This way, you don't have to come back, again and again, while printing is happening

Jun 3, 2014 13:06 GMT  ·  By

3D printing isn't at all a painless process. As wonderful as the results are, they often need you to try several times before the print is made properly. Plastic tends to warp from the heat, and the adhesive holding the print to the print bed might fail mid-process.

This can be really annoying if you leave a printer working and come back after the scheduled 12 hours only to find a hardened blob.

And even if everything goes well, it can be tedious to just drop by just to remove the print and push the repeat button. Mass production was automated for the specific reason of eliminating the tedium after all.

A man by the name of Florian Mauer has the solution: a robotic arm, call uArm, which can load and unload queues of printing jobs.

It uses a suction cup to unload the completed build plate and load the next one. He wasn't satisfied with that alone, though.

You see, this 3D printer uses binder clips to clamp the glass platform to the heating bed, and he needed a way to swap them. Normally, it took a lot of dexterity and force, but his solution was different: a pair of magnetic clamps that attach to the metal portion of the area surrounding the plate and remove the magnetic clamp from the printer.

All in all, Mauer has shown the future, one might say, where both 3D printing and robotics are combined for efficiency.