Kickstarter

Form Fans,

The Formlabs journey began early 2011 through conversations among a group of designers and engineers. Just like you, we saw the power of 3D printing but were frustrated by the complexity and enormous price tags that come with high-end professional machines. And so, we started to dream of a digital fabrication tool that was intuitive, powerful and affordable all at once.

Today that dream is here -- The Form 1 is shipping -- thanks to YOU.

We are proud to say that today we shipped the Collector’s Edition Form 1 printers and half of the Initial Formation tier of pledges. Kickstarter backers will be printing by the end of next week!

When we unveiled our prototypes last year, many of you showed your support in our efforts and backed it with pledges and orders. The Form 1 was truly created by a community, which makes you, our Kickstarter backers and our preorder customers, an integral part of the Form Team.

We especially appreciate your patience and encouragement as we fell behind our original delivery schedule. Fortunately, the hard work and many extra hours from the Formlabs team will make the average Form 1 only a few months late. This despite the complexity of a project that aimed to build precision hardware, develop desktop software, engineer high-quality materials, produce thousands of units, and ship them globally.

We will ship Form 1s as they are produced, fulfilling Kickstarter rewards and preorders by priority. As our production ramps and we have accurate data on our steady state production capacity, we will share more precise dates for each group of printer deliveries. (You will receive a personal confirmation e-mail the day your unit ships).

In the meantime, thanks again! And do drop by our booths at the Maker Faire in the Bay Area or ICFF in New York if you are around. Make sure to give the team a high five. They deserve it, and so do you!

We can’t wait to see what you create on your Form 1!

- The Form Team

P.S. For all you makers out there who want an inside look at the Form 1, check out hacker-extraordinaire (and Formlabs advisor) Bunnie Huang’s great tear-down blog post.

Form Fans,

When you helped launch Form 1 production on Kickstarter, we had planned on launching with a grey resin. At this point, however, grey requires further development to reach the material qualities we think you deserve.

Fortunately, after a year of development and literally hundreds of formula iterations, our materials team has come up with another resin so good, that we just have to get it to you first. We are proud to announce our flagship print material: Clear Resin!

In recent months, Clear has dramatically improved for excellent tensile, impact, and green strength, which allow for immediate use after printing. At 15 cents per cubic centimeter, it’s affordable and fantastic for a wide-range of applications -- from highly-detailed and complex models to fully-functioning prototypes.

Clear is also an excellent color for your prints, especially when playing with lighting. We’ve even had beautiful success painting our prints, which expands the color spectrum as much as you need to (yes, that mouse was printed with Clear). Clear Resin will be available in the Form Store for $149 per liter as our first printers begin shipping.

The process to create Clear (and other materials) is a delicate balance of countless variables that range from chemical to mechanical to computational to safety. Different resins, for example, require a range of laser power settings to properly activate the photoinitiators. Yet material formulas also interact differently with the Form 1 itself. Mark, our Research Scientist, constantly confronts the challenge of improving resin properties while ensuring there is no adverse effect on the hardware. Next, we must optimize software settings for each and every resin formulation. Finally, the print material must be as safe to handle as common household chemicals (download the MSDS here).

For those of you still hungry for Grey, we’re working on overdrive to get it to you. You can purchase it in the Form Store when ready (or let us know if you’d like to be placed later in the Form 1 ship queue for when it’s available.) The great thing about materials development is that we can upgrade your Form 1 capabilities without changing your hardware.

The Form Team is excited and up to the challenge of developing the best form creating technology possible.

You might want to stay tuned for more exciting updates.

-The Form Team

Form Fans,

We’re thrilled to announce the preview release of PreForm Software! The software team has taken the package to new levels to make printing easier and faster. We can’t wait to make PreForm even better with your input after you take it for a test drive.

Since Kickstarter, we’ve overhauled the UI to make it simpler, sleeker, and more intuitive to use. You can import any .STL file, prepare it for printing, and send it to your Form 1 printer. With a few mouse clicks, you can import one or more models, scale and orient them for optimal printing.

We’re especially excited about two powerful core features. Our blazing-fast custom slicer reduces model prep time so your software load is only a small fraction of the process. PreForm also automatically generates support structures for more complex print geometries. Our unique algorithm makes the supports do their job while printing but easy to remove upon completion.

PreForm is currently Windows only, though we’re hard at work on a Mac version. Download the preview release here.

We’ve got more exciting features in the pipeline, like mesh repair capabilities and improved support structures. PreForm will notify you when an update is ready.

Feel free to suggest new features on the Form Fan Forums and help us stomp out bugs by reporting them with the subject line “PreForm bug”. Your input is invaluable to making PreForm even better for the arrival of your Form 1. Enjoy!

- The Form Team

The Form Team just crossed two big milestones.

Beta Shipments

First, we quietly shipped our first 15 printers two weeks ago to beta test users (who are printing as we write)! These shipments are primarily in the Boston area so that we can closely observe the first few Form 1s in the wild, but a few are in different cities and countries. (Thanks to them for the test drive of the customs process.) With their help, the Form Team has been able to quickly identify issues while having the capacity to address them head on. The data is invaluable to test software and hardware, not to mention to prepare instructional material for the thousands of users we will eventually support. Check out some of the awesome Form Spaces and prints below.

Support Site

Next, we are proud to unveil our support site at support.formlabs.com! The information there is just a small start to what will soon be a large knowledge base for 3D printing. You can also check out our new video (above) to see the Form 1 print experience from beginning to end.

Of course, having started on Kickstarter, we understand the power of community. This is why our support site is built with the long-anticipated Form Fan Forums! We can’t wait for you all to try the site, post in the forums, and help us make support.formlabs.com the new home for this global community. Team members and test users have already started some threads, so feel free to join in the conversation. (Use the same login you created at formlabs.com)

We know that you all are eagerly awaiting word on shipment of your own printers, and we plan to update you soon. We have learned that a product launch is better determined by quality than a deadline, and we appreciate your understanding.

We look forward to showing off a few more things we’ve been working on soon...

-The Form Team

As you can imagine, printing 425 gyro cubes requires a bunch of printers. Since most of our prototypes have been tied up in final production testing we are behind schedule. Luckily, engineers like Craig (pictured below) have been hard at work getting the production line in order. (The Form Lab just got a lot more orange with the first batch of printers!)

Craig also happens to be our Lead Gyro Cube designer, having been inspired by the original Gyro the Cube by Virtox. He has taken the gyro through many iterations, including the three shown below. Each concentric sphere must closely fit within the next to stay in place, but not too tight to limit a good spin. Eventually he decided the four spheres weren’t enough to put the Form 1 to use. So he added a suspended butterfly for good measure.

Armed with a good design and our very own growing “printer farm”, we’re ready to start shipping out the first gyros next week. Of course, given the large number to print, fulfillment will take several months to complete. We hope you understand our focus on readying Form 1 production, and we appreciate your patience. When they do arrive, we hope you don’t lose too much productivity being mesmerized by your gyro cube!

P.S. Make sure to check out the full production machines in New York next week.