There are post processing steps in injection molding. As you can see in the video, parts come off with gates on them that need to be removed. In the case of these printed parts, you can wash 1000 in one 10 minute cycle.
A full accounting and comparison of cost and time including post processing, in a general way that applies to many parts, is tough to do well.
The margin that a reseller/distributor/retailer has on a product goes mostly to sales and marketing of those products in one form or another (ads, placement in a store, training of staff on the product, etc). If an OEM lets that margin get squeezed by low cost resellers (like a crappy ecommerce only company), their other resellers will also get their margins squeezed and therefore can't spend much to sell that product.
One common response to this is to charge different wholesale prices to different channels, but this can also be difficult to control or subject to price-fixing regulations.
Keeping the margins high for resellers = spending more on sales and marketing for your product.
I don't think non-commodity products in competitive markets should be subject to price-fixing rules in terms of setting the market price, but that's how it is in many jurisdictions today.
Comments 1 and 2 sound like you have only experienced hobbyist-grade printers and not high quality, easy-to-use, professional tools. Engineers can waste time fiddling and there are many things that make sense to outsource during development, but try a Form 2 and see if you still feel this way.
3 is actually an excellent suggestion. It's important to communicate with production suppliers early and often. But outsourcing early stage prototypes to prototype shops usually doesn't help that much (unless your final production volume is low)
4 and 5 are not true for low cost systems if you have even a small amount of printing and value the speed of your development team.
6. Doing as much digitally/on paper as possible is also an excellent suggestion. Too many engineers rush to build stuff Simulation and other tools are constantly improving. But for full functional testing, ergonomics, industrial design, etc, there is still no substitute for physical prototypes.
Full disclosure: I work at Formlabs https://formlabs.com/ and our mission is basically to solve all of these problems.
Re. 1/2. If you send me a Form 2 for a few months or a discount code I'll be happy to give you detailed feedback. Otherwise, at USD$5000+postage it will take a good while outsourcing production for this to make sense. (Typical third party fabrication cost for us is around USD$30-100 per part or part-set delivered via courier.)
Re. 3. We typically use 3D printing to prototype for injection molding. We don't use it as a production process.
Re. 4/5. Your comment makes the false assumption that iterating rapidly on a single component is the sole bottleneck for product design iteration, and thus that failing to optimize iteration speed amounts to bad management. While this is occasionally a requirement, in fact we mostly find there is substantial parallelization potential per module, meaning that even within a single assembly mechanical engineers can place an order and then move on to another part or concern. Also, nobody selling printers ever calculates for support removal and finishing time/space/tools/chemicals, noise, smell/indoor air pollution, human presence requirement in order to transfer parts to automated washing/curing units, or additional overhead and loss due to slack materials stock.
More importantly, Boston is much heavier into manufacturing technology, hardware, B2B software, etc whereas NYC is more focused on consumer, retail, fashion, etc. Boston is pretty clearly a better choice for GE.
These are some good warnings. The way I like to think about it is that the actual free cash available to spend from the grant is on the order of 1/3 of the sticker price when you fully account for the costs of getting the grant, administering it, and fulfilling the requirements which inevitablly do not line up exactly with your business goals.
Many companies get stuck in a kind of grant hamster wheel where they end up only producing enough from a grant to be able to get another grant, and not advance in commercializing their technology. I think there are few companies that make the transition from being primarily grant funded for a period into a high growth success.
Sometimes it's your only option for funding, but ideally, it makes up 0 to a fraction of your R&D funding so that it doesn't dilute your focus.
This advice is specific to companies that have a path to be VC-fundable, high growth, commercial success. There are many other (most) companies that can be funded by grants and build their technology incrementally over time.
Of course, there is a difference between a demo focusing on implementing new features then the software that we are shipping. But yes, it was extremely impressive and it's no surprise that he is leading much of our engineering team (beyond software, as well) today.
On a side note, what are higher ups looking for in a young applicant? I'm graduating in the fall with a CS Undergrad and don't have any startup contacts (I live in a smaller town in Missouri) and am trying to get my foot in the door somewhere that is doing interesting work.
Projects. Contribute to open source as much as possible and build as much stuff as possible that you can show off. Then you should have no issue finding something interesting. Might have a better chance searching outside your hometown though.
Passion. Engagement. Curiosity. Being the absolute best possible at something - I don't really care what, but being mediocre at lots of things is a turnoff. Ability to learn new stuff, more so than any specific skill (although YMMV with this one).
Any interview I walk out of thinking I've had a 2-way meeting of minds, a genuinely engaged conversation as if we're already peers, rather than an attempt to simply answer a list of questions is going to do well.
I am curious if the demo app was built using some pre-existing libraries/frameworks or even UI widgets. Because, based on the info available on the demo site, even if the author knew exactly what he was going to develop and the tech behind it, the sheer amount of coding required to build such an app from scratch would take way more than 3 days.
It is indeed possible that if the NSA used a very different strategy with vulnerabilities, Iran might be further along with its nuclear weapons development.
Stuxnet will always be possible. The vulns/trojans just replace having to get someone to knowingly install it.
Or rather, will always be possible until we move to doing protocol and behavior analysis of SCADA commands (as they enter the machine). And that'll just mean it has to get more subtle. If there's a way to do it right, there're more ways to do it wrong.
High-speed gearing is indeed very difficult, but jet engines already typically have two separate, concentric rotating units (spools: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbofan#Basic_two_spool). Also, as the article mentions, turboprops (essentially jet engines connected to a propeller) already commonly use gearing. I guess you can think of it as a turboprop with a duct.
The reality is probably just that this is a solvable problem that just wasn't worth the work while there were easier efficiency gains to be had.
> High-speed gearing is indeed very difficult, but jet engines already typically have two separate, concentric rotating units [...]
Yes, everyone knows that, but the spools are not connected by a set of gears as they are in the P&W's new engine.
> Also, as the article mentions, turboprops (essentially jet engines connected to a propeller) already commonly use gearing. I guess you can think of it as a turboprop with a duct.
The new engine is ALSO unlike most installations of turboprop engines in that the fan is driven by the power spool, not a free turbine. The free turbine (in turboprops that have them), which powers the reduction gears for the propeller, runs at a much lower speed than the power turbine.
Not exactly. We raised a seed round of $1.8m a little less than 1 year before the Kickstarter. We probably could have built and shipped the product off of the crowdfunding proceeds, but we couldn't have had such a successful crowdfunding campaign without spending some of that money to design the product and market it well.
Formlabs is bringing ground-breaking professional 3D printers to the desktop of every designer, engineer, researcher, and artist in the world. We pioneered the desktop SLA printer and now have the largest installed base of SLA printers in the world. Our team has tripled in the past year to over 100 people today and counting.
--
Electro-Optics Systems Lead
Formlabs is hiring an electro-optics systems lead. We’re looking for a hands-on engineering leader who has technical depth & breadth as well as excellent project management, product development, and team-building skills. This person will lead an interdisciplinary team to design and manufacture electronics, control systems, and precision optics inside the next generation of desktop 3D printers. This a great opportunity to join the team that’s building breakthrough products and an awesome engineering culture.
Software at Formlabs is beyond full stack: bare metal firmware, embedded Linux, signal processing and controls, 3D algorithms, UI/UX, scientific computing, web applications. Software is critical at every stage in the pipeline that transforms 3D digital models to beautiful physical form. We’re building a team that’s the best in the world at rapidly developing complex systems into elegant and accessible products.
A full accounting and comparison of cost and time including post processing, in a general way that applies to many parts, is tough to do well.