Traveling around Europe’s capitals and writing articles for 3DPI, I have had the fortune to visit some of the most amazing FabLabs to find out about their activities with digital manufacturing, especially concerning 3D printing and 3D scanning technologies. After Berlin, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Tel Aviv, and London (by the way, that last article has not been written yet, but it will be soon), it is now Budapest’s turn.
What has become clear – and what was made clearer by Tomas Diez at FabLab Barcelona – is that every FabLab develops its own expertise and its own “soul”, based upon the surrounding environment and the personality of its founders. Most times, they are digital manufacturing visionaries, full of ideas and passion. At FabLab Budapest, I had the chance to meet David Pap, who fully incarnates these traits.
One of the aspects that David stressed most – and rightly so – is that FabLab Budapest was born and grew on its own, without grants or support from external institutions, basing its business model on providing services to the professional and consumer communities. It began as David’s intuition for the need of an open innovation space in Budapest. The same process of identifying market and social demands and trying to address them drove the Fablab to specialize in 3D scanning activities and development, evaluating all of the standard low-cost systems available on the market. Now, David and his team – in collaboration with other Eastern European FabLabs – are developing their own photogrammetry booth, which is shaping up to be one of the most affordable and fastest systems to hit the market.
David is deeply involved in so many different activities that it is hard to keep track of all of them (during the interview I had to make four different recordings because interesting information kept coming up). Since the Fablab was born, it has worked on incubating three companies (one of which is the local 3D printer reseller FreeDee and another one is the Codie educational robot), contributed at developing the Formlabs Form1 SLA 3D printer (David mentioned that the lab received Form1 number three) and has undertaken bioprinting and open science projects in their small wetlab.
The photogrammetric 3D scanning system is the FabLab’s most ambitious project to date and it occupies a large octagonal portion of the open lab space. “From the very beginning, our goal was to make it easy to disassemble, creating separate panels so that it would be a transportable system,” David says. To keep costs at a minimum the scanner uses 70 digital Canon cameras instead of DSLR’s. This means that they needed to be reprogrammed for remote control capability. “We developed the software internally and uploaded it to the OS through the SD card.”
The goal is to produce a scanner that is both the least costly on the market and the fastest to create final models, ready to be 3D printed. This might be possible by combining the digital camera’s automatic focus capabilities – which automatically calculates distance from the object, collecting information that can be scripted – and, possibly, a combination of structured light and photogrammetry. The data would then be analyzed through powerful cloud-based software. The 3D scan is already operational as a pure photogrammetry system.
Another option might be to offer a higher price system, with DSLR cameras, as well as value-added online services. “This is our preferred objective; however, we would need investments from venture capitalists to support production,” David admits. “This would give us the capability to calculate the volume of an object, resulting in even less human work for cleaning up the 3D scan. By combining different types of scans, and using different software to remove the differences between photos, we might be able to reduce the post-production time even further. Then, the only issue would be that of uploading the 3D scan files, but we are already working on that as well.”
While working with some of the most interesting companies in the digital manufacturing scene, such as Formlabs and, now, Arduino (which is currently setting up operations in Budapest), David is also partnering with firms in the fashion industry for creating virtual catwalks, and also with gyms, for accurate evaluation of their clients’ physical progress. The possibilities for an affordable, transportable, modular, accurate ,and quick photogrammetry system are truly endless and could open up a new phase of growth for the Budapest Fablab. At this rate, no one could know what they will be working on a year from now.
