Earlier this year I went back to school to learn some of the theory behind entrepreneurship. One of my classmates was planning to launch a company and he introduced us to additive manufacturing.
I’ll give you a little bit of context. Typically physical parts are manufactured by molding or machining. Molding can be very cheap but the molds are very expensive to create. Machining is a subtractive manufacturing technique because material is removed by the machine to form the part.
Additive manufacturing builds a part, typically layer by layer. Using only the amount of material necessary. A short video will do a better job than I can of explaining this :
The rapid prototyping revolution arrived thanks to companies like Shapeways and Sculpteo who offer access to additive manufacturing machines over the internet. You upload your design files and around 5-10 days later you’ve got a physical part. But even more incredible is the price. For the HiLO Lens each case is composed of 4 parts and it costs about 20€ to have this delivered to my door ! So we could get creative and experiment without ruining ourselves.
There is a huge “maker” community out there. I hope to touch more on this in future posts.