CapturingBrainWaves: TVRR 3D Printing at ECOS

On Saturday the 2nd November I had the pleasure of attending the Electronic Organ Constructors Society ( eocs.org.uk ) meet up close to Euston station in central London.

My visit had been inspired some weeks earlier by an event at the Bracknell Gadget Fair where I was displaying the Thames Valley RepRap Users Group (TVRRUG.org,uk) demonstration of 3D printing machines

Alan Douglas was visiting the fair and had been coincidentally requested to do a talk on 3D printing at their meetup. Seeing the 3d printer so he took great interest and we discussed some advantages and opportunities that the TVRRUG approach offers

I arrived early in London and found a parking space close to the church hall where the event was taking place.

At 10 o'clock I took my TVRR RepRap around to the hall and found inside a welcoming cup of coffee, some biscuits, and a group of people of varying ages, and unsurprisingly, all male. In the church next door the sound of an organ playing and many men and women dressed smartly for a service.

To prepare for the event Alan had sent me a drawing of, what is known as a “stop”, a piece of an electronic organ which is often used in construction projects. One of the members has been casting them in plastic and it seemed a good example of something that could be 3d printed

I worked on creating a design using the OpensCAD software and printed out a sample which I took a long to be event.

A feature I had not been able to reproduce, using the OpensCAD software, was a radius on the top of the stop, this is the main difference between my reproduction and the original drawing, it is something that is possible to do, but would have taken me more time than I had available.

Alan presented his talk to the animated audience and it covered a lot of areas of general 3D printing, the opportunities and limitations. Afterwards he handed over to myself and I talked through the specific areas around the Thames Valley RepRap design, in particular a involvement and cooperation with the Reading Hackspace (rlab.org.uk), and other hackspaces in general.

There were lots of questions and discussions about 3D printing and its role in electronic organ construction. I thank everyone I met for a warm welcome and wish you well with all your projects.

In this document I want to add some links to the sources of information and resources that I referred to in my discussion.

Thames Valley reprap user group - http://tvrrug.org.uk

Reading hackspace - http://rlab.org.uk

Manchester fablab

Faberdashery filament supplier

OpensCAD - http://openscad.org

Slic3r - http://slic3r.org/

Meshlab

Blender

Sketchup

EagleCAD

DesignSpark - http://www.designspark.com/