The Journey of Discovering 3D Printing

In summer 2018, I came to a dead end of my 8 year career in a well respected multi-national corporation. After the abrupt change of my career, I was suddenly out of anchor as it was the only company that I worked for since graduating college. It was one of the darkest periods of my life as I had a wonderful career, which gave me experiences that most young graduates would dream for. Nonetheless, that path was over, so I gave myself a year to engage myself in a new path.

For weeks, I surfed the web without a clear purpose, in the good old 'web surfing' kind of way. During the surf, I discovered cool DIY projects people around the world are doing, employing technical competence which looked like wizardry in my eyes. It never occurred to my mind that I could ever learn the skills needed to start any technical projects, mainly because I was not educated in any IT, Engineering or Science disciplines. Through the web surfs, I had good ideas of what DIY technology projects were possible, but what was lacking was the in-depth knowhow for projects to take shape.

I was always a regular coffee drinker since adulthood began, I still am. At home, I have a Nepresso machine which requires a regular refill of disposable coffee capsules in order to produce coffee. These capsules came inside a card box with capsules lined up linearly. Each time when I needed to make coffee, I had to stick my hand into the box to pick out one capsule. I really disliked the inconvenience, whenever I tried to collect one capsule, either my hand damaged the cardbox, or more capsules came out of the box than intended. For certain, I needed a coffee capsule dispenser, and the search for the perfect product began.

On Amazon or Taobao or any online sellers, the dispenser designs I came across was not what I needed. All the dispenser designs required the consumer to take out all the capsules for the box and insert into the dispenser one by one. I said to myself, 'why would I repeat the capsule removal process for the box twice' (once to place capsule into dispenser, once to consume coffee). Disgruntled, I continued my search on Google, until I came across a design on a website called 'thingiverse'. This design was exactly what I wanted, nothing more, nothing less.

This design required a user to open the capsule box and slide the whole box into a dispenser, after which all the capsules would fall into place one by one to be collected for consumption. The design file was simply shared online to be downloaded for free, there was no link to buy it. It turned out 'thingiverse' is not a shopping website, it is simply a free platform for 3D printing enthusiasts in the world to share their 3D designs for fun. Having this capsule dispenser 3D design, the only problem I faced then was where I could turn this simple design into a real object. I googled '3D printing' service in my city, found several service providers and emailed for a quotation with the 3D design attached. The quote came back to be around HK$150-200 (USD20-25). I was absolutely shocked, why would I pay USD25 for a little piece of plastic which the service provider didn't even design?

I knew I had to find out more about what 3D printing is. That was August 2018.