3D Printer Village at the Vancouver Maker Faire 2014

Hot on the heels of the Bay Area Maker Faire, Vancouver hosted their own mini Maker Faire this past weekend. The 3D Printer Village, operated by myself and members of 3D604.org was back again and was very busy all weekend. This shot, of a portion of the village, was taken after we had finished our setup on Friday night (before the faire opened Saturday morning):

I brought along my 3D printing pen, called the YaYa (purchased but no longer available from Seeed Studio), to let people play with:

It’s basically the extruder from a 3D printer in (bulky) pen form that you use handheld, just like a glue gun.

Unfortunately, everyone that tried it came to the same conclusion that I did – it’s pretty hard to use. Perhaps that’s one reason why it’s not sold anymore at Seeed. It uses ABS plastic and one challenge was just getting it to stick to something. Surprisingly, nobody had kapton tape in the village. I’m still tempted to try it with PLA but fear that the pen gets too hot for PLA and will clog. But at this point it might be worth a shot since it’s been so difficult to use.

This was the first year of the Printer Village where we had 11 distinctly different models of printers on display. In previous years, we had a number of duplicates but this year, everyone had something different. Just about everyone’s machine was also heavily modified and customized. Only one machine was having issues printing (another first) so everyone was able to have their machines going the entire weekend.

I had a GoPro shooting a timelapse of the booth on day 1:

More photos can be found in my Flickr album from the faire.

I’m still surprised we get such a great response to the village. I’m always worried that 3D printing has jumped the shark and gone mainstream but the reactions we had confirmed that we still have a lot of people to share this technology with.

See you next year!