TCT Awards – 3D Technologies Hall of Fame

 

On Wednesday I was invited to a rather nice dinner at Birmingham Town Hall organised by TCT to attend their awards ceremony, which was in association with their 3D Printing Exhibition at the National Exhibition Centre.  On the left is Kryten from Red Dwarf (or rather, what he looks like on the inside, which is to say like actor Robert Llewellyn); on the right is me being inducted as one of the first five people in the 3D Technologies Hall of Fame.  I got in for inventing and starting the RepRap Project.

At the exhibition earlier in the day I met many old friends, including Josef Prusa.  Prusa Research sells more 3D printers worldwide than any other company.  They are all RepRaps, of course, and he has an enormous RepRap farm printing copies of themselves day and night.  I also had a chat with Tony Lock from Think3DPrint3D and the others involved in Duet3D. They have a nice new PCB for the end-effector of delta 3D printers (deltas were one of many RepRap innovations).  It incorporates three strain gauges using the PCB tracks themselves as the gauges, so you can use it as a bed probe with 100 micron resolution with no additional parts.

The other four first-hall-of-fame inductees were Chuck Hull (the inventor of stereolithography, the first 3D printing technology, and hence the inventor of 3D printing), Hans Langer (the founder of EOS), Scott Crump (the inventor of FFF/FDM 3D printing and the founder of Stratasys), and Wilfried Vancraen (the founder of Materialise).  So in other words they dropped me in with some big cheeses…

I did my best to act like a grown-up.  My little acceptance speech got some laughs and applause, which was kind of people.  But most importantly I thanked all the thousands of selfless RepRap volunteers all over the world that did the work to make the RepRap Project the complete success that it is.

I would like to repeat that thanks here: Thank You All!

Adrian