CTO of Fabric8 here - happy to answer any questions you may have about the technology or company. As you can tell we've got a process that's quite different than other metal AM techniques with some very unique benefits that we're excited to share!
1.) How you compensate for anode consumption/geometry changes over the lifetime of the anode. For instance, does the center get worn away or do you try to uniformly use each "pixel".
2.) More details on anode "pixel" geometry and minimum feature size.
3.) Can you talk about the development process? Did you have in situ measurement, or post build analysis of the part and anode.
4.) Typical surface finish?
There are a lot of little random things that I would design if I knew there was a capability to have it made at non-aerospace prices. Initially heatsinks, manifolds, heat exchangers, but possibly many random things depending on the pricing.
I understand that it is not in Fabric8s interest to do this though, expensive machines are high margin and exclusivity is required to maintain a bit of a monopoly for their customers so that their customers can justify purchasing the expensive machines in the first place. If Fabric8 were to start out with expensive machines and then subsequently release cheaper machines they would burn their previous customers. That would make this one of the many cool things that I can't use until the patents expire which would be a damn shame and would also make the technology completely uninteresting to me as I would have to focus on alternatives in the interim. It took a long time to go from Rep-Rap to Bambu Labs for FDM but with increased interest in the space that process is speeding up. Hopefully Micronics will manage a consumer Nylon SLS printer. A ton of small scale manufacturing technology is being made cheaply enough for home use and services like PCBWay and Send-Cut-Send have really democratized high quality manufacturing. I can make many things production quality with near zero overheads and I can buy things from others who have done the same at similarly low costs.
Something like send-cut-send for ECAM seems inevitable and it would be up to Fabric8 to decide if they want to cannibalize themselves instead of having someone else undercut them. I don't know how defendable their patents are, there does seem to be a fair amount of prior art. There is probably a bunch of trade secrets though. For them one of the downsides of having such a promising solution is that there is an even greater incentive for competitors to enter the market. I would posit that long term there is more money to be made with a scale-out low margin mass market solution where they could better leverage trade secrets gleaned from process experience than than selling individual high margin machines. If they kept overheads low enough it would never be in anyone else's interest to enter the market and they could leverage their trade secrets for above average returns ad infinitum.
This is literally what Shapeways does: https://www.shapeways.com/marketplace
I specifically called out that ECAM should be amenable to low cost mass manufacturing in a way that metal SLS is not.
Are you doing it for the whole cooling unit from scratch or just 1 part? (like a fan or some holder)?
What is the most common reason you would order v2 from the manufacturer after you receive v1 and test it in the real world?
I run a on-prem mini cluster which is water cooled but the customers need edge compute which should stay air cooled. I would probably try to make a blower style vapor chamber for nvidia gpus so I can ram air through without dealing with nvidia driver fuckery. NVidia segments the market based on heat sinks, binning and drivers so the enterprises segment has to pay far more. The 4090 blowers made by OEMs are gimped, rare, and expensive and I think intentionally so.
Not only is consumer grade cheaper but it’s way less hassle to get - the Enterprise sales pipeline is a total pain as the costs keep changing and they keep trying to push older overpriced stuff onto me like I wouldn’t notice. And thats even if they think you’re big enough to talk to. Much easier to pull consumer stuff from the market on an as needed basis.
My software supports graceful degradation so I don’t need ‘enterprise’ reliability. I don’t need high speed interconnects either. I need TFLOPS on dense matmuls, run in parallel batches. Consumer GPUs are fine for this, replace the heatsinks with a blower optimized and put in some powerful fans and take off. I could pack more into a single computer and to have a lower amortized cost and a higher density.
If the vapor chamber blower heatsink is too expensive then I might as well just buy more GPU computers and let them run slower.
I would prefer to be able to:
[x] buy a GPU, -> [v] Download SimReady USD of your GPU from nVidia website.
[v] whip up some CAD
[v] import USD of nVidia card into CAD
[v] measure the geometry using CAD
[v] Design cooling element
-> Export CAD to USD
-> Import CAD as SimReady Asset into nVidia Omniverse with tests you need.
-> Once simulation is OK send final CAD to production (or better from GPU simulation into simulation of production on one of the factories or 3d printers)
In this scenario:
- SimReady USD of a GPU must already exist inside nVidia. They could make it available for simulation inside Omniverse. (or build open high level model yourself)
- Thermal simulation app is something that nVidia needs for their business now and in the future. They could share current software with public and let people like you download it, change it and run simulations with your changes (or build open high level model yourself)
I'm wondering how difficult it would be to simulate important effects on your models. Do you think the above process has potential to improve your process or did I miss some important detail of your work?
For me, good enough is good enough I’m not going to be super optimized as the cost tradeoffs for such optimizations don’t work out as favorable at my scale.
It appears that Fabric8 do intend on targeting all the way down to low margin mass manufacturing with a high number of low cost machines which they run in house on a manufacturing service basis. They’re targeting 1000+ batches but I assume in time they’ll be able to do the very small batch stuff as well. Perhaps with a strategic partner that’ll deal with the small annoying customers like me. I’m super exited by this technology and am happy that they’re targeting areas that I think will be most impactful for the world of manufacturing, as well as long term profitable for them, and hopefully eventually very accessible for DIYers like myself.
1) can you print on oxide, nitride, or carbide ceramics?
2) can you print on shaped materials? Like for example, printing a pcb directly onto the inner side of a rigid shell for an aerofoil/wing?
3) what sort of material restrictions come with electrochemical printing? Can you do aluminum? Titanium?
4) what is the minimum feature size? Could this, for example, print a controlled porous/wick structure with pore sizes around 50um?
5) for those of us without the capital to buy a printer, will you also offer printing services?
Disclaimer: I don’t know much about this field, this may be a dumb question.
That being said it still is an industrial process and requires responsible handling of the feedstock and equipment to ensure safety to personnel and the environment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-UbDk7LrvU
Best regards, =3
I see a close comparison in features to SLM [1], which is already established as a core 3D Metal printing technique for a long time. SLM has precision down to the size of a mechanical pencil's lead. In what way is ECAM better? Is it more precision + no need to handle powder or shield gas + no need for laser source and containment, minus ECAM being slower. Am I missing some crucial feature?
The images suggest pure copper. Are there any alloys that can be printed at this time?
You can get 10 PCBs for $20 including worldwide shipping. Pricing for CNC or laser cutting or 3D printing just doesn't go that low.
What kind of currents do you need?
I've considered the idea before and it seemed to me that since you need a fixed number of electrons for every metal ion you deposit that the currents end up being huge.
Also deposit speeds tend to be slow. How fast can your process layer metal (say in grams per hour)?
100-1000x faster than a typical electroplating process