How Electroloom's clothes-printing revolution died | Hacker News Reader

How Electroloom's clothes-printing revolution died

engadget.com

65 pointsMandieD16 comments

CNC Machine Owner here, I'll add my very limited take. I do mostly one-off or small run projects at my shop, mostly in furniture. Sometimes I make jigs or other tools to help myself work. I'll say this 1000 time: the tools are seldom the problem, it is usually the CAD/CAM. Even if this tool could abstract away some of the complexity, it is still very difficult to model textiles or other wrapped components on a solid. My friends in the Textile business constantly talk about the difficulties in doing that.

While this might have meant you didn't need seams, even creating the model of what you wanted is more of a professional endeavor than an average hobby. 3D machining of solid parts, by contrast is much easier. Some of these CNC for the masses projects like glowforge and Wazer look easy, but that's because they're really just 2D cutters. The level of complexity that occurs when you go to 3D is big. The additional complexity of dealing with materials that need to stretch is even greater. It is just beyond the average hobby audience.

As the son of a master tailor, I second what you said. The literal Italian translation of tailoring school is "cutting school." It's where students learn how to construct the patterns, in paper, which are then used to cut the fabric. In addition to the difficulties of just dealing with fabric, there is also tradition of materials, taste, and folk knowledge involved which simply can't be "dialed" into a machine process.

There is some room, however, for "made-to-measure" clothing where you get measured and a modern supply-chain can get you set-up, in a semi-automated way with good-fitting clothes. Brioni does this. The tailors are still humans, of course, but you get measured and the clothes are made elsewhere.

The modern German word for tailor is Schneider (feminine: Schneiderin) - "cutter".

Even in the clothing and textile industry this seems to be true. While different in process from what this startup was working on, advanced CNC knitting machines that can produce an entire garment (think seamless underwear, Nike Flyknit shoes, seamless athletic shirts) have been around and used in mass production for a number of years now. But the notion of customized, individually-fitted garments produced using this type of technology still seems to be quite a ways off even though it's received a lot of hype. Obviously there are logistics challenges, but at least to me as an outsider it seems to be that a big part of the issue is that pattern-making (i.e. the engineering side of clothing design) remains a skilled activity that has not been amenable to full automation.

This is exactly where Ponoko (https://www.ponoko.com/) went wrong. They're a 3d printing and cutting as a service company. They're still around, but in a much reduced size.

The end product is fine, but the problem is that it's just so damn hard to build anything to be cut on the computer, since you have to use an svg editor (so either Inkscape or Illustrator), and use different colours and thicknesses for different cuts.

What they really needed to focus on at the start was building an easy to use application (whether web or desktop) that could be used to easily make and mock up designs for cutting and/or 3d printing.

An easy cutting applications: Vectric Vcarve Pro. The trouble is that their toolpathing is really only OK for woodworking. They don't have any of the nicer adaptive clearing or constant tool load things. However, in 2.5D, they handle a lot of things very nicely, and very intuitively. I still use it for 2d outline cuts in wood, drag knife work, and 2D vector laser engraving.

edit to add: Don't use SVGs or Illustrator for anything except art. They're really a horrible input for any kind of CNC, better to just use CAD ASAP. Fusion360 is a great free option (for now), and Vectric Vcarve Pro is really nice if you want something really easy in 2.5D.

> Even if this tool could abstract away some of the complexity, it is still very difficult to model textiles or other wrapped components on a solid.

It's also remarkably difficult to simulate fabric draping. Look at how much trouble Pixar had modeling hair in "The Incredibles"--now make all of those hairs have cross linking hairs and simulate it--yikes!--that's fabric.

I'm surprised nobody has taken one of these big GPU clusters and tried something new.

Hmmm: actually cloth simulation is constrained relative to hair simulation. (It's an orderly grid -- a Chebyshev net? -- rather than spaghetti) With a simple Verlet integrator you can animate a "fishing net" of points with no difficulty -- because of the direct links between them.

Someone else will have to fill in the details of recent research. I remember a paper called "Large Steps in Cloth Simulation" which aimed to remove the need for fine detail in simulations.

Fishing nets don't stretch, so I assume the fact that clothing does adds a lot of complexity, especially since seams won't stretch the same way? Also, different sizes have the same number of seams, but won't have the same overall drape/stretch.

Agreed! This is probably why Protolabs (NYSE: PRLB) is so profitable. They have incredible CAD/CAM automation technology along with proprietary part fixturing technology. This enables them to have unique efficiencies compared to a traditional shop. Most of the complexity is in the CAD/CAM.

So would the TL/DR be:

“Rowley: So, we got a whole bunch of attention, which made us irrational - although Silicon Valley pushes an unhealthy view of business so it deserves some blame too. And without really thinking about whether it would work, it just sort of got away from us and so we did a Kickstarter, a bunch of promo videos and took a whole lot of peoples money. We spent it, without making any real progress. And then, out of nowhere, the money ran out and no-one would give us more.

So yea, I’ve got scars. But at least my next company, Vue, a smart-glasses startup, is benefiting from my scars. We’ve learned to control our messaging - For example: Vue aren’t really smart-glasses. They’re headphones - built into the frame of the glasses. So, see how we did that? Just like the way we rode the 3d-printing wave selling electroloom, now we’re riding the smart-glasses wave to sell headphones!

And we’re doing a Kickstarter...and a bunch of promo videos..”

Rowley also believes that there is a problem with Silicon Valley's culture, which pushes an unhealthy view of business. He explained that investors and inventors aren't bothering to pay attention to what came before, "to understand what their technology should be doing." But the collective blindness to this is a result of the "hype around getting funded" and "stories glorifying founders like Mark Zuckerberg and other college drop-outs." He adds that Silicon Valley deserves "all of the criticism that it gets." Because, fundamentally, "it does a lot of great things, but it's also a culture where people get away with some ridiculous things."

Interesting last paragraph. I am often disappointed by the lack of acknowledgement to history, but some ridiculous things really do need to be tried once in a while so they become commonplace and boring.

> The company had conversations with textile factories interested in building an industrial version of the device. The team was essentially offered carte blanche to build a device big enough to fill a warehouse, but had to pull out because some members couldn't countenance relocating.

Some people weren't all in. I'm guessing relocation was to somewhere in China.

I suspect inland China.

But, yeah, I translate that as "We chose to fail" or, less kindly, "We chose to fail because this won't make us rich in 12 months."

If someone offers you "carte blanche" to basically do R&D from prototype to industrial scale, that's a pretty big deal. If you can't figure out how to follow through, you probably shouldn't be running a business.

Or, you can say yes, and sell that business once the contract is won.

But the idea is great. I bet it will reappear with success in the future.

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