Inside Origin One: innovation, collaboration and thermo polymerisation

"We’re relying on an ecosystem to build this."

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Spinning out of two of the most ground-breaking tech firms of the 21st century, the co-founders of Origin have been nurtured to innovate.

CEO, Chris Prucha and CTO, Joel Ong have previously plied their trade, that of software engineering, at Apple and GoogleX respectively. They took a leap in 2015, quietly setting up a 3D printing business which would come to rely on advanced software and an open materials network, and came out of stealth in November 2018 with BASF by its side and the ambition to achieve mass production with its programmable photopolymerisation (P3) additive manufacturing (AM) process.

As the week wound down at the company’s first AM trade show in Detroit, MI, Origin not only showcased its Origin One printing unit for the first time, announced another material partner in DSM, and a beta customer in Ecco too, but also revealed a new printing process.

“It’s what we call thermo photopolymerisation. It’s basically a thermo version of P3,” Prucha told TCT.

After four years of writing its software stack, three building the hardware, and two putting it in the hands of material developers, Origin has around 50 validated materials all optimised to its P3 process, and garnered valuable feedback along the way. The standard P3 process cures the parts during the build on completely flat glass, housing the ability to reduce oxygen and deploy inert gases – either argon or nitrogen – so when the print bed pulls away to build the next layer it does so with extremely little force. This reduction in force allows the platform to print in high throughput whether it’s processing a delicate elastomer, which it will do quickly, or tackling large cross-sectional areas, which it may print at a slower rate.

The thermo iteration of P3, meanwhile, allows the Origin One system to deal with more viscous materials, as well as those delicate elastomers with standard P3. Developed in reaction to its material partners pushing the chemistries on the second-generation Origin One units, the thermo photopolymerisation process can heat materials so they’re no longer resins.  

“We’re actually printing solids from paste,” Prucha explained of the thermo photopolymerisation technology. “As the materials are getting more sophisticated, the viscosity gets really high and we found some of these solid materials are actually safe to handle. They have high molecular weight, they have really interesting properties, so we have these resins that you basically melt in the system, it can go to an exceptionally high temperature, and then you can print it. We now have materials, that are not yet released, that have some of the highest heat deflection and highest impact strength in the world that are derived from this approach.”

BASF, DSM, Henkel (and the Molecule business it recently acquired) and some ten more materials partners yet to be announced (some potentially never announced) have access to Origin’s IP and are bidding to develop and release materials that have previously been unprintable. More materials will be announced throughout the year, while the third generation of the Origin One printing unit, boasting the thermo photopolymerisation capabilities, will be commercially available in the autumn.

Though roll out of Origin’s additive manufacturing process has been staggered, being initially installed with the chemistry experts to fill out the material portfolio and then graduating to a selection of manufacturing partners, the impacts already exist. As Origin came out of stealth last year, the company referenced tens of thousands of end use parts already in circulation as a result of its platform, it had a contract with Marshawn Lynch’s Beast Mode brand as early as three years ago, and while Ecco is planning to implement the Origin One on affordable footwear at high volume, a Connecticut-based service provider has already shipped 100 end-use components at 19 times less cost than the traditionally manufactured counterparts.

In this instance, a manufacturer of respirators reached out to InterPRO having tried and failed to injection mould 100 translucent tubes with multiple bends and a 1.5mm hollow core, which was to be used in a ventilation system. InterPRO, who housed an Origin One printing unit, sought the aid of Henkel, a recently announced Origin partner, and with its LOCTITE silicone elastomer printed 30 parts per day at a cost of $19 per part. Using injection moulding, that would have been around $190 per part and a 4-6 week wait for the hard tooling.

The gains aren't just in speed and cost. At RAPID + TCT, Origin was showcasing a 4kg block of solid material printed on the Origin One. It was enabled thanks to the machine's advanced movement control, and the point of it is that the system can handle heavy objects, users don't need design for AM skills to lightweight the product with lattice structures. Another sample was a chain mail part printed in eight minutes with no supports to show the potential for producing moveable assembly with tight tolerances. 

Whether it be these samples or those 100 parts printed by InterPRO across four days, all of them will have been pushed through post-processing steps that last no more than five minutes. Thanks to the curing that takes place inside the printer, 99% of the properties are already present on the part. It means once the parts have been cleaned in non-flammable solvents, developed again by Origin's material allies, they quickly pass through a final UV curing conveyor system which uses a powerful microwave fusion lamp from Heraeus. With the new thermo photopolymerisation process, Origin thinks post-processing could be limited just to the cleaning step thanks to the inert environment it can achieve.

The inert atmosphere being generated inside the machine is just one of a host of things that can be monitored in real time by imagers and sensors, the information warehoused automatically. Other factors like the forces involved in the printing process, the chemical reaction taking place, and even the humidity of the environment is being examined to ensure the accuracy of parts. The camera technology here has been leveraged from the smartphone industry, helping Origin to ensure the system is as cost-effective as can be.

Origin is making the platform available through two avenues: outright purchases and a subscription model. The former is geared towards those who map out their capital expenditure, forecasting what they can and can’t afford, and investing in equipment accordingly. And the latter is a more flexible option, allowing manufacturers to add modules as they’re ready to scale production at an initial cost of $1500 a month with the price coming down as more machines are brought on board. Both of these options include the software, cloud services, and an initial starter set of material, but not the materials thereon.

Should a unit become faulty, replacements will be shipped out, and in the interim Origin will go through its connected software to remotely diagnose the issues and attempt a temporary fix until the replacement arrives. This pledge has already been put into practice with an early access customer whereby a vital hardware component broke, a substitute was sent, and while the company waited, Origin was able to adjust the software to allow them to resume the production of their application. “The printer was not functioning correctly any more, it wouldn’t print every application correctly, but for their application we could allow [them] to continue working while a replacement is being sent,” said Prucha. “That’s the power of the software and the connectivity of the system to allow us to do that.”

Prucha and his team don’t want the capabilities of its software to end there. In similar vein to the materials strategy, Origin is open to integration of CAD and workflow software programmes and is also on the lookout for hardware partners too for further ‘print process innovations’. The company wants to be as open as possible with its peers, collaborate with them effectively, hand power back to the customer. As customers go into high volume manufacturing, build plate surfaces can be customised to the most sensible texture to enable better part adhesion, for example, while if the base surface of the part has a hole in it, like a tube, mini supports can be implemented and easily washed off. It feeds into the company's aim of “providing the tools to make an injected moulded-like part.”  

Those tools don’t solely include the software and hardware that Prucha and Ong began creating in 2015, but everything that has happened since, from iterations of process and printer, new software updates, new materials, new users, new case studies, and new partners. The company was born out of an ambition to provide additive manufacturing at mass, driven by the software proficiencies that saw the co-founders come through Apple and GoogleX, and wholly reliant on relationships with like-minded companies.

It was from links between their former Silicon Valley tech giant employers where the idea came from. Ong used to work on Google Chrome, the code coming from the company’s open source Chromium project, which in the past has forked components from WebKit, a browser engine project started at Apple, for implementation on Google Chrome, which is now among the most popular web browsers in the world.

Spinning out of two of the most ground-breaking tech firms of the 21st century, Prucha and Ong were nurtured to innovate, and also nurtured to collaborate.

“We’re relying on an ecosystem to build this, so we can be a leaner team – we’re only 30 people – and ultimately the defensibility behind Origin is we’re building that core platform that people can use,” Prucha said. “We want our customers to have the lowest cost per part, and we’ll make money on the system, we think the cost of the systems over time will come down, and we make money on the software, but ultimately we want to be in line with the right per part costs.

“The great thing about software is you can sell it at really low costs. Microsoft, for example, has built a great business selling inexpensive software but it only works at scale, so if you did that today in the prototyping market you wouldn’t make enough money to build a viable company. That’s why we’re focused on really large scale production, because when you’ve got the scale then the little bit of money that you make on software enables this whole ecosystem. [It] will allow us to function as, hopefully, the core player in this market with more lean resources and dependent on the community and ecosystem to innovate.”

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