Undergraduate design team streamlines 3D printing process

This is the Manufacturing Work Cell team, a group of really talented engineers that are part of VT CRO. VT CRO has eight design teams. Everybody uses 3D printed parts. We all want access to these printers. We're always like "Hey, can I get the printer next?" A bottleneck can be the downtime for the printers. So if a print finishes and there's nobody to take off the plate, that's time wasted. We aimed to solve that problem by making a plate swapper, so an autonomous print farm that can automatically remove and replace plates. So the idea is you can add prints to a queue, it'll automatically take off the print, place it in a shelf somewhere, notify the user, and then automatically start the next print. So we have minimal downtime. We're talking like 5-10 minutes compared to maybe like 5-6 hours. The whole movement system between picking up a plate, placing it down, storing it in a shelf, picking up a new plate, putting it down, that's entirely made by our mechanical team. On the software side, we have access to a website queue system that's hosted on Oracle servers. We had integration with Bamboo slicer and Orca slicer. We also have an entire Ross network. That was all developed by us. Also, Discord integration. VT CRO, all 100 plus members are on our single VT CRO Discord. And I think it's very important that it's super easy and accessible to use our website, like, the queue aspect of it. A system like this at a maker and consumer level really doesn't exist at this price point or at the accessibility level that we're trying to accomplish. One of our main goals was to make this for, like, a hobbyist to be achievable. So this system back here costs $3,000, and anybody can build it based off the CAD and the instructions provided. I have huge interest in additive manufacturing. So being able to talk to mechanical engineers and kind of realize my idea has been really exciting for me. We have CS majors, computer engineering majors, electrical engineering, mechanical, and then also one aerospace major. It's super exciting to collaborate with a whole bunch of different specializations just to see what kind of product you get because if you only, like, electrical and computer engineering, which is what I'm familiar with, you really like get, like, a software with, like, maybe a bit of, like, electrical aspect to it. But this is, like, a full design team that can realize an actual product.