This week’s selection is the QR Code Memorial by Michael P. Bourque.
Bourque, a former Stratasys director, is a prolific 3D printer operator, publishing several interesting designs made at his “Invention Lab”. He experiments with materials, designs and applications.
Recently he posted an amazing design on LinkedIn that is both simple and timeless. It’s a memorial for his late father, John Harold Bourque, who passed in 2017.
Bourque sought to provide a kind of electronic memorial for his father and designed a QR code medallion as shown at top. This was then affixed to the tombstone, where passersby can easily use their mobile phone camera to link to the online site. That happens to be hosted by Legacy.com, an online obituary sharing service.
While the geometry of the memorial is simple and easily created by extruding a vector representation of a generated QR code, the printing is more interesting.
Because the medallion is to be located outdoors, it must withstand the environment, and in particular UV rays from the Sun. For this Bourque chose ASA as the material. ASA is being increasingly used in popular 3D printing, but has not yet reached well-known status. It has basically the same engineering properties as the more commonly used ABS, but also adds UV resistance. This makes ASA an ideal material for outdoor applications such as this.
To make the code more visible, Bourque used two contrasting colors, black and white, in the print. This was likely accomplished by pausing the print as soon as it reached the QR code layer, and swapping in black filament for the base white.
Bourque also future-proofed the project by purchasing the custom domain name used in the QR code’s URL for a 20 year period. Of course, this also assumes that Legacy.com survives as well.
I’ve not seen 3D printed QR codes used in this way previously, and it seems like a very powerful application. Not only will it be useful for visitors, but it’s also very easy to build.
Via LinkedIn
