow on a habr.

Semyon began to assemble his favorite creation.


Here I am. I am glad to complete the assembly and satisfactory print results.


Naturally, our magic bag with robots and all sorts of useful stuff was attached to the two bags.


By the way, we brought five syringes filled with chocolate in a suitcase from Ekaterinburg. I can't imagine what the security officers thought when they saw a full suitcase of electronics and syringes with a brown substance :)

But the pliers during the inspection at Ekb had to give: (Well, okay, they didn’t think of it themselves. They can bite the wings off the plane - a dangerous thing.

Our booth from afar. Journalists shoot the plot in Chinese!


But our neighbors - chocolate masters. The guys have to constantly eat chocolate. Sad yes?

Products

That did the chocolate turned out to do on the day of arrival. The air temperature was about 22-23 degrees.







In the next two days, the southern Moscow weather, as well as the active work of 3D printers and visitors' bodies, led to an increase in temperature to 26-27 degrees. At such a temperature, not having a cryocoast available, we could only print lettering and other flat images. But this was quite enough for visitors to the exhibition. Printed the names of someone's children, the nicknames of lovers, postcards for moms :)

By the way, the Choc Edge printer did not arrive at the exhibition: (Detained at customs. I am delighted with our customs officers. So the entire exhibition was only plowed by our printer.

Printers

And now about the contents of the exhibition. Printers were different. Basically, those that we call "household". Let's start with domestic printers.
Already known to all Picaso.


And budget Printers3D. Well done guys. Their printers are 2-3 times cheaper than Picaso.


Orange Gorilla is also a domestic development. It has a large working field - 300x300x400mm.


Well, all the rest. I will not describe them in detail.












But we tested this printer in our hackspace.




Replicator 2x, however. Daddy most Chinese printers :)


Here is a machine that does not print, but rather mills. He cuts a solid model from a paper array. Manufacturers as a big plus point out that their product turns out to be environmentally friendly. I will not comment.


For the first time I touched parts made by sintering metal powder. At the stand was presented the nozzle from the Rolls-Roys aircraft engine, sawn into four parts. Now I understand why the printed metal pistol withstood several hundred shots.


This printer is to be commended. Still, the only delta printer in the exhibition. Yes, so damn high! By the way, we are also now designing such a piece, only a smaller one :)




And another unusual device that you probably already saw on the Internet. 3Doodler - extruder pen, which allows you to write plastic in the air. Very funny thing.




But about these printers, I tell separately. A team from Spain brought their Witbox cars to the exhibition.




Very powerful design. Drawings of the printer and software sources open.

Another printer, but at the dealers' booth.


It so happened that foreigners were our first friends at the exhibition. First, they were among the first to come to our booth. And secondly, the friendship helped a little misfortune (to whom a small, and to whom, and pain).
Our blue four-legged robot was injured in the form of a broken leg. We would have printed it ourselves, but the trouble was that only a chocolate printer was at hand :) I turned to these guys for help, and they did not refuse :) They printed us a piece of silver plastic.



Our experienced technician performs an operation to replace the joint.



By the way, it turned out they also dragged robots printed on the printer to the exhibition. These robots, they, like us, are creating for instilling technical creativity in children. That's it!



They gave me a top-up with them on the iPad (then I'll show on YouTube).

Scanners

There were a lot of scanners. Most different, but mostly expensive.









And here are the budget options that are suitable for scanning people.
After scanning with the help of “kinektov” (let's call it this way), the model is amazingly sharp. Such models, being printed on a gypsum-polymer full-color printer have great similarity with the source. Well, just as live. These results spurred us to bring to the mind of our own scanner. So soon we will do the same.




Another team scanning for the same technology.


Christmas tree toy with the hostess inside, is impressive.

Plastic

Finally, there were plastic manufacturers. We are not waiting for these people. Tired already carry plastic from overseas-ocean.
By the way, another manufacturer who recently opened the line in Yekaterinburg did not get to the exhibition!

Total

I am a hundred or five hundred times glad that we were invited to this exhibition. This is probably the first such major 3D printing exhibition in our country.

Communicating with colleagues we learned a lot about scanning and printing with various materials. We received a lot of useful tips on working with chocolate from professional confectioners. We met with the developers of domestic printers. We met a lot of different smart interesting people!

In general, another successful event in the piggy bank of the MakeItLab hackspace.