My Work on Formlabs Fuse 1+ Process Optimizations

23 Mar 2024

Most of the work I do at Formlabs has been on the backend and hidden from view. I work on the secret sauce that differentiates formlabs from the competition. This is why I was so pleased when formlabs marketing team decided to make public and highlight one of my recent projects.

The video below (from the Formlabs marketing release) illustrates the improvements I made:

Coverage on LinkedIn by:

• Nick Graham, Chief Revenue Officer
• David Lakatos, Chief Technical Officer

This media announcement encompasses the work I did at formlabs in 2023. I originally proposed these performance improvements to Fuse 1+ to CEO Max Lobovsky in November 2022, and Max approved my proposal with enthusiasm.

This program started small. I wrote all the code for the first major release corresponding to the first 30% speed improvement myself. After this success, leadership doubled down and allocated some of Formlabs brightest minds to make further improvements.

We formed a small interdisciplinary team. We had two software engineers (including me), three print process engineers, and two outstanding technicians. This group epitomized the ideals of agile software development. We failed fast, prototyping dozens of concepts, and only shipping the precious few that showed genuine promise.

In addition to the speed improvements that Nick Graham mentioned, these are some more subtle improvements bundled into these software releases:

1. Through software improvements alone we improved the tensile strength and elongation at break of our printed parts. Parts with thin cross sections are more durable now, compared to the Fuse 1+ at launch time.

2. We improved the the fine feature resolution. Details like text and sharp corners were muddled by the previous printing process. With our new process these features are sharp and legible.

3. We eliminated several categories of printing failures stemming from sensor irregularities, solving yield issues for high value accounts.