3D printing made simple

When a part gets printed, a retractable blade cuts the piece out and moves it into a bin, and the next project begins automatically. Projects can be monitored remotely via webcam. 

Invented several years ago in a MIT fraternity house’s basement and commercially launched last April, the printer is now used at more than 100 businesses and schools, primarily as an education tool. Over the past year, there have been more than 84,000 prints, saving more than 165,000 labor hours, according to the startup.

NVLabs, the startup’s research arm, is now bolstering security, analysing big data, working with materials, and improving human-robotic interfaces for 3D printing. In January, NVLabs spun out Digital Alloys, a startup developing high-speed, multimetal manufacturing systems that run at lower costs than traditional systems.

The company envisions a world in which 3D printing is as easy and commonplace as printing on paper — and perhaps more globally accessible, says chair and co-founder Alfonso (A.J.) Perez ’13, MEng ’14.

“Our mission is to allow printing with any material, at any time, and from anywhere in the world. This means you could be on a beach in Bora Bora and control a machine at MIT with the click of one button,” he says.

The other co-founders are Chris Haid ’14, general manager at NVBOTS; Forrest Pieper ’14, director of software at Digital Alloys; and Mateo Peña Doll, director of hardware engineering at Digital Alloys.

As undergraduates, the four NVBOTS co-founders were brothers of Phi Delta Theta and dedicated “makers.” Outside the classroom, they worked on various projects that involved 3D printing parts, such as medical devices and a number of other gadgets. But whenever they wanted a part, they’d submit a computer-aided design (CAD) file to a 3D printer location on campus and wait for the product, which took days.

To expedite production, the group built a custom 3D printer in the fraternity house’s basement. It was exciting at first, but everyone in the house soon wanted to print at the same time. The solution was a cloud-based queue and webcam to monitor the printer which, at the time, was the first of its kind, Perez says.

But each part still needed to be manually removed. “If it was 3:00 in the morning, and you wanted to start the next job, you had to get up and go down into the basement and start it,” Perez says. “That was an untenable solution for us lazy students.”

To rectify that issue, the students created an automated part-ejection mechanism. After a part has been printed, the print plate is lowered. A blade moves over to the plate, wedging underneath the part. As it moves across the plate, the blade cuts away the part and pushes it into a bin. The blade retracts and the plate rises back up.

Being new to the technology, Perez was shocked that, despite decades of operation, 3D printers couldn’t automatically eject parts. The four students filed patents with the MIT Technology Licensing Office but didn’t plan on becoming entrepreneurs. That changed after they brought to the 2013 MIT Tech Fair “a quintessential MIT prototype — a rat’s nest of wires,” Perez says.

Numerous 3D-printing experts asked the students where to buy the automatic part-remover. Moreover, novices didn’t realise the technology and the queuing software were new. “When the early adopters — the experts — are saying that this is the solution to a problem, and the general population already expects the solution to exist, that was the ‘ah-ha’ moment,” Perez says.

That summer, “things got serious,” Perez says, when the co-founders entered the Global Founders Skills Accelerator (now MIT delta v), held in the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship. There, they fleshed out a business plan and learned about profit margins, earning customers, and company ownership, and they officially incorporated NVBOTS.