During my placement I worked a lot with 3D printing. I got to work with new materials and new printers. When you work for a hospital, it is very important to choose the right materials and production methods as everyting you use must follow ISO 10993 and 14971, meaning the materials need to be chemically resistant, bio-compatible and safe to use in a hospital environment. This automatically excludes many of the standard filaments. Luckily, we just received a new 3D printer at ATU, the Formlabs Fuse 1+ 30W, a SLS printer that uses Nylon 12, which is hospital approved.

To make use of this printer, stl files need to go through a slicer software first which transform the stl file into a g-code file. Preform, which is the slicer software of the formlabs printer, takes you through the process step by step. I found that it has a very modern, rather minimalistic look and feel which makes it very easy to work with in my opinion. Every step is often accompanied by an image or an info button, so it is also suitable for beginners.

Additionally, PreForm has another great feature which I found very handy, the one-click set up or magic wand tool which you can find on the top left corner of the preform screen (bottom left image). By clicking this button, the software automatically orients and positions your objects in the best, most material saving way. The SLS printer is a powder based printer, so it also does not rely on supports. Compared to this, most other slicers need you to arrange and orient your objects manually, like in the Ideamaker software on the bottom right image. This extra feature in PreForm can save the user a lot of time.

But mainly, I think the Preform slicer looks great, it feels more like you are in an app on your phone and not in a 3D printing software. The Design is more clear and more fun to use. On the below images you can see the direct comparison of the texture feature in PreForm on the left and IdeaMaker on the right. The images, the sliders, the buttons, everything looks nicer, is more simple and therefore is also more accessible for people with disabilities.

In conclusion, I can say that I learned a few new things and got to know new features when working with PreForm and the new SLS printer at the college. I am grateful that we have the means to work with such large machines and I think I made good use of it for my Hospital placement. I can definitely tell that printers and slicers are continuously evolving and I am sure they will be of growing importance in the future.

So I decided to use microsoft clipchamp to create this projection video. I had never really worked with any other video editing software before so I just used clipchamp as it was already installed on my laptop. Luckily, I realized that Clipchamp is very easy to work with.
There is a library of video clips, sounds, and effects where you can search for certain keywords, like in this case „thunder“, „lighting“, „storm“ etc. Through this library I already had a base of clips and sounds which I then topped with some more clips I imported from the internet.

I was able to drag and drop the clips into the timeline and adjust them in the way I liked. I also added different filters and sound effects on top of my existing clips and tried to create smooth transitions between them.

I know that there is probably more professional video editing softwares out there but I personally enjoyed working with Clipchamp and I think it was more than enough for what we needed. The only issue I found was a small green stripe on the right edge of the video that appeared after I exported it. But luckily, we were able to get rid of it.

Below I attached a snippet of the moment we projected the video on top of the smoke for the first time.

I was quite nervous before our first CAD lesson here. I felt like I just got the hang of using Fusion 360 in Ireland. We don´t use CAD in secondary school back in my home country Germany, so I was a total beginner before and I did not feel ready to learn a completely new software now.
And like I feared, learning to use Rhino was a horrific experience the first few weeks. The commands and general layout are totally different from Fusion and our teacher loves talking very quietly and go through the steps like we are running a marathon. I just did not understand the basic principles and even when naviagting the space through dragging or rotating the object, I would always use the mouse clicks I was used to from Fusion, which don´t work in Rhino.

I would say only now, after almost 3 months of CAD classes, I feel more convident using Rhino. So far we learned how to create objects in the standard space and make technical drawings. We are also using the SubDivision space, where you can create and form objects by pulling and pushing points or surfaces of an object.
Surprisingly, I feel like nowadays I might actually choose to create a product in Rhino instead of Fusion if I had to choose.

I think it can be very useful to know how to use Rhino in the future since it is the standard CAD software in my companies. I am very glad that I feel more convident with it now, because over the last weeks I had many moments where I doubted this would ever happen. I am interested to see which one of the two softwares I will prefer in my work life.

Here the Fusion and Rhino Space in comparison.