rapman-education's posterous

rapman-education's posterous

Dave White  //  A place for educators, teachers, lecturers and students to find "stuff" about RapMan,BfB3000 and BfB 3DTouch printers... The unofficial Blog by Dave White, Advanced Skills Teacher and Head of D&T in Clevedon School UK.

Feb 23 / 5:00pm

Students improve products with 3D printing

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If you browse back through this blog to an entry I made on 2nd February "improving products with 3D printing" I showcased some of the work done by my students in designing and 3D printing prototypes of improved products.... Here is just a taster of how a simple design has evolved with the help of the relatively rapid modelling that can be done with 3D printing.... Our 3D Systems Bits from Bytes machines are really being put through their paces!

In the photo galley in this post you can see how this model has changed... The original red model was intended to be used with the opener pointing towards the finger tips... Through testing the student has decided to reverse this. The finger rings have now been angled to be a little more ergonomic and the design is now approaching something that would be viable. ... Forgot to say that this design is intended for domestic and commercial use... It is now the sort of design that a barman could "wear" throughout a shift behind the bar and have a bottle opener "to hand" and ready for instant use whenever there is a need to open a bottle.... Just writing about this is making me drool... I could crack open a cool bottle right now!

 

Filed under  //  dt   education   printing   student  
Feb 4 / 3:28pm

More product improvements with 3D printing by students

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 Following my previous blog post I couldn't miss posting about this product model by one of my students.

As you can see from the photos this student has tackled a project to design an improved pencil sharpener.

This is intended to be a non functional model exploring the ergonomics of the design and some aspects of the functionality such as the hinged waste bin and aesthetics.

A very promising project... I will hopefully post some more as it develops, so keep checking back here!

Filed under  //  casestudy   dt   printing   student  
Feb 2 / 9:03pm

Improving products with 3D printing

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 Our AS Level students at Clevedon School are doing some fantastic coursework projects. Their main project is to design and model an improved version of an existing product... Including some innovative ideas.

As you can see in the photo some of the students have chosen to design improved kitchen products including bottle openers and a pizza cutter. These products need to be ergonomic (designed to fit the human body) and made to a standard where they can be tested.

The products shown in the photo are not their final finished designs but have been made to do some initial testing to check the ergonomics, that the sizes are suitable and most importantly that they will work. To help the students with this they decided to make their prototypes by designing their products using Creo Elements/pro 3D design software and then 3D printing them on our RapMan and BfB3000 printers.

I can't wait to see what their final designs look like!

Filed under  //  casestudy   education   printing   student  
Jan 22 / 1:44pm

Bespoke USB sticks

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 The students in my year 9 CAD/CAM integrated project groups have all come together with different amounts of experience, some having done work with the 3D program Creo/elements pro and others having done none at all. And very few have experience of actually designing for 3D printing. So we did a fairly quick introductory project to help get everyone to the same skills level.

This introductory project was to design and 3D print a custom case for a USB stick. As you can see from the photos there are some very interesting designs. Hopefully some more photos will be posted when the students have printed their design.... And then on to the main project!

 I have posted some Free to download teaching and learning resources for this project on the Bits from Bytes wiki http://wiki.bitsfrombytes.com/index.php/Bespoke_USB_Stick

Filed under  //  education   printing   resources   student   teachingandlearning  
Jan 16 / 10:34pm

Iterative designing for 3D printing

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 One of my GCSE students (15 years old) decided that for his final project he would design a fitting to hold an iPhone on his bike handlebars. I think he must have seen one produced by another student last year and featured in an earlier post on my blog!

So he went away and started to produce some ideas using Google Sketchup I would have much preferred him to have used a proper CAD program for the reasons you will probably see later. Anyway, he finished his design, exported it to .stl format, created the gcode with BfB Axon and printed the first parts. As you can see they were far too big and chunky... This was a real surprise to him as in Sketchup the design looked ok. So, back to the drawing board! ... I wonder if he would have realised his mistakes if he had used Creo Elements/pro or Autodesk Inventor?

His next designs look far more promising, the size is better and somehow it all fits together... So what will the next version look like? ... Well, this is where the power of 3D printing lies. The simplicity, cost effectiveness and relative speed allowed this student to start down the road of an iterative design process. For this him it would have been almost impossible for him to test and visualise what his product would turn out like without printing his first draft design. The jump he made in improving his design would probably not have been possible if he had to have invested heavily in skill acquisition, time and materials for CNC milling. 

Filed under  //  Student   dt   education   printing   teachingandlearning