Welcome to Shaper! Come on in.
Shaper is a human involved robotics company. So, we're trying to use computer
vision and robotics technology and other modern technologies to bring the power
tool industry up to date and beyond. So, Shaper Origin is our first product
and our first foray into making products that enable people to do crazy things,
making stuff that they just couldn't do before.
This was Brubeck, our first prototype that had all three axes so the z-axis
could move up and down and could plunge for you to variable depths. In Brubeck, all the
electronics and computation was still external. So, there was a whole external
computer, everything was kind of just shoehorned into this. So, my role at
Shaper has been to take some of the concepts behind what Brubeck was off,
off-board computer, off-the-shelf electronics, make it all custom,
integrate it all into one device and make it manufacturable. And then, the last
piece of the puzzle here is Shaper Tape. So, Shaper Tape which comes in this roll
like this that we manufacture. This is how you augment your workpiece, how Origin
knows how to track where you are in 3D space. So, this is designed to be cheap,
disposable, easy to apply and easy to come off.
Origin knows exactly where it is in 3D space. So, you can augment your design
files virtually onto your work space and then from there, it's basically like
playing a video game that origin lets you control. On Origin's capacitive
touchscreen, you follow the lines you try to stay as close as possible to the
thing that you're cutting and Origin has a real time correction system.
It's like autocorrect for your hands. So, you do the rough movements and then origin does the
fine adjustments for you, adjusting many hundreds of times per second to make
sure that you're following your cutting path exactly even if you don't have the
world's most steady hands. So, you get a cut that is perfect despite you as a
human not being perfect. One of the cool things about Origin is that all of the
parts have to work together in perfect harmony from both the software,
electrical and mechanical standpoint and if either one of those doesn't work
as it's intended, then the entire product won't function properly.
Within Origin, there is multiple PCBs. All of them mounted in different planes and at
different angles just because of the complexity of the product. There is a lot
of work that I had to do with our mechanical team to get the electronics
to be big enough, to have all the actual electronics on them that the tool needs
to operate, small enough to fit inside the tool, positioned in such a way that
we can heatsink everything properly and insulated from the environment in such a
way that we can keep them safe. And Altium has been quite critical and
allowing me to do that efficiently. As a start-up, we don't have the time or money to do a
hundred revisions of these things. We want to get as much right initially as possible.
People have these ideas, these things they want to do, these things they want
to make. Shaper, as a company, is about enabling people to make something that
can be wood, can mill a copper-clad, circuit board, you can do that design in
Altium, you can do that design in Illustrator, it doesn't matter.
We want to let people just express their creativity and that's what Shaper is about doing.
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