Here’s another story about someone who’s unafraid to let an individual noun represent her identity. April, of the 3D Printing group on LinkedIn, has taken a piece of technology made for customizable one-offs and turned it into her own customized one-off: a Hello Kitty themed 3D printer.
Hello Thingy is April’s first 3D printer built entirely from scratch. She printed the parts for it on a MendelMax 1.5 kit that she got her paws on over a year ago. While it may look, merely, like an aesthetic upgrade to the MendelMax, she’s actually modified parts of the original printer’s design to fit some drawbacks she saw in the original design. For instance, Hello Thingy has a PrusaNozzle MKII, ALU MKII head bead, and RAMPS 1.4 with Taurino power. April has also shielded the electronics and cables using copper shield to minimize radio frequency interference.
[nggallery id=154]It may not seem like it would make much of a difference to print all of Hello Thingy’s parts in April’s favorite color, but pink holds a strong significance in a large portion of society. Somehow, an arbitrary wavelength in the visual spectrum had come to be associated with femininity (and, therefore, a whole web of complicated issues) to the point where a guy I spoke with in Chicago was genuinely angered, practically foaming, at the new Pink Line on the city’s rail system, calling it “gay”. The significance of pink in the US – and likely other parts of the world – when coupled with the underrepresentation of women in STEM careers, gives Hello Thingy a profound power over other RepRaps. Like GoldieBlox, a toy company that makes engineering kits for young girls, Hello Thingy can help young girls, who may have already linked pink with femininity, bypass their color biases and get excited about engineering.
Kudos, April! Maybe GoldieBlox would have some interest in your kit??
