Danbury Coronavirus: Hackers, 3D Printers, On The Front Lines

DANBURY, CT — Danbury Hackerspace, located in the Innovation Center on Main Street, is an incubator for enterprises and ideas. It's a collective of very bright people who use the manufacturing equipment installed there to develop new businesses, or who have established businesses but need a separate space to pound out a prototype for a new idea.

Members pay up to $50 a month for access to 3D printers, a drill press, chop saw, table saw, router tables and other gear your father warned would take a finger if you weren't careful. Although they call themselves a "collective," they're all normally very focused upon, literally, minding their own business. That changed, as did everything else, when the new coronavirus hit Danbury.

Danbury Hackerspace co-director Mike Kaltschnee has family in Hong Kong and took an intense interest early on in the spread of the virus. That interest turned to alarm when the infection made its way into southwestern Connecticut.

"It quickly became obvious that our medical personnel had severe shortages of life-saving personal protective equipment, like face shields and even simple face masks and a bunch of other stuff," said Gregory Pings, a spokesman for Hackerspace.

>>More Coverage of the Danbury Coronavirus Crisis

So Kaltschnee put the word out to the collective's 3D printing gurus and other "makers," who began noodling around some face shield designs. 3D printers can make just about anything, quickly and relatively inexpensively, but the key bit is getting all the minute and excruciating details in the software-programmed design files correct. Normally, that kind of chin-stroking and hey-whaddabout-ing in a product development cycle would take months, but the coronavirus was not being generous with the clock. Some midnight oil got burned, and the Hackerspace techs and designers settled upon their final code within a week, according to Pings.

Hackerspace, a 501(c)(3) organization, has only about two or three 3D printers on its premises, but most of the makers involved in the 3D printing there also have their own gear at home. As word spread among the hackers and hobbyists, other outfits with 3D printers were discovered — some were other hobbyists, some were in commercial space shut down during the pandemic. The open-source face shield design files were shared around, and the plastic began to pour.

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The only speed bump was the cost of the specialized PETG plastic, the clear material that makes up the front of the face shield. That could not be mass-printed, but needed to be purchased at a cost of $50 for a 4-by-8-foot sheet. Hackerspace can craft about 40 face shields from each sheet. After digging into their own pockets for the first wave of PPE, they decided to reach out to local residents and try to raise some cash.

Pings said that a "small army of volunteers" is already pouring plastic 24/7, and is geared up to make hundreds, "hopefully thousands," of the higher-end personal protective gear for local health care workers.

If you are interested in doing your part to send armor to the troops on the front lines, Danbury Hackerspace is accepting PayPal donations on its website here.