NOVEDGE blog

The Edge: What is the Matter(form)?

Novedge: Adam and Drew, tell us a bit about you.

Drew Cox: We are both tinkerers, makers, and inventors. Adam [Brandejs] specializes in electronics and design, while I'm more engineering and software.

Novedge: Partnerships are powerful, but can also be difficult. How did you two come together? What makes your collaboration successful?

Drew Cox: We met through working in Advertising. We both had a love for interesting tech, and Adam knew every cutting edge thing that was out there. So we started working together on projects and one of the ideas was for a laser based 3D Scanner. We work well together because our skills only overlap where it's important. Otherwise we are both pretty eclectic individuals.

 

Novedge: Why do we need the Matterform?

Drew Cox: Maybe not need, but want. 3D Scanning is a technology that is new to a lot of people, and the more people that get to try it out, the more interesting things we find to do with it. Right now there are a lot of people from all walks of life who are interested in the Matterform 3D Scanner. Everything from medical and dental applications, to artists, or dads wanting to save their daughters plasticine sculptures. The uses are really unlimited.

Beta Scan

Novedge: You received great support on Indiegogo. What advice would you give to anyone looking into financing their project using that platform?

Drew Cox: We used Indiegogo because it was open to Canadians. It's important to remember, with any crowd funding platform, that you be honest, and make sure you communicate to your backers as much as possible.

Beta Scan

Novedge: Do you have a 3D printer at home? Or do you use a 3rd-party 3D printing service?

Drew Cox: We use both. We have a few different 3D printers here in the shop, but we also use local services such as 3DPhacktory, and online services to help us print parts when we need them.

Novedge: What software do you use to prepare your files for 3D printing?

Drew Cox: We use a wide array of professional and free software. It depends what we are doing. I am a big fan of Solidworks, but it's not for beginners. Blender and SketchUp are great free modelling packages. After that we use Repetier (with Skeinforge and Slic3r) to print our own parts here.

Novedge: Are we in the midst of a 3D printing revolution?

Drew Cox: For sure! I want to live in a world where we can fabricate whatever we want without big machines and lots of restrictions.

Novedge: What's next for the Matterform and for you?

Drew Cox: We're just focused on finishing the production of the Matterform Scanner, and polishing off all the software. Of course we never stop tinkering and developing new ideas, so hopefully there will be some surprises to come.

 

Check out Matterform's website for more details and images.

Get in touch with Novedge on Twitter

Interview with the Afinia Team: Aaron Pratt

Novedge: Tell us about yourself and what you do

Aaron Pratt: I’m Afinia’s Vice President of Marketing. In my personal life, I’m a husband and a father of seven, and I love playing the piano and reading. 

 

Afinia is the new business division of Microboards Technology, which has been developing robotics and printers in the CD/DVD industry for twenty years. In the new business division, we are experimenting with all kinds of printing-related robotic technology. 3D printing is the most prominent of them. But we're also playing with very high speed label printing, and with some devices for the medical industry as well.  It's a fun place to be. And we know 3d printers especially well because we use them in our own design and prototyping every day.

 

Novedge: What inspires you?

Aaron Pratt: I’m inspired by ideas. I spend a lot of time reading about ideas.  I like reading about foreign policy and economics, about communications and language, and about art and science.  To me it is important not only to test ideas and see if they work, but to choose to see the world through models and ideas that bring about good – good art, good relationships, good feelings.  I see 3D Printing as a tangible manifestation of that - enabling creation, transferring ideas to the physical world – making us all designers and artists. 

One of the best books I read last year was Seth Godin’s Linchpin. It talked about making good art and giving it away. As an artist, I was inspired by the idea of seeing my work as art and a gift to the world, and seeing income and career as a residual effect instead of the purpose. 

Not long after I read Godin’s book, I had a visit at my office from a 3d Printing Enthusiast named Peter Leppik.  He’s an endearing person, very smart and enjoyable to talk to.  He showed me a set of toy gears that clip together he’d designed for his nephew for his birthday.  You can see them (and download the files) here http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:30981.  What a great way to give something of yourself.  Maybe Sam will grow out of the gears someday, but what a great expression of love to design and print something like that. 

We also have another user who volunteers his time designing devices for helping disabled children. Because of how children grow and change, assistance devices require much more customization.  This guy is a talented mechanical engineer and designer. Before he bought a printer I invited him to send me a design he was trying to wrap up and printed it for him.  Even though I had put many hours in at one of our printers I was awed at how beautiful this part was when it came off the printer.  I remember we did it in yellow at his request, and it was the first time I'd used our yellow filament, and it worked absolutely perfectly, the first time, and was something that I was really proud to send him.

 

Novedge: What are you most proud of at Afinia? What is the biggest challenge you overcame? 

Aaron Pratt: I’m proudest of our out-of-box experience. If that sounds like a product pitch, well, it is, but it really is our highest accomplishment.  We were what you would call a “late market entrant”.  We came in to the market because we know how to commercialize a product, and we saw a lot of companies that don’t know how to do that.  Things that are painful to users are not obvious to companies that are experts in the technology.  We worked with a manufacturer and said “Let’s fix this.  Mount the LED here. Make sure it comes out of the box in one piece.  Fix the little tiny bugs. Rewrite the manual.”  We went around the country meeting with users. We toured supplier facilities in China. We’ve tested dozens of filament suppliers.  We changed everything, right down to the packaging itself, to make sure that users would want to tell their friends how easy we were to use, especially compared to whatever tinker toy they had pulled their hair out trying to assemble last.  You can see a very detailed description of the out-of-box experience as my counterpart, John Westrum, steps you through it here:

In it, he describes every step and every accessory in the box – in less than 30 minutes.  When I’m setting one up at a show, it takes me under five minutes to have it set up and recognized by the PC. 

Getting the product just right is what will allow us to recreate Peter’s experience tens of thousands of times.  One of our users designs customized parts for assistance devices for disabled children.  I just talked to another guy who builds airships who wants one for his shop and to introduce his son to design and prototyping.  That’s just a small handful of the many stories we’ve been involved in. 

Design by @dizingof

Novedge: What is special about Afinia's 3D printers? What software is best used when designing an object to be 3D printed with them?

Aaron Pratt: What's special about our printers is the experience.  The speeds and feeds of the various devices on the market is all about the same.  It’s what happens around the machine that makes us awesome.  Try calling our tech support – if they don’t answer immediately, they will within a business day. (Seriously – try it – 952.279.2643).  Or e-mail us. Or Twitter us. Or Facebook us.  We’re very responsive. 

The software is strong too – again, all part of having a flawless user experience.  Our software is one step: open the STL and hit print.  You can do some manipulation, of course – scaling it, placing it where you want it to print, rotating it, adjusting support material and so on.  But there’s no pre-processing, exporting G-Code, and so on.  That’s all done in the background. And once the file has been sent to the printer, you can unplug the USB cable and walk away.

So far we’ve had great experience with all the design software that can output STLs. In-house, we’re a Solidworks-centric company. But lots of our designers use the other major packages.  (And some of the obscure ones, too.)

Design by @dizingof

Novedge: What innovations do you see in your field now or in the future?

Aaron Pratt: The big ones that everyone is talking about are print envelope (larger part sizes), speed, and materials.  I see all three as part of the near future.  I think the first one you can expect to see from us is a larger print envelope.  We also recently announced an enhancement in resolution (from .20 mm to .15mm), and I anticipate there will be more of that in the future.  The one I am most excited about is materials.  I can’t promise anything yet, but I am really looking forward to being able to make some announcements about different plastics and beyond.

All images courtesy of Afinia.

No, It Will Not Make Tea

If you have been spending time on Planet Earth during the last year or so you must have heard that we now have 3D Printing that will soon and forever change the way we live. If you read the articles on the mainstream media you will probably think we have just invented the Star Trek Replicator 1.0 and as soon as 2.0 will come out we will be able to ask Siri for “Tea, Earl Gray Hot” and have it materialized by this incredible thing called 3D Printer in a few seconds…

Well, I have bad news for you, there is no Next Generation (pun intended) 3D Printer model to be released soon that will make you tea. Even if we were able to manipulate matter at the level necessary to materialize tea (and mug) out of thin air the energy requirements are so enormous that for many generations to come traditional tea making will remain the better option (I guess that a Siri enabled kettle will do most of the trick anyway..)

Disappointed? Well, don’t be because this revolution is happening, it will just not be as big as if we could control the creation of matter out of energy at subatomic resolution. What this revolution IS about is the popularization of “Rapid Prototyping”, a quarter century old technology, due to the recent introduction of low cost (read few thousand US$) desktop 3D Printers. These low cost printers are making Rapid Prototyping technology that once was only accessible to companies with deep pockets available to pretty much anybody that can benefit from it. This is in my opinion similar to the car revolution that was the result of the introduction of the Ford Model T. With the Model T the car became affordable to the masses where it was only available to the financially privileged and this changed forever the way we travel: personal mobility became available to anybody that wanted it.

Practically, what will change once we will all have a 3D Printer? I believe so many things will change that this is really hard to predict but I’ll go out on a limb with some examples that I feel very strong about.

• It is like holding the object in your hand, literally. How many times you have heard that with the latest and greatest 3D visualization software “it is like holding the object in your hand”? With 3D Printing that is exactly what you will do: you will hold the physical object in your hand and play with it. Anybody that knows about design knows that you should prototype early and often and with 3D Printing it is so easy to build prototypes that you will do just that, on your desktop.

• Rapid prototyping will be available to small companies and individual designers. Because of the affordability of the technology 3D Printing will not be just for the Boeing and GM of the world but, for example, architects will be able to print their dioramas to show their customers faster and better than they are doing now.

• You will be able to download lots of plastic toys and parts. When I was a kid I loved to assemble plastic models. If you are familiar with them you know that they come as injection molded plastic parts. If you have a 3D Printer you can download the 3D models of these plastic parts and print them yourselves. No need to go to the store. Many toys will be sold as MP3 files (STL to be precise that is the MP3 equivalent for 3D Printers)

• Goodbye LEGO? I do not really know if LEGO will be replaced by 3D Printing but you can certainly see that now you can create something quickly with a simple 3D editor like Sketchup and print it. Not only you could download your toys but you can in fact design them and have them materialized right away. What a way to nurture creativity. If I were a Kid I would love that. Oh well… I do not need to be a kid – I love that, period!
  

So, the 3D Printing revolution is in fact happening and it will be very interesting to see how it will impact all of us. Then, maybe you could brew yourself a nice tea, Earl Gray hot, and think about what you can do with a desktop 3D Printer and let us know.

How do you think affordable 3D Printing will change your future?

 

Cristiano Sacchi – is the co founder and CEO of Novedge

Why I like 3D Navigation Devices

When we interact with a 3D computer model to analyze it or change its shape, a 3D scene appears on the screen as seen through a virtual camera. In order to look at the object from a different direction, zoom in or out, or to pan to a different area we need to move the virtual camera or change its settings.

Few years ago, changing the camera would involve typing some short commands on a command-line. Longtime AutoCAD users still use some of those commands. As the GUIs became more pervasive, icons and buttons replaced the text commands. This new, visual approach was more intuitive, easier to learn and remember. For heavy 3D users like me, there was a major drawback: every time I needed to change the camera position, I had to move the cursor from the center of the scene to the icons and back. Software systems quickly came up with a simple solution to the problem. The trick was to associate the camera position with simple mouse movements when holding some keys, such as [SHIFT], [ALT], or [CTRL]. The improvement was evident, but something didn't feel right yet. Every time I had to suspend a command to change one of the camera parameters, I had to hold one key on the keyboard and drag the mouse's cursor on the screen as if I were interacting with an invisible slider. As the camera reached the new position, I always had to bring back the cursor to its original location to complete the suspended command. If this doesn't look like a great deal to you, try to imagine working 8 hours a day, 5 days a week with a 3D system. I’m sure you'll begin to see the cost of it.

All this mouse racing around the desktop is now over! An affordable solution to the problem is available: 3D navigation devices. Now you can combine a 3D navigation device, such as the ones made by 3Dconnexion, with a traditional mouse and a keyboard to optimize the interactions with a 3D scene or 3D object. While one hand is on the mouse to control the cursor, the other hand holds the 3D navigation device to control the position of the virtual camera and to navigate the 3D scene. In my experience it takes just a few minutes to get used to controlling two devices at the same time. I immediately felt comfortable the first time I tried a mouse and a 3D navigator together; it was just like the first time I used a PC mouse.

In the past those 3D navigation devices were a little bit on the expensive side. It was difficult to justify their cost, especially if your boss was not fully familiar with the concepts of 3D interaction. Now, with new products just released by 3Dconnexion (a company owned by Logitech), such as  the SpaceNavigator and the SpaceExplorer, the price of a 3D navigation device dropped to a level comparable to a regular mouse. Tell your boss, there's no excuse anymore!

Franco Folini

P.S. I would recommend this video from the Google Earth Blog.