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Comment by krasin | Hacker News Reader

Carbon3d is an under-appreciated tech. Their materials are incredible. A few years ago, we successfully used their elastomeric polyurethane to build a soft robotics gripper ([1], [2]) and we've got an impressive durability rating of 500K cycles (basically, months of continuous grasping).

While our prototype never got into a production, it was very clear that Carbon3d has a uniquely strong proposition because of their materials.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnxlaT_XmFY

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itxe9g-Z3Rk

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It's not as unique as it used to be. Neither is their DLS printing technique. They also have an insane valuation [0], so I'm not sure if they are really that under appreciated.

For example Origin [1], which was just bought by Stratasys, is very similar in a lot of ways.

0. https://venturebeat.com/2019/06/25/3d-printing-platform-carb... 1. https://www.origin.io

Formlabs printers can do a lot of this stuff but at a fraction of the cost (base model costs around 2k, also has an expansive list of materials with interesting properties: https://formlabs.com/material-selector/ ). Also, you don't own Carbon3d, you lease it, for like 50grand a year or something crazy like that.

We tried Formlabs, of course. We could print fingers like these, but none of the materials we tried (about 10 different options) survived more than 1000 cycles.

As I said, Carbon3d underappreciated, because everyone think "it's just a more expensive Formlabs", while in fact Carbon3d is all about production-grade materials.

If it was possible to take materials from Carbon3d and then print on Formlabs, that would be a very good combo.

Agreed - not just materials either, Carbon printers are fast and for mass production. Making shoes via form printers at scale is not viable (form is nice for prototyping though and small scale stuff).

I believe the big difference is that the Carbon printers use a special bottom plate that lets air molecules passing through. That's why they can use chemical reactions to create better material properties. This also means the print doesn't stick to the bottom plate and they can print faster.

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