Consumer grade 3D printers are now surprisingly affordable. Design repositories such as Thingiverse (https://www.thingiverse.com/) empower anybody to just download and print a phenomenal variety of objects with no expertise required. Beyond that, open source software such as FreeCAD and OpenSCAD make it possible to create your own designs, or tweak existing ones. If you can think it, you can print it ! Need to make something new, fix something that is broken, or just make a statement ? Making a case for your Raspberry Pi, fix a broken umbrella handle, bicycle attachments, tools, customized gifts, fancy lighting, mobile phone holders, lego blocks or even rockets if that's what you fancy - they've all been made with 3D printing. Utility or fun, 3D printing is the way :)
This hands on workshop aims to be a gentle introduction to the fascinating world of 3D printing and design - focussing on consumer grade 3D printers. This will cover basics and common gotchas. We will do live modelling of a simple object (decided at venue with consensus of participants), and make a couple of prints as well !
It is highly recommended that attendees install FreeCAD (https://www.freecad.org/) in advance - prior to the workshop. It is highly recommended to have a mouse as well ! We'll take a sneak peak at OpenSCAD(https://openscad.org/), so install that if you can too. OpenSCAD is a text based tool where you write code to describe models., FreeCAD is GUI based.