3D People UK — Design Engineering Showcase 2022

Student: Zhiyuan Liu
Team: Software Development
Role: Software Developer, Lead Hardware Engineer

3D People UK, founded in 2017, is a relatively small but rapidly growing firm in the UK’s additive manufacturing industry. The company offers industry-leading 3D printing services as its main product, and some CAD consulting services for customers who have limited knowledge of additive manufacturing. The main feature that makes the company stand out from the industry is its e-commerce style, automated ordering, and manufacturing process. Customer satisfaction is the company's main objective.

Role and Contributions

Most of my work is to automate internal/backend processes and save time and money spent on stages of production. I directly report to the business owner and communicate with the people in the firm to have a better idea of how my work can save their time. The projects I’ve been assigned are software works, one task was related to basic finances and taking a leading role to establish a hardware engineering build.

For the most amount of my time at 3D People, I work as a backend software engineer, but the most important outcome of my placement, I recognize is my hardware project. The software projects (mainly using python) are implemented on our company website's backend (using AWS Lambda), providing a smoother experience for customers and easier operations for our technicians to process the received 3d model files. The hardware project was making a prototype of a 3.6kW dyeing machine, which involves different engineering control methods. As most people in the company do not have an engineering background, and the projects will affect the team for a long time, so detailed documentation for the non-technical background is made for future developments.

Project Details

Role and Contributions