Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Carl Bass – Interviewed live at MakerCon”.
Hi, i’m dale doherty and we’re live at makercon and we just finished uh having carl bass talk to us about some of the new developments at autodesk and uh. I don’t know, do you mind just kind of summarizing what you were talking about today, yeah no problem. Um, what did i just talk to gave an update, because last year i announced fusion 360 here and what we were doing for kind of the enthusiast community. So we talked about that and kind of gave an update on where we’re going with.
That talked a little bit what i saw about the future of design software, and then we made two announcements: one about an open platform for um, a software platform for 3d printing, and then we announced a reference implementation right with our own 3d printer right. So the software platform for 3d printing is, is that sort of almost middleware probably use the wrong word, but it sits between your computer and the printer. It’S the processing. You have to do to prepare something in g-code. You know, and you guys are kind of trying to improve the accessibility and uh ease of use for that yeah.
Yeah people probably won’t call metal, but that’s exactly what it is it’s. How do i take a 3d model that i have in my computer and i get a print a print out, and rather than have every manufacturer reinvent this thing right? We have the software, so we want. We want to distribute that and have as many people as possible use that yeah and so uh as much as surprise was that you announced the 3d printer yeah. I knew that would be the surprise i kind of joked at the beginning.
If i talked about the 3d printer in the beginning, no one pay attention to anything else. I said, and you know, and that’s true i mean autodesk is a 30 year old company. We’Ve never produced a piece of hardware, you know other than you know, we’ve sometimes at times sold it with a computer, but we’ve never produced hardware before so.
This will be our first hardware product. So it’s a different kind of 3d printer, though it’s not uh a pla or abs printer that most people are familiar with. This is a kind of a new breed yeah. So so it’s not a filament printer that you see at home. We think that market is pretty well served.
What we were really interested in is more industrial uses, and this involves taking a liquid material and curing it with light right, and so you expose it to light, and then it hardens and there are. There are printers like this on the market already, but we thought there was more room to you know: grow there was a need for more experimentation and in particular just in 3d, printing in general, and very specifically with this technology. The thing that has to come together is this hardware: software, as well as material science right. You need all three parts, and so you really need a platform for experimentation, and you talked about.
I mean one of the people are so excited about 3d printing, but once you get into it some of the challenges are. It takes so long, sometimes to print something even yeah, these these sort of resin printers and other things are, you know, uh, you get a wonderful object, but you then you say you know your example. Is you double it in size and you’re you’re, yeah yeah? You go from an hour to four hours by doubling the size and you know, should you want to quadruple it’s 64 hours, yeah and also now you say: i’m printing this thing for three days and if you have one in your house, it’s going to know and If something goes wrong right, yeah and it goes wrong where you run out of material, so i mean there are fair number challenges, and so you know the way i liken it to like the early days of the pc. There’S tremendous amount of promise and it’s going to be an important part of what happens in the future right, but right now you need real hobbyists and enthusiasts people are willing to put up with a lot of the shortcomings right and so we’re just trying to accelerate That process get rid of the shortcomings and get to a place where you can get to where it’s really accessible to more people and there’s less of that frustration.
We have the uh at least a demo of that product at maker faire of the printer. You know we hadn’t even thought about that. I i i have some parts that we printed on and walking around in my backpack. Okay, great i’ll, show you i’ll show those to you, okay, um.
So besides i’m more excited about bringing my go-kart to, i know. Oh actually, we should talk about that. So you’re going to be racing, a go-kart that you and your son have built yeah and uh.
You designed it in 360 – fusion. Yes, yes, so we so so we did. We desi! We designed it in fusion the part i’m most excited about is getting there really early saturday morning, so we can just drive in the parking lot and just see how fast it can go, and i also understand there’s a little go-kart track there. Yes, there is so this is. This is going to be perfectly fun because so far, all we’ve done is run it up and down pier 9.
and uh. I think that huge parking lot before it gets filled up so uh. That’S great. I want to see that, let’s uh, let me know when that happens, that might be a lot of fun all right. Well, thank you, carl for being at makercon.
Thank you for all that you’re doing and it’s fascinating to see how autodesk is developing new tools and and now new hardware for for the maker community and beyond great thanks very much thanks for the invitation. As always, .