Ever since I was little, I've been very interested in building things and since I can remember I've only played with Lego bricks (and wondered why kids buy a Lego set with pirates, when there are Lego excavators with hydraulics :). I inherited my love for technology from my grandfather, who was a mechanical engineer and who introduced me to that world through a story. During high school I had a small break in mastering, and then I decided to enroll in the Faculty of Economics (under slight pressure from my parents) with the logic that I should not enroll in the mechanical/electrical engineering faculty because - "your love for making things is for nothing if you don't have money to you do it". I graduated from the Faculty of Economics in Belgrade and then entered the Master's Faculty in London. That's where my mastering starts to progress :).
I heard about the Raspberry Pi and Arduino computer/microcontroller for the first time in the lectures and I immediately bought them. That's when I started programming the most basic functions and building simple robots."
Then, as part of the faculty, I traveled with a group of colleagues to Silicon Valley to visit Venture capital funds and high-tech companies. I visited Apple, Google, Tesla motors, Electronic Arts and a few other companies. I have to admit that during my visits to Apple and Google at that moment I didn't feel any particular regret about not doing programming because I found myself in the heart of the world center of technology and the whole frenzy and craze for social networks and the Internet somehow seemed confusing to me .
And then we went to some small local technology fair, which was actually more like a technical college workshop where various things were on display, and that's when I saw the 3D printer for the first time. I, who have always been a gadget freak, have never noticed (that is, remembered, since everything pops up on the Internet, at least for 1 second) about commercially available 3D printers.
Walking through that hall I saw a cannon (fig. 1) that fires rockets and I asked the man what it was and he told me that he "printed" that rocket and then showed me a Dremel 3D printer that was working. I was completely shocked, and at that moment it just went through my mind everything I had ever made (sawing, sanding, chopping, soldering, gluing and finally buying) and the fact that anything I could imagine I could create with such a level of precision, we was completely abnormal. It was like someone rediscovered Legos for me.[/cs_text][cs_text]I spent a few days on the Internet, looking at various technologies, and decided on FFF technology. The DLP printers that printed from resin were even crazier to me, but I thought the functionality of those items was not as good as they weren't as strong as the PLA printed items and I noticed that the resins were quite expensive. I looked at a couple of reviews, and saw that the Ultimaker was listed as one of the best printers in all of them. I ordered it online out of the blue, and soon realized that it was the best purchase of my life. After that, my life fell apart. I taught myself how to design in AutoCAD and since then I can't stop thinking about a 3D printer. While I'm working (I'm currently employed as a financial analyst), I design things in my head during the day, and when I get home from work I throw my ideas into AutoCAD and Inventor and print them overnight. [/cs_text][x_blockquote cite="" type="left"]" ...during the day I design things in my head, and when I get home from work I throw my ideas into AutoCAD and Inventor and print them overnight."[/x_blockquote ][cs_text]I used to even wake up at 6 in the morning out of curiosity to see how far the printer came with printing. At one point I had to stop for a bit, because my girlfriend threatened me because I couldn't devote myself to her while the printer was working, but she ended up loving the printer too and now I have full support haha :)
The next model I made was a remote control boat, I downloaded the design from the internet:
After that, I started experimenting with aircraft myself. I had a remote controlled airplane, and I wanted to replace the propeller with ducted fan jet engines, so I made and printed ducted fan engine parts. I couldn't find any software that would allow me to determine the optimal number of blades and propeller pitch, so the engine ended up with 1.2 kilograms of thrust, and after 10 seconds the housing melted from the load :) After that I made a small ducted fan which had 500g thrust and worked perfectly fine.
After the ducted fan, I started making a drone. My first design and idea was a drone with two engines modeled after the Chinook helicopter, but this design turned out to be too unstable. After that I built a conventional drone, and it was the most successful model I built. The drone contained an Ardupilot controller, a RaspberryPi camera and a USB 3G module. After a long period of constant crashing and jumping in the neighbor's yard, I managed to perfect the design so that it flies and receives commands via the Internet (3G module) while on the computer it receives video footage and the path of movement on the map.
And one more thing for "home-improvement" - I wanted to make a media center, so I made a wall frame for the iPad, and in it I inserted an Arduino that has an IR emitter (ball in the third picture) and on which I loaded commands from the remote from of all devices (screens, amplifiers, TV receivers).
And finally one model (which I printed the longest of all, I think the printing itself was 6-7 days), I downloaded the design from the thingiverse.com website.