in the fall of 2016 I went home for the
weekend at the time I was running a
product design and engineering company
and we just finished a very large
project so when I went home there was
nothing to stress about but since there
was nothing to stress about by about
10:00 a.m. on Saturday morning I was
bored so I took out my laptop and I
designed a small robot arm that had been
kicking around in my head for a while I
whipped up the design and CAD I 3d
printed some of the parts on my printer
available through in some hobby servos
and wrote a little bit of code so that
by about Sunday afternoon I had a robot
arm that I could train to kind of pick
up a pen and maybe draw a smiley face
just for the heck of it I took it into
work on Monday to see if it would spark
any good ideas from anybody there at the
office and the response was really good
everybody’s like babe we should pursue
this let’s see if it’s worth the effort
let’s put it on Kickstarter or something
and I was like no I don’t want to do a
toy right now and I don’t want to do a
3d printed anything like ever but then
alright no come on let’s we don’t have
anything else going on so let’s try it I
was like ok fine we took two or three
days and we wrote up a Kickstarter blurb
and we did a quick demo video and we
just threw it up there to see if anybody
cared if there was any response at all
and much to my chagrin the thing was
funded dammit
so I was now on the hook to produce this
3d printed product now the reason I have
such an aversion to 3d printing at that
point was because it was originally
designed in the mid-1980s as a means to
create prototypes a way to take a 3d
design and bring it into the real world
so that you could see it feel it and
kind of get a rough idea of what the
real thing would look like more recently
in the 2000s 3d printing has come to be
kind of a personal technology but it’s
created this monster this guy walks into
the office holding this piece of garbage
yoda head and he says check it out
I made this on my printer over the
weekend I’m gonna start making stuff for
my wife and I’m gonna be making toys for
my kids I’m gonna totally disrupt the
whole manufacturing cycle in supply
chain and we’re like way to go Frank you
spent all weekend on a two thousand
dollar machine with 20 bucks of
materials making a piece of garbage that
you could have bought for 99 cents in it
on Friday and had delivered by Monday
sticking it to the man but because of
this this personal 3d printing
technology designers and engineers when
we think about the technology we
consider it and describe it using these
three words slow crappy and expensive it
takes forever to make the part it’s more
effort than it’s worth and it’s always
terrible when it comes out because it
was just created and invented the whole
process just to make it rough out but
now I was on the hook to make a product
that people were going to use and give
gave us money for but these were no
longer features of a technology that
were to be avoided they were problems
with the technology that we now had to
address and in doing that we realized
that just about every one of these
the first one to drop out was really the
speed 3d printing if you’ve ever got a
small part takes a long time to make a
single piece if you’ve got a small piece
like that the shoulder read part on that
arm it takes about an hour or two to
make it so it’s pretty slow but at the
time we had about two printers in our
office and we started working on the
production for this arm and we realized
it would take about six to eight months
to complete the pre-orders that we had
which was a little slow so but then we
thought oh well 3d printers are pretty
cheap we can double the number of
machines we’ve got in the office now
it’s all gonna take us three months and
we could probably double it again and
then we’d finish it up in six weeks
that’s not too bad but then if you take
that logic and you extend it to a
hundred printers a thousand printers now
you’re creating parts at a rate that is
comparable to almost any other kind of
manufacturing process even though a
single machine may take an hour to make
a piece if you have a hundred machines
you’re now making a hundred pieces per
hour if you have a thousand machines a
thousand pieces per hour just about the
same as any other process if you can hit
that scale so 3d printing had the
potential to produce stuff in a volume
and at a rate that was viable so we went
ahead and we got a few more printers and
we went ahead and produced the
pre-orders for this arm at this point we
realized that there was something there
people cared enough it was a project
worth pursuing and turning it from a
project into a real product but the
issue was the one that we had originally
created was pretty much my original
design that I created over the weekend
and I don’t know about anybody else but
I’m generally not perfect on my first
try so we had to do a full redesign of
this if we were going to continue on
with it and the decision had to be made
did we want to continue on using 3d
printing to produce this or did we want
to go to a more traditional process like
injection molding we thought about it
for a little while but then we decided
yeah we’ll stick it let’s stick with 3d
printing once we did
it freed up the design process so much
since 3d printing had always been a
prototyping technology people would
create and design something for some
process down the line and use 3d
printing just as a way to get a rough
out of it
you never used its strengths you never
used its weaknesses and designed for
those since it was now the end game for
our product that we were planning we
could use its strengths and weaknesses
we could design for that process and
this is what we created this is the
little arm to see every one of those
parts is optimized for 3d printing the
layerings is aligned so that the parts
are strong and reliable every part has a
single flat surface so that it adheres
to a hot print bed and since we knew
that we were going to use 3d printing we
were able to use its ability to create
very complex geometries to make the
parts lighter with internal lattices
that aren’t possible with any other
method as well as to combine the parts
and reduce the total parts in the kit so
that it is quantitatively easier to
assemble easier to work with and in many
ways more beautiful so by designing for
the process we were able to create a
product that was not just good but
better than what had ever been possible
or created before because we used 3d
printing as the endgame but then we
decided to push that a little bit
further we put that on Kickstarter it
did very well much better than the first
one since we actually cared about this
one a little bit and then we kept on
going we saw if we could use the
layering to make a product that was a
little more approachable a little more
fun you can use the layering of 3d
printing the way you would use grain and
wood to soften a product and make it
more approachable we messed around with
how you would use multiple different
parts and producing them so that they
interconnect and work together this is a
little arm big it’s a more complex
robotic arm and then we took every
thing that we’d learned over that span
of time and we combined them all into
this single kit at the end this is the
critter it’s technically a walking robot
he’s kind of like a fish out of water he
drags himself along which is an easy kit
for kids to build and mess around with
but still viable in robotics and
teaching them how walking things work
but what’s really interesting about this
is that we created all five of these
real products went from the design to
the launch to manufacturing into retail
in under a year that doesn’t happen with
most product design it takes months at
least if not years to create a physical
product and get it to market and we were
launching these every two months and
having them into the world and for the
first time a product that you’d pull off
of a shelf when you opened up the box
the parts inside were 3d printed but we
were able to move that quickly because
our prototypes were our production
models and we were using the process and
the most efficient means possible to
create these now at this point we’d
figured out that okay if you use 3d
printing correctly by designing for it
you can create a viable product that is
good and high-quality
and it can potentially produce at a rate
that’s viable but there’s still that
component of cost and within cost you
have the human labor that goes into
making the part and the material goes
along with it for 3d printing again
because it’s a prototyping technology
originally the human labor was a large
component of the cost because somebody
has to set up a file that be 3d printed
and then when a one part is done people
would have to pull it off and then start
the Machine again and then post process
the part there was just so much touch
but fortunately we ran a design company
with a high focus in robotics so we went
ahead and started creating this this is
a photo of one node of our current
printer farm every one of these machines
is custom-designed for industrial
production of 3d printed parts they are
highly modular easy to maintain when one
finishes apart it ejects it it moves
to the next part they are very smart and
getting smarter they can produce about
five to ten thousand parts per week now
with one person maintaining 100 machines
beyond that the only thing a person has
to do is create the design email it to
the farm and say I want a thousand and
it goes until it’s done this is really
awesome in addition to having this
capacity to produce so many parts and do
it reliably since we’ve hit this scale
we’re able to buy a ship load of
material from anywhere in the world and
use the economies of scale that come
with that to make the material cost very
low so that now since you’re using 3d
printing a digital process you’re able
to basically just put in electricity in
plastic and out come finished parts
there is no setup there’s no tool in
there’s very little design time it’s the
creation of physical things at the speed
of thought in the middle of 2017 the the
farm had reached a level to where we’ve
had some excess capacity so we went
ahead and released it as its own company
so that it was available for other
creators and innovators to use and start
designing products for it to create new
things
3d printing allows a kid with a laptop
in a dorm room in the weekend to create
a real physical thing manufacture it and
deliver it to a customer for basically
just the cost of designing and creating
that thing for the longest time this has
only ever been the domain of software
and art the kid could create a movie
script or he could create a website or
app but if you were to create a physical
thing you had better already have a
small fortune because you’re gonna have
to go through all of the setup
to get started and all of the
expenditure that goes along with that
but now that kick can create the design
just post it online and say if you want
this buy it and when a people then you
can buy ten deliver those you can update
the design so that everything
manufactured after that is updated the
way you would update an app you can then
make a hundred update it again make a
thousand this is a manufacturing
back-end that allows the creation of
physical products to be as easy as the
creation of software 3d printing is not
a personal technology it’s a nightmare
to work with but it is a technology that
makes the creation of real physical
products affordable
practical and very very possible thank you
weekend at the time I was running a
product design and engineering company
and we just finished a very large
project so when I went home there was
nothing to stress about but since there
was nothing to stress about by about
10:00 a.m. on Saturday morning I was
bored so I took out my laptop and I
designed a small robot arm that had been
kicking around in my head for a while I
whipped up the design and CAD I 3d
printed some of the parts on my printer
available through in some hobby servos
and wrote a little bit of code so that
by about Sunday afternoon I had a robot
arm that I could train to kind of pick
up a pen and maybe draw a smiley face
just for the heck of it I took it into
work on Monday to see if it would spark
any good ideas from anybody there at the
office and the response was really good
everybody’s like babe we should pursue
this let’s see if it’s worth the effort
let’s put it on Kickstarter or something
and I was like no I don’t want to do a
toy right now and I don’t want to do a
3d printed anything like ever but then
alright no come on let’s we don’t have
anything else going on so let’s try it I
was like ok fine we took two or three
days and we wrote up a Kickstarter blurb
and we did a quick demo video and we
just threw it up there to see if anybody
cared if there was any response at all
and much to my chagrin the thing was
funded dammit
so I was now on the hook to produce this
3d printed product now the reason I have
such an aversion to 3d printing at that
point was because it was originally
designed in the mid-1980s as a means to
create prototypes a way to take a 3d
design and bring it into the real world
so that you could see it feel it and
kind of get a rough idea of what the
real thing would look like more recently
in the 2000s 3d printing has come to be
kind of a personal technology but it’s
created this monster this guy walks into
the office holding this piece of garbage
yoda head and he says check it out
I made this on my printer over the
weekend I’m gonna start making stuff for
my wife and I’m gonna be making toys for
my kids I’m gonna totally disrupt the
whole manufacturing cycle in supply
chain and we’re like way to go Frank you
spent all weekend on a two thousand
dollar machine with 20 bucks of
materials making a piece of garbage that
you could have bought for 99 cents in it
on Friday and had delivered by Monday
sticking it to the man but because of
this this personal 3d printing
technology designers and engineers when
we think about the technology we
consider it and describe it using these
three words slow crappy and expensive it
takes forever to make the part it’s more
effort than it’s worth and it’s always
terrible when it comes out because it
was just created and invented the whole
process just to make it rough out but
now I was on the hook to make a product
that people were going to use and give
gave us money for but these were no
longer features of a technology that
were to be avoided they were problems
with the technology that we now had to
address and in doing that we realized
that just about every one of these
the first one to drop out was really the
speed 3d printing if you’ve ever got a
small part takes a long time to make a
single piece if you’ve got a small piece
like that the shoulder read part on that
arm it takes about an hour or two to
make it so it’s pretty slow but at the
time we had about two printers in our
office and we started working on the
production for this arm and we realized
it would take about six to eight months
to complete the pre-orders that we had
which was a little slow so but then we
thought oh well 3d printers are pretty
cheap we can double the number of
machines we’ve got in the office now
it’s all gonna take us three months and
we could probably double it again and
then we’d finish it up in six weeks
that’s not too bad but then if you take
that logic and you extend it to a
hundred printers a thousand printers now
you’re creating parts at a rate that is
comparable to almost any other kind of
manufacturing process even though a
single machine may take an hour to make
a piece if you have a hundred machines
you’re now making a hundred pieces per
hour if you have a thousand machines a
thousand pieces per hour just about the
same as any other process if you can hit
that scale so 3d printing had the
potential to produce stuff in a volume
and at a rate that was viable so we went
ahead and we got a few more printers and
we went ahead and produced the
pre-orders for this arm at this point we
realized that there was something there
people cared enough it was a project
worth pursuing and turning it from a
project into a real product but the
issue was the one that we had originally
created was pretty much my original
design that I created over the weekend
and I don’t know about anybody else but
I’m generally not perfect on my first
try so we had to do a full redesign of
this if we were going to continue on
with it and the decision had to be made
did we want to continue on using 3d
printing to produce this or did we want
to go to a more traditional process like
injection molding we thought about it
for a little while but then we decided
yeah we’ll stick it let’s stick with 3d
printing once we did
it freed up the design process so much
since 3d printing had always been a
prototyping technology people would
create and design something for some
process down the line and use 3d
printing just as a way to get a rough
out of it
you never used its strengths you never
used its weaknesses and designed for
those since it was now the end game for
our product that we were planning we
could use its strengths and weaknesses
we could design for that process and
this is what we created this is the
little arm to see every one of those
parts is optimized for 3d printing the
layerings is aligned so that the parts
are strong and reliable every part has a
single flat surface so that it adheres
to a hot print bed and since we knew
that we were going to use 3d printing we
were able to use its ability to create
very complex geometries to make the
parts lighter with internal lattices
that aren’t possible with any other
method as well as to combine the parts
and reduce the total parts in the kit so
that it is quantitatively easier to
assemble easier to work with and in many
ways more beautiful so by designing for
the process we were able to create a
product that was not just good but
better than what had ever been possible
or created before because we used 3d
printing as the endgame but then we
decided to push that a little bit
further we put that on Kickstarter it
did very well much better than the first
one since we actually cared about this
one a little bit and then we kept on
going we saw if we could use the
layering to make a product that was a
little more approachable a little more
fun you can use the layering of 3d
printing the way you would use grain and
wood to soften a product and make it
more approachable we messed around with
how you would use multiple different
parts and producing them so that they
interconnect and work together this is a
little arm big it’s a more complex
robotic arm and then we took every
thing that we’d learned over that span
of time and we combined them all into
this single kit at the end this is the
critter it’s technically a walking robot
he’s kind of like a fish out of water he
drags himself along which is an easy kit
for kids to build and mess around with
but still viable in robotics and
teaching them how walking things work
but what’s really interesting about this
is that we created all five of these
real products went from the design to
the launch to manufacturing into retail
in under a year that doesn’t happen with
most product design it takes months at
least if not years to create a physical
product and get it to market and we were
launching these every two months and
having them into the world and for the
first time a product that you’d pull off
of a shelf when you opened up the box
the parts inside were 3d printed but we
were able to move that quickly because
our prototypes were our production
models and we were using the process and
the most efficient means possible to
create these now at this point we’d
figured out that okay if you use 3d
printing correctly by designing for it
you can create a viable product that is
good and high-quality
and it can potentially produce at a rate
that’s viable but there’s still that
component of cost and within cost you
have the human labor that goes into
making the part and the material goes
along with it for 3d printing again
because it’s a prototyping technology
originally the human labor was a large
component of the cost because somebody
has to set up a file that be 3d printed
and then when a one part is done people
would have to pull it off and then start
the Machine again and then post process
the part there was just so much touch
but fortunately we ran a design company
with a high focus in robotics so we went
ahead and started creating this this is
a photo of one node of our current
printer farm every one of these machines
is custom-designed for industrial
production of 3d printed parts they are
highly modular easy to maintain when one
finishes apart it ejects it it moves
to the next part they are very smart and
getting smarter they can produce about
five to ten thousand parts per week now
with one person maintaining 100 machines
beyond that the only thing a person has
to do is create the design email it to
the farm and say I want a thousand and
it goes until it’s done this is really
awesome in addition to having this
capacity to produce so many parts and do
it reliably since we’ve hit this scale
we’re able to buy a ship load of
material from anywhere in the world and
use the economies of scale that come
with that to make the material cost very
low so that now since you’re using 3d
printing a digital process you’re able
to basically just put in electricity in
plastic and out come finished parts
there is no setup there’s no tool in
there’s very little design time it’s the
creation of physical things at the speed
of thought in the middle of 2017 the the
farm had reached a level to where we’ve
had some excess capacity so we went
ahead and released it as its own company
so that it was available for other
creators and innovators to use and start
designing products for it to create new
things
3d printing allows a kid with a laptop
in a dorm room in the weekend to create
a real physical thing manufacture it and
deliver it to a customer for basically
just the cost of designing and creating
that thing for the longest time this has
only ever been the domain of software
and art the kid could create a movie
script or he could create a website or
app but if you were to create a physical
thing you had better already have a
small fortune because you’re gonna have
to go through all of the setup
to get started and all of the
expenditure that goes along with that
but now that kick can create the design
just post it online and say if you want
this buy it and when a people then you
can buy ten deliver those you can update
the design so that everything
manufactured after that is updated the
way you would update an app you can then
make a hundred update it again make a
thousand this is a manufacturing
back-end that allows the creation of
physical products to be as easy as the
creation of software 3d printing is not
a personal technology it’s a nightmare
to work with but it is a technology that
makes the creation of real physical
products affordable
practical and very very possible thank you
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