Innovation Labs
3D Print Farm
Over winter break of my Junior Year, I spent most of my time in the Innovation Labs, building up a dozen new printers and installing firmware and hardware upgrades on all of them.
We (the Innovation Labs) ordered 13 new Ender 3 printers to set a new precedence of standardization. Instead of having a variety of printers, one single type of printer allowed us as a maintenance team to fix these printers much quicker, allowed the users of the space to become more comfortable with the printers that they have access to and the software that enables these printers, and allows us to have standard expectations of print quality coming from each and every printer.
We upgraded the firmware of each printer to make them easier to use and give us more control over the printers. With the new firmware, we can do things such as:
perform PID tuning on the Hot Ends of the printers
adjust the Z-axis offset of the printer mid-print to allow for beds that aren’t level
We added over 30 custom-printed parts and rewired the electronics of these printers, vastly improving:
print quality - from surface quality to layer adhesion
printer uptime - extruder heads can now be replaced with the removal of two bolts instead of needing to perform on-printer maintenance
Workplace Systems
As a maintenance lead on a quickly growing team, it was easy to see that we needed to establish systems that could scale up well. Working with some of the other leads, we have set up a number of systems within the workplace that allow our teams to operate more effectively. Utilizing programs such as Slack, Clickup, and Airtable, we have made thigns much easier for:
Team members to see what they need to do
Team leads to see what the team members have done
Team leads and members to communicate effectively whenever needed
Custom Organization Parts
The Innovation Labs govern a number of areas on the DU campus such as the wood shop, much of the engineering building’s lower floor, and what is often just called the “maker space” by the students. The maker space is the main hub of the Innovation Labs and we are constantly looking to expand outwards into areas such as the Project X-ite Lab in the business school, which is intended mainly for prototyping of the entrepreneurship students.
As a “maker space,” we believe that we should be making as many things as possible, especially when it actually improves the area that said items are being used in. I have spent a lot of time designing organizational items that can be constructed (mostly printed). During design, I have focused on keeping organization as modular as possible, as the space is very frequently reorganized and everything gets moved around. I have been taking advantage of the method known as “french cleats” to secure most of the organizational objects. To ensure that these french cleat objects can be moved around the space freely, I have also designed a series of french cleat backing pieces that can be very easily mounted onto items like the electrical outlets or table edges. You can pick out many of these pieces from my gallery.