Teaching 3D Printing at Hackerspace Phnom Penh Cambodia

Recently we started a novel experiment at Hackerspace Phnom Penh to introduce 3D printing technology to kids. We organized a saturday afternoon workshop for the coding club members of local international school. The parents who brought the kids were just as excited about the 3D printing technology.

Photo Credit: Akira

The workshop started with Leo Jofeh walking the kids through the basics of 3D printing technology. The Makerbot Cupcake CNC was used to show various parts of 3D printing machine. The DIY model of the Cupcake CNC 3D printer makes it easy to see all the parts unlike the more recent models of the 3D printers.

Next we brought in the modern Lulzbot Mini 3D printer and did a quick test print of small object from Thingiverse.com to show the whole 3D printing process. The kids were already bubbling with ideas for building model tanks to full scale super hero characters. However we suggested something simpler that doesn't take hours of print time. The code club members were already familiar with the Google Sketchup program. So they quickly started creating drawing of comic characters and creating custom currency coins. With a Sketchup STL export plugin they could export the drawings into a 3D printable STL file.

Leo collected these STL files and added to them the Cura printing software with minor changes. The kids and the parents were totally engrossed all throughout the workshop. Indeed 3D printing unleashes your inner tool maker in everyone.

The workshop was a learning experience for us. Next we are going to expand the program to cover more schools and with few working templates that kids and the parents can work-together.

If you want to help or get involved please get in touch with us at facebook.com/groups/hackerspacepp.

"Think Global, Make Local" 3D Printed Product Design Program in Cambodia

Are you a Cambodian citizen? Are you interested in learning how to make amazing products using Industrial Design, 3D Printing, 3D Design, Electronics, and Engineering taught by four world class teachers from the UK, Australia, and Norway? Do you want to be part of a movement to make high quality, original products made for Cambodians by Cambodians!?

If this describes you, please email contact@archubpnh.com to get an application for a FREE scholarship to this 8 week training course now!

3D Printing Hamster Castle

They say there is no greater noble deed than 3D printing castles for homeless hamsters. Hackerspace Phnom Penh's Leo Jofeh set upon himself the noble task of designing and printing a Hamster Castle on Lulzbot Mini 3D printer. The project took over three hours to print the walls and another 2 hours for the roof and ramparts.

The following timelaspe video shows 3D printer in action. The timelapse was captured on Sony RX100 MKII in WiFi mode with TimeLapse Android app.

It looks great and the hamsters have made themselves at home!

3D scanning with mobile phone

You got a 3D scanner in your pocket right now. It's your mobile phone. The innovative 123D Catch application let's you turn ordinary photos into 3D models. You can edit these 3D models and print it with a 3D printer. The 123D Catch is available for iPhone, Android, Windows PC and web app (Works only in Google Chrome).

Go forth and 3D capture the world around you.

Troubleshooting

Looks the services was down during the weekend. Login page spewed the following error. Now the service is back online.

{"CODE":100,"STATUS":500,"MESSAGE":"Internal server error | URL Parameters:afc=PA1ON1&locale=en-US&ssl=true&relative_redirect_path=/login-redirect","DATA":{},"ERROR_ID":"175e100e-e932-4e37-81aa-bab52ec0ae5c"}

3D Printing a Prosthetic Hand

Richard Van As lost four fingers on his right hand in an accident. He started to build a prosthetic hand with set of mechanical fingers using tools in his woodworking workshop. I met Richard at Tech4Africa 2013 in Johannesburg, South Africa. His Robohand project provides 3D printed prosthetic hands for the disabled. Anyone with a 3D printer can download the shape files from Thingiverse and print a prosthetic hand.

Richard is a hero for tinkers and makers everywhere. His innovative use of 3D printing technology heralds of things to come. Watch the video about Robohand project on YouTube.

For more information visit robohand.blogspot.com

Getting Started with Arduino in Hanoi

Spent the weekend learning basic electronics with Arudino open source prototyping platform. La 4uatrieme creative lab organized a two day Arduino workshop in Hanoi.

Designer and teacher Eoin Kinsella delivered a very interactive workshop. We learnt basic electronics, Arduino hardware and software environment by tinkering examples from the popular Getting Started with Arduino book. We spent the day building simple prototypes with sensors, switches and LED's on solderless breadboard and programed it using Arduino development environment.

The Arduino IDE on Linux is not well tested. During the workshop I found a minor bug in Arduino package in Ubuntu and fixed it right away.

The inexpensive Arudino hardware makes it easy to build interaction design and physical computing prototypes. With 3D printing services such as Shapeways you can now bring your ideas to life much faster than ever.

You can buy Arduino hardware in Vietnam from Soatec (www.sotatec.com) in Ho Chi Minh city.

Watch Arduino The Documentary (2010)