Make-N-Share

Use your 3D printer to make money and help the community with the power of Make-N-Share.

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Inspiration

We were inspired by the number of people who leave their 3D printers sitting there doing nothing, and the number of people who want to print, but don't have a printer to use. Most professional solutions are expensive and out of the way, Make-N-Share provides an easy and simple way for anyone to upload a file for someone to print for you.

What it does

The Make-N-Share website exists as the center of our ecosystem that allows members to upload 3D models for others to print. Even though there is no payment system currently integrated, we hope to pay members for printing a requested model, keeping people constantly active in the community, both uploading, and printing.

How we built it

We used a combination of MySQL, PHP, HTML 5 and CSS 3 in order to create the front and back end of the website, without the single use of an external library or even bootstrap. Everything was built meticulously by hand to provide the absolute best user experience on every page. With the power of CSS Grid, everything was ready to be organized with ease, allowing the front-end developers to focus on developing the life of the website that is Make-N-Share.

Challenges we ran into

Coordinating the back and front end teams to be in sync, as well as coordinate who is working on which tasks and files to keep then GitHub repo in check. Our upload system was quite a task, especially when configuring permissions on the server.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The team is extremely proud of the logo and UI design that we were able to come up with, as well as getting the uploading system to work for 3D files.

What we learned

Too much to start listing out here, that's for sure. Most of the development process required us to pick up on new skills.

What's next for Make-N-Share

Obviously, this is not a final product.

In the near future, we hope to fully integrate using AWS or the Google Cloud Platform, compared to our current server running out of a college dorm. We hope to soon integrate payment using either the Shopify or Paypal API as well as other features in order to better the experience of using Make-N-Share. These include features like enhanced profiles, friends, and automated shipping label generation for when members can inquire print requests for profit. We are also hoping to allow for other types of files, to allow people to share their CNC Mills, Laser Cutters, and so much more.

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