Translator: Lisa Rodriguez Reviewer: Rhonda Jacobs
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 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 in CAD,
I 3D printed some of the parts on my printer available,
threw in some hobby servos,
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.
The response was really good.
Everybody was like, "Gabe, we should pursue this.
Let's see if it's worth the effort.
Let's put it on Kickstarter or something."
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 they were like, "No, come on, let's -
we don't have anything else going on, so let's try it."
I was like, "Okay, 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.
(Laughter)
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.
(Laughter)
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 going to start making stuff for my wife,
and I'm going to be making toys for my kids!
I'm going to totally disrupt
the whole manufacturing cycle and supply chain!"
And we're like, "Way to go, Frank.
You spent all weekend on a 2,000-dollar machine
with 20 bucks of materials making a piece of garbage
that you could've bought for 99 cents on Friday
and had delivered by Monday.
Sticking it to the man."
(Laughter)
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 a rough-out.
But now I was on the hook to make a product
that people are going to use and 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 descriptors is wrong.
The first one to drop out was really the speed.
3D printing, if you've ever gotten a small part,
takes a long time to make a single piece.
If you've got a small piece like the shoulder red 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 at 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.
But then we thought, "Well, 3D printers are pretty cheap,
we can double the number of machines we've got in the office.
Now, it's only going to take us three months.
We could probably double it again, and then we'd finish 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 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 these,
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 with 3D printing.
Once we did that,
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 LittleArm 2C.
Every one of those parts is optimized for 3D printing.
The layering 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 end game.
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.
(Laughter)
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 in 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 the LittleArm Big. It's a more complex robotic arm.
And then we took everything 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 in the most efficient means possible
to create these.
Now,
at this point, we'd figured out that,
okay, if you've used 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 that 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 to be 3D printed,
and then when 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're highly modular,
easy to maintain.
When one finishes a part, it ejects it, it moves on 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 one hundred 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.
(Laughter)
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 shipload of material from anywhere in the world,
(Laughter)
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's no set up,
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 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 going to have to go through all of the setup
just to get started,
and all of the expenditure that goes along with that.
But now, that kid can create the design, just post it online,
and say, "If you want this, buy it."
Then he can buy ten, deliver those.
He can update the design
so that everything manufactured after that
is updated the way you would update an app.
He 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.
(Applause)