About 3D Printing, Drones and the Next Big Thing
We’ve caught up with state of the art technology...or have we really?🤔
This Friday, for our weekly Open House, we had Kishore Jonnalagadda talk about 3D printing at HasGeek House.
Kishore started his talk with an introduction about him and what he does. It’s interesting that in the commercial world of 3D printing, almost everything is patent protected. You don’t really develop something from scratch and disrupt the tech scene by itself, but build on top of something existing and patent it.
What really changed the scene was the adoption of open source. This gave an opportunity to hobbyists to tinker around and thereby contributing to the ecosystem.
Fast forward to 2016–17, go to any maker event in India and you’ll definitely see a stall with a 3D printer. That’s how popular it has become. It’s beautiful to see models that you’ve designed on a computer, take life (or is it shape) right in front of your eyes. I was mind blown the first time I saw this. I still have a couple of 3D printed souvenirs from friends.
Although, 3D printing isn’t as new as we think it is. And it’s definitely not that new in the food industry as well. Remember that complex icing that you saw on a wedding cake🎂? Yep, that would’ve been 3D printed. From food to tissues in the body- it’s just mind blowing to think that machines could do so much. 3D printing has gotten more and more affordable that a lot of hobbyists can now get their hands on them. I still remember Surendranath Reddy sharing about Fab X- The World’s Most Affordable 3D Printer starting from INR 20,000 and that, for some reason, made me really proud!
Drones
Disclaimer- Working on this in India could be borderline illegal.
No matter where, drones are always attention grabbers, especially when they have cameras attached. The GoPro Karma in the camera industry is a big example of the focus on this. Add to that, the tech industry’s general focus on mobile- gives you SelFly. The problem with flying drones in India is that there are no rules and regulations defined around it. I was talking to Kishore about this and he tells me that since he works on government projects, he usually gets permission to do conduct flight tests. But it’s just sad that we don’t have any regulation on this.
The default behaviour is- “When you don’t understand something, easiest thing to do it to ban it”. Now if you’re a law abiding citizen like me🙈 and consider it your moral responsibility to take prior permissions from the local police before flying a drone, you still would have to depend on his/her leniency to get permission.
The cop might play around with the drone, try to fly it and seem fascinated by it. But he still wouldn’t give you “permission” because things are unclear and he doesn’t want to take responsibility of your actions.
The “Why we do what we do”
I think a lot of us know about 3D printing because individuals like Kishore and others in the community are happy to go out and talk about it because they’re really passionate. This is what one of the attendees at Open House told us-
I have a 3D printer at home. I tried it just once and the print didn’t come out properly. I haven’t touched it ever since and told my wife that it wasn’t working. It costed me around INR 45000
But after attending our Open house and interacting with Kishore, he felt that he had a renewed interest and confidence in tinkering around with it again. He felt more connected to the community of people interested in 3D printing and I, for one, was happy to hear that a couple of hours on a Friday evening resulted in this for him.
Open houses at HasGeek are in-person discussions spaces for people interested in technology, development, policy and the web, in general. But believe me, it’s not limited to that, and that’s the beauty of it!
If you’re interested in some of the above topics, or even just a curious person like me who would like to lurk around before participating, do come by at our Open house at HasGeek on Friday evening from 6PM. We have🍺&🍗 for you!
This blog is a part of my “One Blog Per Week” resolution. Contains random rambling, learning and experience. If you have any inputs/thoughts, shout out to me at @dun3buggi3.
