MENDEL 3D PRINTER
The Bioscience engineering classes are always doing groundbreaking work, but there are always things that are getting in the way of succeeding as much as possible. What some of the Engineering students are trying to do is to make the learning process and projects progress much greater by allowing them to put their models and engineering concepts to the test. We have noticed that the Engineering pathway could benefit from some 3D modeling equipment so that people could have something physical that they could manipulate and learn from. This could help for prototyping things and they could even build small parts with this kind of equipment.
The equipment we are talking about is 3-D printers, which the Engineering pathway lacks at the moment. 3-D printers are very helpful for all sorts of project and it would be a great learning tool if we were able to obtain these for the Engineering pathway. The specific 3-D printer model we wish to build is called the Mendel RepRap which created by the the RepRap project. The RepRap project is open-source, and focused on creating affordable 3-D printers. As open-source, the plans are freely available online, and are always being improved on by the online community.
The pricing for one of these RepRap machines is minimal compared to the amount that we would gain by having this equipment in our class room and the learning we could obtain from them. The Pricing that we have come to for this machine and the filament that it uses would be approximately 700$ for the machine and about 2 pounds of filament. As we improve the machine and build additional ones, the price will increase, but this is nothing compared to the advantages we would gain from having access to one of these machines, as students who have worked with ASU projects have found out.
