What is additive manufacturing?
Within the last 20 years, a variety of new fabrication technologies have emerged, which are fundamentally different from any other manufacturing methodology. During centuries the creation of any part involved either the substraction of material from an initial building block or some kind of casting procedure. Today, modern information technology allows a very different approach: additive formation from scratch, in most cases layer by layer. This strategy allows the creation of geometries of almost any imaginably freedom, as well as a direct "printing" of prepared CAD-data.
In the near past, these benefits had an enormous impact on the prototyping industry, where short delivery times and customizability are a crucial point to success. But recent technological developments evolved the range of available materials (e.g. plastic: PA and PE, metal: titanium and cobalt-chrome) and machine types to a new level, finally capable of fulfilling real production requirements.
Together with the possibility to create customized products the benefits are comparable to these created by digital printing which came up during the 1990s. As there are already recognized trends into that direction, we strongly believe that major fractions of the future manufacturing industry will create highly customized on-demand-delivery products.
What is netfabb Studio Basic?
A very important component to this transition is a large-scale availability of production machines. In fact, while the state of the Rapid Prototyping industry is often compared to that of the computer industry in the 1970s, more and more low-cost fabrication machines (1, 2, 3) are becoming available, paving the way for a diversity of customized niche applications. Furthermore, open source projects like rep-rap or fab@home are aiming for the "factory on every desktop".
On the other hand, there has not been any affordable software which is capable of preparing the source data for additive manufacturing processes. By releasing a free (as in free beer) version of netfabb Studio, we are addressing this gap. netfabb Studio Basic offers all the functionality needed for creating build data out of an STL file.
- STL display and inspection
- Hole closing and mesh repair
- Part placement and orientation on a platform
- Part slicing and export
While doing this, we hope to contribute to the spread of the technology as well as to give access to data preparation to universities, hobby-users and anyone else with the need to build parts by additive manufacturing processes.
What is netfabb Studio Professional?
coming soon...
have a look at our video
http://video.designworldonline.com/video/vid=f840f6cbecc540689b7377872cec4986