Hi everyone, I recently got to participate in the 3D Hubs Autodesk UCSD Makeshop event. Apparently I am one of the top rated hubs in the area (yay me!). I would say it’s a little surprising since I have been exclusively using my original Prusa v2 that I built about 3 years ago but I get pretty darn good prints off of it. My printers capabilities however are not what gets me good reviews though, it’s all about how I interact with customers.
Anyway, this is not a post about my skill, but more of a critique about the event and how everything went. It was one of the first of it’s kind for 3D Hubs so there were a few organizational hiccup’s.
All the students that attended the Autodesk conference to learn the basics of Fusion 360 were awesome. They asked tons of questions and were all around friendly. Exactly what I would expect from a school of this caliber.
Whoever set up the event fed us which is always a plus! We were provided with tables and chairs so we just had to bring our printers, tools, and computers.
Power was a bit tricky, but all of us made sure to bring extension cords so we were able to make it work with some nearby television hookups. Scouting the area beforehand would be a big plus. If possible it would be best to hook up one extension cord for each bank of printers with their own power strips. Daisy chaining is not only illegal it’s downright dangerous. Best case scenario you could blow a breaker stopping every printer in its tracks. Worst case scenario you start a fire. I figure we were running close to 4000 watts worth of power supplies through two extension cords. Not the best solution.
Myself and the other Hubs that were invited were allowed into the venue about an hour prior to the start of the event which was good. Parking on the campus was a bit difficult so we needed most of that time to get our things inside, park at the garage, and then walk back to the venue. Also it was $16 for parking but the Autodesk rep did offer to pay for it. If possible it would be better to work it out with the school before hand to get passes for the lot closest to the venue. I would think they would be amicable to providing staff parking passes for the Hub owners and staff.
The Hub: What we ended up doing was creating a central Hub for all of the orders to be processed through. We didn’t really have a workflow at the beginning which led to some confusion. Fusion 360 has a collaborative feature which was great for the students to share their projects, but those of us working our printers were slowed down quite a bit trying to help students with their designs via Fusion 360. They then still had to upload them to the Hub so that we could process their order. In the future I would suggest that the Hubs not be expected to help with the design aspect especially since none of us had any experience with Fusion 360 directly. Any design changes that the students require help with need to be resolved by the Autodesk reps.
In the end what worked best for us to distribute the orders was to leave them “Processing” until we were ready to add them to a print job. As soon as one of the Hubs accepted a print job they wrote down the order number so that later on the 3D Hubs rep that working with the event can move the orders to the individual Hubs of the printers. Once an order was shown “Awaiting Payment” the other Hubs knew it was already taken and could pick another order.
They also need to be informed that if they have to make a design change to no create a new order but delete the file from the current order and upload the change. Quite a few of them created multiple orders.
The first students to sign up for the event were guaranteed their prints would be completed during the event. We were given a list of emails and names associated with them but I think quite a few did not end up attending. It would be helpful if they were told to approach the Hubs and inform them that they are on the list of guaranteed orders. I think that some of them were probably a bit shy to do it on their own but if they were told they needed to do it there wouldn’t be much of an issue.
Collecting prints after the event: This is proving to be a bit problematic. Of the three Hubs that attended we each ended up leaving with about 6 orders each that need to be delivered or picked up after the event. Most of the customers there are college students and a lot of them do not have readily available transportation. At this point I am opting to just mail them out for a couple dollars each. I got paid the standard rate for the orders so a couple dollars each to mail them is not a problem at all (I did not ask for any money from the students). If we had somebody selected ahead of time like a professor or student who could accept all the orders and then distribute them as the students could meet them at the school it would make everything much smoother.
Photos, video, Tweets, etc.: We were expected to tweet out the names of the orders as we started them but I myself had a hard time keeping up with it. There were so many questions from the students it was difficult to even work on prepping orders for the printers without feeling like I was ignoring them. A couple of times I had to politely tell them all to give me a minute and ignore them while I got the prints running before returning to answer questions. I did set up a time lapse but without readily accessible power the camera died and I ended up with a rather short video. I did not have time at all to take photos. Here is a link to the time lapse I did get:
After printing they wanted pictures and tweets of them with their printed keychains. Again, I had a hard time trying to do that along with tending the printers, tracking orders, talking to students, etc. It was a very busy event. A better option I think would be to get the students to do it in order to get the metal rings for their bottle openers. A sign with instructions on how to do it at the table where the rings are would be more than enough. If they don’t have a phone then handling a few students wouldn’t be much of a problem for those of us running our printers or the Autodesk rep helper could do it.
I know this sounds like a lot of complaining, but all in all it was a blast and I am super happy to have been invited. It was a long day, a good 8 hours of interacting with people and I was completely exhausted at the end of it.
