Critical 3D Print Operations With Aaron Roy Of 3DPrinterOS

Many shy away from going deep into how 3D Print operations and the operating system work because it is a challenging topic to tackle. If you feel this way, then you are in luck because this episode will help guide you through it. Breaking down the complexities and confusion surrounding it, Tom and Tracy Hazzard talk to Aaron Roy of 3DPrinterOS about how critical 3D Print operations are for any business, school, or makerspace. Aaron discusses their mission for making the 3D print operations and workflow streamlined so that deployment can be the same no matter what printer you add. Don’t let the techie topic scare you away from making the most out of your 3D Printing endeavors. Let Aaron show you the ways you can easily incorporate this system and grow and expand with the technology.

—

Listen to the podcast here:

Critical 3D Print Operations With Aaron Roy Of 3DPrinterOS

Perhaps you think 3D print operations and the operating system is the least interesting topic for a podcast and you would be in good company with us as well. Everyone said we had to see and talk to 3DPrinterOS for ourselves and they were right! The 3D print operations are absolutely critical to smooth running for any business, school or makerspace, but it doesn’t have to be complex and confusing. Aaron Roy discusses with us their mission for making the 3D print operations and workflow streamlined so that deployment can be the same no matter what printer you add. Imagine that… a system you easily learn once and allows you to grow and expand with the technology instead of having to overhaul the system every time you make a change or addition.

—

I wasn’t excited about our guest. When you first told me that we were going to interview Aaron Roy of 3DPrinterOS, I was like, “It has OS in the title. It’s an operating system. It’s going to be all techie.” I was not excited about it at all.

Clearly, I did all the back research on this one.

I was not enthused but Aaron changed my mind because there’s so much data here and you know how I love data.

Also, the ease of use.

That’s their goal. Their goal is to simplify everything and to make it one place, one shop, one area where you go to do all of these things. It doesn’t matter what printer you have. It doesn’t matter where you brought your model in from. All those things don’t matter. You go to one spot and one workflow.

It also makes it easier if you have one printer and you then get another printer and another printer and each use different systems typically to print a file. Now you can use one system consistently that’s familiar to you for all of them. Rather than us talk about it, let’s go to the interview from Aaron and then we’ll talk more on the other side.

—

Aaron, thanks so much for spending some time with us and helping us learn more about 3DPrinterOS. Can you give our audience a little bit of a background on you and a quick overview of your company?

Thank you for inviting me on. I’m head of operations and strategy at 3DPrinterOS. To give the quickest background on me, like any regular human being, I saw 3D printing and I fell in love. It blew my doors off. I had the chance to walk in a fab lab years ago, see 3D printing in action and I knew that’s where I wanted to be. I knew it’s what I wanted to do. Every choice I’ve made since then has been being more involved in 3D printing. That led me to this company, 3DPrinterOS. We’ve been open for the past few years. What we’ve built is an entire management platform for 3D printers and users. We say open operating system. For most people, the word operating system in 3D printing is a foreign concept as of yet. What we excel at is making printers run well and making it so more people, more printers can access printers from around the world.

You’re connecting them in a way.

We’re creating a network of 3D printers.

We had heard about you from a couple of other people in the industry. It has been recommended we talk to you for a while.

We’ve mentioned you a few times on the show and we’re like, “We got to have him on. We got to find out what this is all about.”

That’s good news. That’s good to hear.

One of the things that we understood is that your software is online. It’s free at the moment. I don’t know if that’s a long-term plan but it’s free. People can upload their files, slice them and send them to print. One of the most interesting aspects is you’re creating profiles of printers that are learning from the prints that your users are printing all over the world. Can you help us understand that a little bit?

Is there a feedback loop? Talk about how that works.

The backbone of everything we do, to start with this data, understanding why 3D prints are successful and why 3D prints fail is essential to helping the industry progress and making it easier for the average consumer to pick it up. From our standpoint, using the Cloud and logging and tracking different types of print data, we can see what type of slices result in the best prints, what results in failures, how different filaments affect different printing if people are choosing their filament types and how different print speeds and all these other variables come together to influence each printer. Our goal is, over time, cutting down on failure rates, cancellations and aborted prints and improving the success rate per printer per user over time.

Is that transparent to the user? Is it in the background? If I have a printer that’s on your list and I’m setting up to print with it, are those settings automatically tuned to what you guys feel about optimum ones? How does that work?

The preset settings come from the feedback from our community. We clearly can’t own every printer. I don’t own a Zeus or some of these printers that I’m hearing about, but we’ll add them. Users can request printer integrations. We have a form. We’d ask for their feedback. What are the best settings? They know their printers much better than we do. We’ll put those settings as the base settings and then we’ll continue to get feedback to improve them to a point where we feel comfortable either calling that a draft profile or a quality profile. If it’s a printer, we’ve had tons of time on a perfect print profile. The Ultimaker 2, we have a perfect print profile and it’s because we’ve had many people say, “This one works.” You can click, start, go, and it’ll work. That’s always open to change. That’s the premise of these profiles. If someone says, “There’s a new filament. It’s a new PLA. It works differently on a Printer Bot,” we will take that feedback and continue incorporating it.

One of the things that we found a lot is what you print, the file you’re printing. How big a factor is that in maybe messing up your data or helping your data in terms of it?

The file itself tremendously matters as a variable much like the dragon print you guys sent over to me. That file is a bit more difficult to print than maybe a duck or a simple object, but there are some variable settings that can be put in place like a base layer setting. If a MakerBot should be a base layer speed of twenty millimeters a second, that can apply across all files. Maybe they shoot their base layer with a non-heated bed PLA. It should never be 90 millimeters a second. Taking even that little bit of guessing out, it’s one less variable. One less thing they have to guess at.

I find that to be useful because when we had a Leapfrog printer in here for a while, I was having a lot of trouble figuring out what the best settings were. There are too many variables. I was reaching out to users in the Netherlands because that’s a Dutch printer and there’s a lot more people there with them. I’m getting some feedback from them, but it was hard. It would be a lot easier if I had a resource like 3DPrinterOS.

You have an archive that’s created for each profile of somebody who comes in and Tom was raving about this when he discovered it because I built him a database. We’re data research people, which is crazy for being designers but that’s what we are. We like to track our data and our designs and make sure that we have a history of what we’ve made, what settings we used and all of that, but your system automatically captures that.

The goal is you wouldn’t have to use an Excel sheet. If that’s how you’re tracking it, that’s great. We encourage that, but not everyone is that skilled as of yet or maybe they’re not thinking of it. Another big thing and something we added to the system is we’re tracking estimated print time versus actual print time. I’m not going to say we’re proud of the results so far. We have work to do, is what it made us realize. Any slicer people use is a common frustration. It says, “An estimated time of an hour and ten minutes.” It took an hour and 50 or it took two hours and ten minutes. What happened? What went wrong? Was it me? Was it the printer? The reality is a lot goes into slicing algorithms. It’s a complicated piece of the science. We’re starting to track and plot out what was the slice time that was estimated. What was the actual time and how do we have those two reconcile? We haven’t cracked the code yet. Let’s make these things more accurate. Let’s make slicing an easier thing to explain and use.

I’m not the technical one in this team here. I start to glaze over when I hear hundreds of setting some of these printers have. I want the slicing to go smoothly and easily. I don’t even want to think about it.

3D Print Operations: Understanding why 3D prints are successful and why 3D prints fail is super essential to helping the industry progress and making it easier for the average consumer to pick it up.

To Aaron’s point, the estimated times are usually ridiculously underestimated. I haven’t understood why that is. I don’t necessarily need to understand why that is.

It’s a significant factor. It’s not a factor that you need to dial in the slicing settings. As a business, if your business is printing out the designs and models that you’re getting, you’re taking a file in, you run it through the slicer and you take a check and it says, “It’s going to take two hours. That’s going to be this much money.” You give an estimate out to a client and then it turns out to be longer, that’s money lost.

We have an exact example that made us even think of that and that’s very much where it came from. I’m based in New York. One of the jobs that we’ve done through our system, it was based out at $9 a print hour. If you’re giving someone an estimate of seven hours of printing and it ends up taking nine hours, you’re losing two hours of billable time. For designers and people using systems like ours, it’s important to make those estimates accurate.

The only way from a practical reality that you’re going to be able to estimate those times is through a history of comparison of estimated to actual. I’m interested to see how that goes in the future.

The world we’re hoping to build is you could take an STL and get it similar to a preview and understanding of what we think this STL will slice at with these expected settings and what the time will be. That way, you have a good feel for a file. If it’s a complex object and you plan on having 30% plastic inside, you have an expectation it’s going to take the blank amount and you can build a profile or build an estimation off of that. It’s always going to be refinement, but the first step is saying, “Let’s start tracking this. Let’s start improving it.”

It’s going to be one estimated time when you’re slicing it but your estimated time is going to have the benefit of experience. It’s going to be more accurate over time.

The goal is improvement. If our variable estimated time and our actual print time, let’s say they’re 50 minutes apart on average or whatever it is. The goal is, can we get that to 35 minutes? Can we get it to twenty minutes? Whatever we can do, you can plot and track improvements. We have a whole system’s worth of prints, not just my individual prints.

You can always do a plus or minus.

This is early stages. The bottom line is we want to improve like everyone else who’s in this industry. This is an area where it’d be great to improve and have more accurate forecasting.

For our readers, I want them to understand. I did register on 3DPrinterOS. I have a profile there and added a printer and took a file we had created and uploaded it and had it printed in 3DPrinterOS’ offices. That’s the dragon Aaron was referring to. It was a test. I made something that was aggressive to print. It has some thicker and thinner areas. It has some areas where it would have to do some bridging. They try to do it without requiring any support material. It seemed to do well. What I want to talk about is my experience slicing it. It was easy. You bring it in and there were recommended slice settings for that printer. I accepted the default settings. I wanted to see how it would work.

What fascinated me even more than that was the options I had to edit a file. This is important for users who maybe don’t have a lot of CAD experience because they have a file editing app on your website and other apps that you can do things like add text to an existing file. Tell us a little about that. If you’re a user, you can search for files and you can edit them. You can augment them without having CAD software or knowing a lot about how to use it. Isn’t that right?

Yeah. I don’t think every person who’s going to be getting into 3D printing is going to have a doctorate degree or a ton of advanced experience. We want to make it easier for the newest user to pick something up, change it, make it their own or make it customized or get it the way they want and print successfully. Some of the applications you referred to, one of them that we’re quite proud of is the STL editor. We’re constantly adding features to that. It’s turning out as a tool. You could move, rotate and scale. Since then, we’ve added centering multiple objects, support, mirroring. You could also do things similar to Photoshop where you can turn layers on and off and view different layers. You can add files and watch how they interact, meaning printing a file within a file. If I wanted to print a big duck and a little duck, I could do that if I had a hollow bigger duck. Adding in more functionality is one of our goals there. We’re going to continue adding to that as well.

One of the big things for us is trying to improve our support structures and make it easy for a user to visually see what that is and what they’re adding. Some of the other apps you mentioned, one of the ones that make it easy for us or at least it’s helping the average user to go from file to printing is we have an application called Magic Fix. Magic Fix is 76 different checks, fixes and repairs. Instead of repairing a file for 3D printing, which we have Netfabb in the system for as well, it prepares a file for printing on a specific printer. It’s not perfect. It’s always something that’s improving but it’ll analyze faces and specifically flop or rotate an object to hopefully print an orientation that would lead to success. There’s a huge difference between this dragon file we’re referring to printing on its head or printing the way you intended it to print. The goal is to analyze it and put it in a way where it has a higher chance of success.

Speaking of the dragon, you mentioned that it broke off, that there was a bad layer. Your software wouldn’t know that though. Is there a way for you to manually input that something went wrong on the printer? How do you feedback that?

There are a few options. I fully admit I haven’t had a chance to go back and look at it yet. One is we could look at the Toolpath Viewer. We have a tool for G-codes called the Toolpath Viewer and I can look at that layer in particular. Maybe the speed was too quick on that or maybe something went wrong. It does show you each layer and how it’s being processed. I’m interested to know personally, after having looked at it, did maybe my filament, because it’s not on a spool, not extruded necessarily the way it was supposed to? It seemed like a light layer. I’m running them not off a spool holder and that’s my own fault. The Toolpath Viewer is where I would start from a troubleshooting standpoint and then going back to the printer. One thing that does help is we do have animated GIFs if you do have a video camera. I have the animated GIF file and I could see right when it knocked it off.

The nozzle went by and hit part of what it had already been printed in and knocked it off.

That’s what it looks like. I do want to take a peek and that helps. I wasn’t there at the printer, but I can at least see maybe what occurred and prevent it in the future.

Also, sometimes it has a little warpage and it would have been a little higher and the nozzle could have hit it. You don’t know in that case. It’s great because as a designer, we need feedback loop. Is it a design problem? Sometimes you can’t get that if you don’t have your own printer and you aren’t running it yourself. That is helpful to be able to have some way to communicate about that.

It’s probably more likely, either a filament feed or extrusion problem. That tends to be more common when you have a thin layer and maybe it wasn’t quite as good fusion from one layer to the next.

With the G-code analysis, you could look back. If you see something glaring, it helps. I’ve had files I’ve designed where I realized, “I missed something.” Maybe I built something in Tinkercad and I didn’t have two layers touching. I’ve done that before. I didn’t know until after the fact. I printed it. I thought it was a poor slice, but the reality was I messed up.

You were talking about all those extra tools that you have and the STL editor and things like that. The files that you’re going in, can they search and get anything? Sometimes those files have never been printed before. It would be difficult if a newbie is going in and editing and putting their name on something or rescaling it or whatever and then try having to print and it’s a bad file to begin with. How are you screening through that or are you?

As of yet, we’re still subject to the same limitations that address any of those marketplaces or pieces like that. If someone searched something from Thingiverse in our system and downloaded it and it was unprintable, probably going to be unprintable through us. The hope would be they could see it because visualization is a big piece of what we do. Let’s say they picked up a horse file or something hard with huge overhangs. They can see maybe this isn’t 3D printable. As we go forward, we do want to catch more of that. As it stands, we see search used less than traditional upload. The people that are already making, they have their own patterns. They go to Thingiverse. They go to wherever they go to get files. The people who use our system, who we traditionally see, they’re uploading their own files or bringing in something they’ve built from Thingiverse out externally.

When Tom first was talking about this and we were conversing back and forth about this, there’s a little bit of a can of worms from a designer standpoint because sometimes, depending on the site that it’s pulling from, because you’re doing a general search across multiple sites, I’m assuming.

We have two search engines. One is Yeggi, which is more of a Google-esque search across all. The newer one we are excited about is Sketchfab. We added Sketchfab and their database is evolving. It seems like they change daily and grow. I’m excited to see how that one shapes out too. As these marketplaces and databases flesh out what is 3D printable content, that’s only going to help us to.

If in the case of Yeggi, you’re combing across all files and you say, “I want to print a duck.” It searches for every duck out there. A lot of times there are designers setting things, whether it’s in a site like Pinshape and in some other places. They’re setting a creative commons license on there that may not allow derivatives. If we don’t get to a stage at which you’re screening through for that, there could be issues with designers being upset that their scale got messed up and words got added to what was their design.

3D Print Operations: One of the biggest pain points from educators is seeing 3D printing as unfamiliar.

We do have something in place for that. For those sites like 3DLT, GrabCAD and Pinshape, we launched them to their external site so they can view the license. Those ones we launched an external site so they can view the license. It says, “Download manually.”

With new users, especially those who don’t have much experience, they might be more likely to make some of those mistakes.

I could see somebody doing that simply. Our way of addressing that is we make those sites where specifically they have a creative commons or something, it launches externally. They go through there. The same thing with the Sketchfab, the only thing it searches across is what’s delegated as downloadable or they’re free sharing content. Any of the other stuff is still through Sketchfab.

It would be a great future if that is a growing area for you. I hope it’s more on the upload side too. I love the idea of original content. If it happens, it’d be great to still be able to be within your system but do it in a way that you can screen it out. It’s like one of the filters.

I’m envisioning it in my head. It’s like a free audio site. Being able to search available for creative commons, available for general use, commercial use no derivatives and putting search parameters. That’s how I would see it. As we grow these different pieces, I’m sure we will definitely take that into account.

While I understand most of your users are maybe more technically capable in creating their own content or uploading their own contents anyway, I see the opportunity as 3D printing starts to reach newer users and go a little more mainstream. Your software is ideal for newer users I would think because you’re trying to fine-tune the settings, you’re trying to make it easier to use, and in one place. You can edit the file and augment the file. It makes perfect sense.

You mentioned you have Netfabb built in. When you have to go out and you’re like, “There’s something wrong with my file. I don’t know what it is. I have to go out. I have to go into Netfabb.” That’s frustrating. There are a lot of printer manufacturers out there who don’t realize that they get concentrated in their own little world of making this printer that they forget how important the ease of use that comes from creating the content creation and then slicing it is important and that frustration of whether or not your machine’s even working.

Let’s say a manufacturer makes a wonderful system for a school or for an educator, every manufacturer in many ways has their own machine-specific workflow which is painful sometimes. If I teach a student one workflow, then they graduate. They head into the next stage of their career. They then have to relearn a new workflow which is completely separate from the old one. If someone learns on a Printer Bot, our goal is to deliver the same experience on an Ultimaker and on a MakerBot and on a BQ and whatever other printer you add to the system. You could teach one system and then manage all of these printers from one spot.

That is a good point that I hadn’t thought of. I do think some peoples’ needs outgrow certain printers at certain times. As new printers are created that don’t exist yet, the fact that you can integrate those and then people can use what they’re familiar with, that makes a lot of sense.

Every time we get a new printer, it’s like a six-month scale up for us sometimes. That’s completely frustrating because it should be like, “I bought this new printer to do this one new feature thing and I should be capable of running it within a couple of weeks.” It’s not the case now.

Education is something I want to talk about because some of our more popular episodes have been around education in 3D printing, either educating people to do it or educational institutions.

Educating the educators. Teaching the teachers. It’s a big issue because that’s where a lot of people are struggling because it’s different. These teachers are like, “What do I learn and when I don’t even know what printer we’re going to deploy?”

We understand that you have some things that are maybe not obvious for being a user on the site. Some capabilities you have for helping school systems, in particular, deploy and manage 3D printing. Can you help us understand a bit about that?

We pushed live to the set, pieces of it. It’s a premium feature set. We call it our educational bundle or enterprise bundle. It’s built on two important parts. One, for a school it’s difficult to share that out if you have more than one printer and one user. If you have one printer and ten users, are they all using an SD card or using an Excel sheet to track that data? How do you scale that piece out? The first thing we built is workgroup codes. It allows clustering of one type of printer, many types of printers, and then being able to share that to entire organizations and classes and systems of schools.

How we envision it and how it’s already being used for some of the schools we’re working with is on that first day of school, their first day like an engineering program, a student can come in, they get their packet information. This is your email address you’re going to have at your school. This is your workgroup code to have access to 3D printers. Day one, 3D printer is in their account ready to go. It makes it easy for admins to take 3D printers, put them online, and then share them. They then can take one system no matter what type of printers they have. They can continue adding printers to their system and have only one system to teach. It’s very simple to allow them to scale.

Going with those workgroup codes, more importantly to us, is attaching data to that. What we’ve done is allowed administrators at schools to track data that comes through their system. Not just random data but usage data, user data and printer data. Meaning they can track who’s printing what, how many hours they’re printing. What type of G-codes? What type of STLs? Even grade students can start on, is this a good slice? Is this a good file?

They spend enough time on their project. Teachers are going to love that.

It also allows teachers and universities and schools to bill back students. How much filament did a student use? How much print time have they done in the past 30 days? Who jammed the Printer Bot? Who jammed whatever printer we have on floor two and the design lab at 2:00? They can go back and see that. One of the pain points we’ve heard from many of the schools we work with is, “Someone printed via SD card. I’m not sure who did it and they walked away.” As an admin, how do I track that student down? How do I have any accountability? How do we take maybe 3D printers at only our design school has and maybe open them up to the architecture school and open them up to the engineering lab? This is our hope of how to do that.

It’s making the facilitation of making it an IT management issue. It puts it in with what they’re comfortable with and they already use for other types of equipment.

Making 3D printing something that can be deployed in a way they’re familiar with. One of the biggest pain points we’ve heard from some educators is 3D printers aren’t familiar. What is this? It’s new and confusing. I’ve been at 3D print shows. They’ll walk the entire floor, an educator. They’ll walk wanting to buy a 3D printer and they will leave without purchasing because they’re like, “I didn’t want to buy the wrong one. I was unsure what to buy because what if we buy the wrong system? Teach our students the wrong printer.” The goal is to take away that pain. No matter what printer you buy, you could teach them the system. You have something that’s centralized and they could change their mind down the road. It’s not going to come back to haunt them.

There’s a lot of this unknown about how to deploy it and how to handle all of this. Helene Trudeau, who was our guest. There are a lot of these questions. She’s a consultant so she’s trying to figure out what the plan should be. She’s not even at the point where she can say, “What printer to choose?” There are many other questions that you have to have addressed first and management of it is one of them.

It’s a long-term project for her to figure that out but it seems to me that perhaps this capability of 3DPrinterOS answers a lot of those questions and might speed up the process for her.

One thing I do want to mention and pass this along to Helene, we are giving free trials to schools here and internationally to try it out and if it works for them, terrific. We are a feedback-driven company. This is built on the backs of what we heard from the schools we already worked with. It’s a direct response to hearing what educators’ pain points were and what can we solve to make this more easily accessible. The more people that are 3D printing, the better for us as an industry. We’re doing also a webinar. Beyond what we do software-wise, education as an initiative for us as a company is a huge piece. We do teach classes here in New York and in San Francisco. We’re doing a live webinar on the basics of 3D printing. The bottom line is there are still so many people who need to learn about 3D printing. Any groups you think of, we’d love to help. It’s essential for 3D printing. The more people know the better.

Aaron, the information on the show has been great but also seeing is believing. What I’d like us to do is do a little a screen-share session and we’ll record some video so you can walk people through a visual of what can be done with 3DPrinterOS. Even as a new user, it’s hard to see all the potential until you get a lot of prints uploaded and start doing something. You don’t have a history yet. You did this with me as a pre-interview. It’d be valuable to our users.

It’ll be my pleasure.

3D Print Operations: It is essential that more people learn about 3D printing right now.

To our readers, you’re going to want to check a video companion for this episode. You’ll be interested to check out.

Do you have any last things that you want us to know about 3DPrinterOS’s future and the future of 3D printing?

First of all, if you haven’t tried it, please do. We are a feedback-driven company. Much of what we’ve learned and been able to develop came off requests. We want to continue to be that way and continue to build what people need and want in 3D printing. Most importantly, if you’re not 3D printing and you stumble upon this episode, try 3D printing. Go see it, go touch it, go be around it. It’s incredible. To us and to many people around us, it’s the future of manufacturing.

Thanks so much. We appreciate your time.

—

People should definitely check out the videocast that we did along with that interview. It’s good to see the amount of data and speed and the simplicity of it and its all tab-based. It’s easy. Sometimes when I go into these slicing software and things like that, my eyes glaze over. I get dizzy with technical details. There is as much or as little data as you want to see there, which I thought was good.

What’s also great about the video is when you’re a new user on 3DPrinterOS and you don’t have a bunch of printers installed and you don’t have a bunch of files uploaded or a history of prints, it’s hard to understand the power of what they’re providing you, what it will be as you get down the road a little bit. He clears that up for you.

That’s live so you can see this newest feature and it’s for this IT management side of this, which is perfect for education deployment. It’s also perfect for enterprise deployment because I think about these things. There are some service things built into it. It notifies you when your printer had 200 hours on it and it’s time to start changing out your nozzle or something like that.

We want to make sure everybody understands that that’s a premium service. That’s a paid service that only if you’re a large organization or a school, a university would you pay for that and use that. The free account, you may not be able to see that.

You won’t be able to see that, but you can see it on the videocast. That’s why I was pointing that out. That kind of service, you get used to how the workflow of 3DPrinterOS is. It has all its great data built into it. All of that information that those enterprises are doing is still filling the data pipeline of simplicity that they’re building into getting those profiles. That’s happening because you’ve got these. The more corporations and the more schools that they have doing it, the more data there are going to be. The individual user benefits too.

It benefits tremendously, I agree. I’m a lot more excited the more that I’ve learned about it.

I’ve changed my mind. I’m excited about the OS part of it. I’m always been excited about the 3D printer part of it.

The fact that you weren’t excited about it illustrates an important point, maybe not only for 3DPrinterOS but other companies looking to simplify the process and make things easier to use, more plug and play. As the audience grows to maybe less technical people who want to get into it, their software, their interface makes it much easier for somebody without CAD experience and knowledge to be able to use it and to 3D print things. I don’t know that they’re communicating it that way to that potential market. They’re technical and they need to be the, but they need to market that.

Their name says it, technical. I had this mindset but clearly, it is an operating system. It’s helping you operate your machines. It’s helping operate your workflow. It does make sense.

To me, it’s more of a user interface.

Maybe that’s what people want. They also want to know that you’ve got something, you know what you’re doing, it’s technical and it’s reliable and you’re taking away the trouble for them. We ought to start thinking that all OS is ought to be operating under the radar. It shouldn’t be something we have to think about anymore in this day and age.

Their system is probably the easiest to use of any of the different systems, software combinations that are out there for creating or manipulating content and then printing it. That’s admirable.

This is a lesson to anyone else out there who also wants to talk about their product, talk about their services, talk about what their website does. If you’re having trouble communicating it, maybe come in on our show and talk to us. If you can get it through to me and you could get me excited about it, then maybe you need to change your marketing message a little bit. If I can get excited about it without the technical background, then you’ve got something there. You’ve got something that is going to keep playing as 3D printing grows with a larger less technical audience.

That’s true. The technical stuff is important. I’m interested in it.

It’s got to be there. Don’t get me wrong. If you’re going to be out there and attracting newbies in a way, if you’re going to be attracting new people to it who are learning, you can’t scare them off.

That’s where the big growth market is in the United States at least, 3D printing and probably in a lot of other countries too.

If you want to contact us, if you want to talk about your product, if you want us to review something, we’re happy to do that. All you got to do is go to our website, HazzDesign.com. You’ll be able to find all the information you need there. Send us a message. Send us a voicemail. Send us an email. We answered it all ourselves.

You can find us anywhere on social media @HazzDesign.

Thanks again for reading.

Important Links:

Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share!

Here’s How »

Join the WTFFF?! 3D Printing movement today: