14 DAY TRIAL // Anyone can have an idea, but it's a sad fact of life that many of people with potentially good ideas never get around to doing anything with them because of situational impediments. A company from Singapore wants to overcome such impediments.
Called Blacksmith Group, the company has almost everything it needs to be successful: a good idea, the way to make it real, and a proof-of-concept device.
What the startup lacks, however, is money. It's an unfortunate fact of life that money, or lack thereof, can determine the rise and fall of so many things.
Anyway, the Singapore-based Blacksmith Group company has revealed their Genesis 3D printer / scanner product.
It has a build volume / scanner chamber size of 9.1 inches / 210 mm in diameter, and a height of 6.3 inches / 160 mm, which means 5,542 cubic centimeters.
The Genesis uses a built-in camera to build accurate 3D virtual models of, well, anything you put on the stand. It takes around six minutes for the scan to be completed and translated into something that a program can later manipulate.
Printing a product takes, naturally, a lot longer. The layer thickness can be of 50 to 200 microns. Normal 1.75 mm filament is used. All in all, the Genesis is a surprisingly able machine, given how small it is.
The printer / 3D scanner doesn't have Wi-Fi connectivity yet, but the Blacksmith Group team intends to include it in future iterations, as they make an SD card reader.
Once everything is in place, it will be possible for owners to monitor the state of the print (if any is in progress) from anywhere, as long as they have a tablet or smartphone, or laptop, with Internet access. After all, that camera that the printer has won't be doing anything else while an object is being raised from the ground up.
However, this will only happen with your help. You see, the Blacksmith Genesis hasn't been launched as a retail product yet, and probably won't be at all if no one helps to crowd-fund it. The Indiegogo campaign hasn't been launched yet, but it will be soon, at which point you'll be able to make a pledge of support and, if you submit enough cash, get an early shipment.
With only a few days until the campaign goes up, we still don't know what the minimum price will be. Either way, it will be lower than whatever retail price Blacksmith Group settles on later this year.
