Rapid prototyping for an edukit using 3D printer and CNC machine

Abstract

Rapid prototyping for an electronic product is now a burning issue in the industrial world. The world is now a global village where business is very much competitive. Technology is rapidly changing. So if a product is invented but not brought in the market in the right time then market will be lost, whole R & D effort will be null and void which in turn creates huge revenue loss. 3D printing technology has been proved effective for rapid prototyping of electronic product. It does not require making any new tool for product development which saves a lot of time, money, and effort that would normally be spent on tooling the production line and getting an assembly process set up. In this project, an Educational Kit (EduKit) for teaching and learning of microcontroller has been designed and developed including its casing and PCB has been developed using the CNC machine and 3D printing facility of IICT as a case study in order to learning the technology. Eagle software has been used for schematic and PCB design. From the schematic design, G-code is generated and then it is fed to the CNC machine for PCB fabrication which is once sent to China for the said fabrication and took months to reach in hand. Casing of the EduKit is designed using fusion 360 CAD software and from the CAD design G-code is again generated to feed the 3D printer. 3D printer slices the whole design using two a number of dimensional planes and exact amount of resource is used and the casing of the product is manufactured within shortest possible time. In future the 3D printing technology available in IICT, BUET can be used for commercial product development.