Logistics Platform for 3D Printing Clusters printing PPEs

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  Flow chart for 3DP logistics of PPEs

https://www.astroprint.com/covid-3d-cluster-app

Inspiration

Most of the AstroPrint team is based in Malaga, Spain, and is therefore right in the middle of the fight against C19. This is hitting very close to home (literally) for everyone in our company. We began speaking to groups that are already 3D Printing PPEs for medical facilities in Spain to find out how we can help. It turns out that although many many people are volunteering to help, when it comes to software helping with logistics, not a lot was getting done. The software volunteer teams forming were groups of people that never worked together, and were attempting to build complex applications from scratch. We saw that if we took our team of engineers and UX designers, that have worked together closely for years, and leveraged a lot of the code already powering the AstroPrint 3D Printing Software platform, we could VERY QUICKLY create software that helps these organizations 3D Print at a much higher scale, and therefore help many more medical professionals have the protection they need.

Our mission now is to leverage our software and engineering team to help local organizations scale up 3D Printing of medical supplies. We’re starting with Spain now, and then will release accessibility to the platform to the rest of the world. Of course, we are not charging for any services related to Covid19 relief efforts!

What it does

AstroPrint Clusters App: A) Connects Regional Coordinators of medical supplies with 'clusters' of 3D Printer owners in their local region. B) Regional Coordinators use cloud file repositories to control what files are being printed by the clusters. C) Regional Coordinators can remotely track the production schedule for all 3D Printer owners in their clusters. D) Regional Coordinators can arrange for serial number creation and quality control checks/validation for parts. E) Regional Coordinators can use the platform to determine optimal pickup/delivery schedules across the 3D Printer owners in their region. F) 3D Printer Owners - simply need to print the files the Regional Coordinator has requested, then make them available as the Regional Coordinator requests pickups/deliveries. E) The system is being built for 3D Printing, but it's important to note that it can handle logistics from any manufacturing technology (CNC, DMLS, SLA, etc).

How I built it

AstroPrint has dedicated our entire engineering team, and UX team, to this project (5 engineers, 2 designers). We are able to leverage some of our existing 3D Printing APIs (publicly available) to speed up production.

Challenges I ran into

Please see this white paper we wrote. This describes some of the challenges facing Spanish 3D Printer owners that are currently printing PPEs for local medical facilities: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Nl5EGuJdiz2lzGIQygKznx6NemWm_LVnBHHYjPDdRrE

In a nutshell, the Regional Coordinators of DIY medical supplies could not scale up production. It was too complex to manage a cluster of 3D Printer owners and all the logistics around part production. They were able to manage somewhat, via Google Spreadsheets and other shared documents. However, they reached a limit. They were turning away new 3D Printer owners that wanted to help, because they could not handle the tracking/logistics of having more people involved.

The tool we're creating is a logistics tool to solve this exact problem. This will allow them to scale to significantly more production capacity.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

SAVING LIVES!

What's next for Community 3D Printing Platform to Fight Covid-19

We already have LOTS of additional feature requests. APIs to integrate with spreadsheet programs, version control of parts, documentation (i.e. Build of Materials) for each part with version control, better matching tools/algorithms to quickly match the right kinds of 3D printers in a region to the Coordinators that need them, and much more.