Presented by

  • Vik Olliver

    Vik Olliver
    @VikOlliver

    Vik is a longhair hacker and maker from Masterton, where he works at the local Fab Lab community makerspace. His main claim to fame is kludging this thing called a "3D Printer" together as a core dev with The RepRap project, which turned out to be quite popular. Brought up making 8-bit home micros in the 80's, there was no hope for Vik. He worked on CP/M, 'boring old Z80 crates', embedded heart monitors, Ethernet chips, satellites, Linux, closed environmental life support systems, and all three main branches of the emergency services - for which he was also a major customer. In his spare time between trips to Accident & Emergency, Vik makes keyboards for people with dexterity issues, plays around with assorted micro-controllers, grows olive trees and thistles, and makes small pieces of metal move very, very quickly.

Abstract

3D printers are everywhere, printing everything from D&D models to buildings. But how can the home 3D printing enthusiast tackle hacking small stuff for cellular biology, microfluidics, the little electromechanical devices that abound in our smartphones, or even chip-scale electronics themselves? While these tasks are typically handled with silicon fabrication techniques, RepRapMicron aims to do them at low cost using techniques and hardware familiar to the 3D printing community: Arduinos, steppers, and bits of bent wire. This may require abandoning some manufacturing dogma, like our reliance on silicon, and in turn open up new fields for citizen science in areas like biohacking and at-home chip fabrication. This presentation covers how small a thing you can make using a 3D printer, a bunch of nuts and bolts, and a jar of salty water. We'll discuss the techniques and difficulties involved in creating mobile machinery capable of repeatable positioning within a micrometre, the problems with print heads, how to use it as a very small object scanner, and the frustration of levelling the darn thing. There may be a well-deserved rant on USB microscopes. Then there's the thorny problem of how you pick up and manipulate objects smaller than the dot at the end of this sentence? Initial RepRapMicron prototypes are already achieving 0.1mm objects with 15 micrometre resolution. So the device has to manipulate the objects it makes, raising an interesting possibility: If you can print and operate a tiny little 3D printer that can in turn make smaller objects, how small can you really go?