The members of Creator- Box2036 – the name adopted by the student team of ARENA2036, a University of Stuttgart research platform for mobility and future production technologies – are involved in the development of groundbreaking technical solutions to everyday research challenges. For instance, the working students are helping with the automation of the Internet of Things in the ARENA2036. The CreatorBox2036 team are also implementing a project of their own; Fabian Geyer and Finn Jonas Peper explain what it entails.
What are you currently working on?
Our current project is the ARENA2036 Rapid Prototyping Service (ARPS), for which we need to develop a fully automated 3D printing system. Our objective is to make a user-friendly 3D printing service available to everyone in ARENA2036. Users can submit print jobs via a website, whereupon production on a free 3D printer will start fully automatically. We envisage automatic transportation of the finished prints from the printing platform to a warehouse via an autonomous transport vehicle. We are currently in the process of creating a 3D model, planning the mechatronic systems and programming the control system.
What is the greatest challenge in all of this?
We often encounter maintenance issues or defects. For example, our 3D printer is fitted with a small extruder with a diameter of just 0.4 millimeters through which the liquid or semi-liquid material passes for days on end. This extruder can get clogged up if the temperature setting is incorrect or if the run time is particularly long, in which case we have to disassemble the whole 3D printer and repair the component in question. We are currently working on data collection and early detection with a view to solving this issue in order to automate and stabilize the process.
What’s so special about the CreatorBox2036?
During your university studies, you often find yourself surrounded by people studying exactly the same thing as you. In contrast, students with different skill sets studying anything from electrical and information engineering to technical cybernetics, mechanical engineering, aerospace engineering or autonomous systems are brought together in the CreatorBox2036. We enjoy sharing our ideas and knowledge among ourselves and are delighted about being able to turn our hobby into a job. We work in an extremely independent manner and enjoy a lot of freedom to express ourselves.