As the COVID-19 outbreak worsens across the world, the urgent need for medical gear is being partially fulfilled by the additive manufacturing industry. Additive is being used for everything from face shields, medical masks, and respirator valves, to much-needed ventilator parts for critically ill patients. With this kind of critical medical gear in short supply, 3D printing offers a fast way to fill in some of the gaps.
In order to provide our help in these efforts, we are creating a new online tool named: AstroPrint 3D Printing Clusters. This will allow Regional Coordinators to manage ‘clusters’ of local manufacturers (i.e. Printer Owners), and to deliver critical 3D Printed parts to the Medical Facilities that need them.
This will help Coordinators follow local production in real-time, regardless of the manufacturing technology utilized. Since this application is more about logistics, and less about 3D Printer communications, it can be used to track production on any manufacturing technology (FDM, SLA, CNC, DMLS, etc).
How You Can be a Hero:
We need two types of Heroes to help scale up 3D Printing for Medical Facilities.
Regional Coordinators – Connect with local Medical Facilities, determine their needs, approve new Printer Owners into the Cluster, and manage pickup / delivery of printed parts.
3D Printing Heroes – Use their 3D Printers (or other manufacturing machines) to print the designs specified by the Regional Coordinator, and arrange for pickup / delivery.
Join the program via astroprint.com/covid-3d-cluster-app
Spread the word to any 3D Printer owner, any hospital administrator. Now more than ever we need to stand with our great community to win this battle!
Let’s get our printers to work!
Stay safe,
