Month: March 2014

3D printing, Blender, hacking, tricks

Printing Fractals on MiniFactory

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Last week, we had our 8th International IT Week for Students here at HAAGA-HELIA where I work. We had teams from Spain, Denmark, and Finland, and we looked into issues like mobile games development, robot building on the Arduino set, and on the Danish day, fractals. My good friend and colleague from Coopenhagen North, Anders Kalhauge, presented a lecture, and the students then led a workshop into fractals.

Fractals are odd creatures. Wikipedia says that

“A fractal is a mathematical set that typically displays self-similar patterns, which means it is “the same from near as from far”. Fractals may be exactly the same at every scale, or, […] they may be nearly the same at different scales. The concept of fractal extends beyond self-similarity and includes the idea of a detailed pattern repeating itself.” Continue reading Printing Fractals on MiniFactory →

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3D printing, tricks

Things I have learned of MiniFactory

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I have now had the wonderful MiniFactory 3D printer for about three months. As I have little teaching with contact lessons, and hence no need to go to the University every day, I haven’t been able to print something all the time. Nevertheless, I have become somewhat proficient in managing the printer, so I thought I would write a little blog post to illustrate some of the stuff I have picked up along the way.

MiniFactory is located in Seinäjoki, Finland, and its manager Janne Pihlajamäki has been instrumental in getting our machine to work properly. I have contacted him on email and phone, and he has never failed to provide an answer to my questions. He probably thinks me a very nontechnical person, what with the million questions I have sent him, but on the other hand, he’s been getting the word back from the trenches. I hope this is a mutually beneficial set-up. MiniFactory is a startup company, and hence, they have been too busy in building the production line and the machines themselves to get all of the documentation in place yet, but they are doing an admirable job at this difficult business.

Continue reading Things I have learned of MiniFactory →

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