A 15-year-old home-schooled teenager is single-handedly changing the way India looks at 3D printing. Indeed, Angad Daryani runs his own company and sells a variety of DIY kits, ranging from portable speakers to Atmel-powered ReRap printers.
“I had no satisfaction that I knew things, I couldn’t apply anything I had learned to real life,” Daryani recently told DNA India. “I quit the formal pattern of studying and am now being home-schooled.”
Daryani says he built his first humanoid robot at 8, along with a remote controlled hovercraft he made in sixth grade by watching YouTube videos. He has also designed an e-book reader for the visually impaired (the Virtual Brailler), which converts written text to braille as it scans across a text.
Daryani’s latest project is the modded RepRap SharkBot, which he describes as “the fastest and most robust desktop 3D printer that can print any material except metal.”
The young Maker said he was inspired to design his own 3D printer, slated to launch in January 2014, after noticing that DIY Makers and engineers were importing printers for desktop use. In the meantime, Daryani continues to offer standard DIY RepRap kits.
“We are wasting foreign currency by importing these things. I want to change that,” Daryani explained. “There’s a movement called Rep Rap which allows people to build [an Atmel-based] 3D printer using stuff they can find at a hardware store. I sell the RepRap Prusa i3.”
As we’ve previously discussed on Bits & Pieces, Atmel AVR XMEGA and megaAVR MCUs can be found in the majority of 3D printers on the market, including the popular MakerBot and RepRap. It should also be noted that the lucrative 3D printing space is set for “explosive growth” in 2014 and 2015. To be sure, Gartner analysts expect worldwide shipments of 3D printers to increase by 75 percent in 2014, followed by a near doubling of unit shipments in 2015.
Atmel | Bits & Pieces 