We invited a handful of members of the 3D printing community that we have been featuring for #3DThursday or on our weekly 3D Hangouts live show to share with us their thoughts about the past year, what they each shared, and what they are looking forward to for 2015.

Andreas Bastian is a researcher, designer, and engineer who focuses on 3D printing technologies and their applications.

He has worked with FDM, SLS, DMLS, and SLA technologies and is currently a 3D printing research scientist at Autodesk. He is also active in the e-NABLE 3D printing prosthetics community where he designs devices and infrastructure.

Q: TOP THREE PRINTING MOMENTS FROM 2014?

• Announcement of HP’s multijet fusion technology — the process has been demonstrated and is still a couple years from commercialization, but it represents an important play by an experienced and established company to produce a new kind of printer that contrast with those manufactured by old industry giants and young, scrappy start-ups. It’s also exciting to see a relatively novel process that is independent of FDM, SLA, SLS, and polyjet technologies.
• Launch of Spark and the Spark Fund — I’m a bit biased on this number because it’s stuff that I get to work on, but it’s been great to work towards open tools that directly address the many of the factors that have been slowing development and implementation of 3D printing technology.
• e-NABLE’s Prosthetists Meet Printers Johns Hopkins Conference was an astounding success and an incredible summit of medical professionals and 3D printing community activists. Everybody walked away motivated and with new ideas for better hands and it really opened up dialog between medical professionals and e-NABLE volunteers within the e-NABLE community.

Q: WHAT’S A 3D PROJECT YOU SHARED THIS YEAR?

In mid-December, e-NABLE released the Raptor Reloaded, a body-driven device synthesized from hand designs and ideas generated in the community. The design is fully documented with source files, schematics, and assembly images available on e-NABLE’s github, and is designed to be hacked.

Q: WHAT ARE YOU MOST LOOKING FORWARD TO FOR 3D PRINTING IN 2015?

New and more capable materials for FDM and photopolymer systems and better software. I think we’re going to be able to get a lot more out of machines from 2014 in 2015.

Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!

Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!

The Adafruit Learning System has dozens of great tools to get you well on your way to creating incredible works of engineering, interactive art, and design with your 3D printer! We also offer the LulzBot TAZ – Open source 3D Printer and the Printrbot Simple Metal 3D Printer in our store. If you’ve made a cool project that combines 3D printing and electronics, be sure to let us know, and we’ll feature it here!