Fabpilot by Sculpteo Demonstrating New FDM 3D Printing Integration at TCT Show

Last year, French 3D printing company Sculpteo first introduced its standalone Fabpilot software in October, before officially launching the fully cloud-based solution at formnext the month after. Now this week, at the 2018 TCT Show in Birmingham, Fabpilot by Sculpteo will be presenting its new Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) integration – the software solution now directly connects to FDM 3D printers in order to optimize their production and handle industrial production.

Fabpilot is a Software as a Service (SaaS) and this update helps it serve professionals who own several FDM 3D printers and are looking for a better way to manage them. Especially in businesses where multiple users control the machines and need file security and traceability.

“Fabpilot aims to eliminate the insecure and error prone practices of physically moving data around,” explained Alex Gryson, Product Owner. “Machine integration such as with FDMs makes this a reality for any scale of lab or production facility.”

It took Sculpteo eight years of in-house development to create Fabpilot, which provides third parties with a way to better manage and optimize their 3D printers. The software provides traceability, auto-routing for machine scheduling, streamlined file analysis and repair, file management and versioning, and a historical record of settings and configurations. The company claims that by using Fabpilot companies can increase overall production efficiency by 35%, and improve part quality.

Now, with its new direct FDM machine integration, Fabpilot is on a mission to support 3D printing for makerspaces, FabLabs, educational programs, universities, manufacturers and other businesses that provide 3D printing services. These can all use Fabpilot for direct integration with most FDM 3D printers, in order to combine file analysis and repair, quotation, part and order management, and performance analytics, as well as controlling end-to-end FDM production from the same cloud-based platform.

“FDM is by far the most common 3D printing technology: it’s cost-effective, highly adaptable, and the applications, from a microscopic scale to 3D printing houses, are endless. When thinking about the next progression, it made perfect sense to integrate directly with FDM,” said Clément Moreau, CEO and Co-Founder of Sculpteo and Fabpilot. “I am very proud of releasing this new functionality, which will bring a huge increase in the return-over investment ratio for users.”

With the new integration, Fabpilot users will be able to connect directly to FDM 3D printers and print from the cloud. It only takes a simple set-up and instance of Fabpilot to upload files, analyze and repair STLs, slice, and send G-code right to the FDM 3D printer. Some of the features the integration offers include:

• Multi-machine control: automatically assign jobs to available printers.
• 2D Nesting: arrange the maximum number of parts on the build plate while avoiding a collision to reduce the number of required jobs to print parts.
• Cloud slicing: upload over 30 file types, which are sliced and have their toolpaths defined so that G-code is ready to be sent to the printer.
• Optimize orientation: use Fabpilot’s current automatic orientation algorithm to find the best orientation and minimize the need for support structures.
• Print from the cloud: no need to download G-code and manually upload it, because slicing is completed in the cloud and sent directly to the printer.

This new development by Sculpteo’s Fabpilot protects files in a single platform from upload all the way to printing, completes the end-to-end workflow, and streamlines FDM 3D printing for several kinds of 3D printing labs.

The company’s new direct FDM integration was announced today at the TCT Show. At booth #P48 at the show this week, Fabpilot by Sculpteo will be proving it to visitors. There will be several demos of the integration, and a fun 3D Tetris Challenge with an interactive display will also be held.

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