Ultimaker has announced the launch of an advanced version of its Ultimaker 2 desktop 3D printing platform at Formnext Connect.
The Ultimaker 2+ Connect is considered to be the company’s ‘most accessible’ product and is introduced with an ergonomic feeder level, a stiffer build platform, the addition of a touchscreen for easier operation and remote file transfer with added security thanks to the Ultimaker Digital Factory. It is also supported by free e-learning via the Ultimaker 3D Printing Academy and, thanks to a ‘clean and updated design’, requires only four hours of maintenance per year.
Ultimaker’s new platform boasts a single-head extruder which can support nozzles of 0.4, 0.25, 0.6 and 0.8mm. It is also supplemented by the release of the Ultimaker 2+ Connect Air Manager, which is an optional add-on that has been designed to remove up to 95% of ultra-fine particles and shield operators from hot and moving components.
The company believes the accessibility of the machine, at a cost of just $2,499, will help small enterprises and educators to achieve ‘true progress’.
Ahead of Formnext, TCT Magazine spoke to Ultimaker CEO Jos Burger and Ultimaker’s VP of Application Software R&D Paul Heijmans about the Ultimaker 2+ Connect and the company's software developments throughout 2020.
More on the Ultimaker 2+ Connect
Ultimaker 2+ Connect
There aren’t too many companies out there who, upon conversing with industry heavyweights like Ford Motor Company and university graduates, take the feedback in equal weighting.
With its S5 Pro Bundle geared towards more industrial clientele wanting to churn out manufacturing aids and the new and improved Ultimaker 2+ Connect designed for education and rapid prototyping purposes, Ultimaker does.
Rolling out the Ultimaker 2+ Connect at this week’s Formnext Connect, the Dutch desktop 3D printing company sends out a reminder that, despite the sizes of its hardware products growing and the now extensive materials partner network, the entry-level markets are still of the utmost importance.
“We started this business a long time ago,” Ultimaker CEO Jos Burger tells TCT, “and one the successful workhorses of the company has been the Ultimaker 2; very successful in small and medium sized companies for prototyping, education. These are very strong segments and we want to keep focusing on these segments on order to give them an entry-level product that allows them to get acquainted with Ultimaker, get used to it and then, what we quite often see, is that often grows to other types of printers, materials and use cases.”
Before users get on to those other printers, materials and use cases, Ultimaker first has moved to ensure the experience of the entry-level system is better than ever. It is now a connected system which supports cloud 3D printing, allows access to more than 150 material profiles on the Ultimaker Marketplace and is compatible with the Air Manager that the S5 platform has to ensure the printing chamber is closed and nanoparticle emissions are reduced. Improvements under the hood have seen enhancements to the bed levelling, an ‘optimisation’ of the electronics that adds memory and improvements made in the gantry. Unlike its predecessor, the Ultimaker 2+ Connect also now has a touchscreen to make operation easier and is being marketed at $2,499 and an additional $455 for the Air Manager.
Ultimaker 2+ Connect
“It’s not a completely new printer, but we felt by adding these kinds of improvements, we can keep solidifying the position of the Ultimaker 2 in the entry level market and what we hear from resellers and distributors is that, indeed, that is a wise move,” Burger says. “As an entry level at that price range, we feel it’s very appropriate to come to the market with this machine.”
The reason Ultimaker’s seller network considers it a wise move to bring out an improved entry-level platform is that, despite a growing focus on the higher end markets, the bulk of its revenues still come from those customers utilising its products for rapid prototyping and concept modelling.
“If you look at education more generally, and there are slight differences between here and the US, for instance, but generally speaking it is safe to assume that 20% of our sales is in universities, technical universities like MIT in Cambridge. Roughly 10-12% of revenues are in education, [for pupils] between the ages of 12 and 16/17. That’s pretty much a stable thing,” Burger explains. “If you look to the types of application, I would say that roughly 40-50% is still prototyping or design iterations and the rest is tooling, jigs, fixtures and even also small series production.”
Software developments
Ultimaker
Ultimaker Essentials
While Ultimaker has put significant effort into advancing the capabilities of its hardware portfolio and onboarding more than 80 materials partners to expand its filament offering, throughout 2020 it has also concentrated on the user experience. On the first day of the year, in fact, Paul Heijmans, Ultimaker’s VP of Application Software R&D, was brought in to help build out and strengthen the company’s software proposition.
Last year, the company’s Cura slicing software was said to have been used to prepare 2 million print jobs per week, double that of 2018, and has more than 600,000 active users per month. What was already a popular platform, and an open offering at that, has now been reinforced with ‘enterprise-grade support’ in the form of Cura Enterprise. This platform is said to be a ‘security-assessed version’ of Cura that delivers stability through features that are tailor-made to each business.
The launch of Ultimaker Essentials, meanwhile, has enabled Ultimaker to assemble an ‘ecosystem’ of software products. It supports the Ultimaker Marketplace – a function where users can download material profiles and avoid manual setup when using these third party materials – with downloadable plugins like simulation tools. And it also strengthens its Digital Factory offering with a version that enables users to assign operator control and block operator control with a built-in firewall that ‘closes your printer to the outside world.’
This latter feature helps to solve one of the ‘glaring IT pain-points’ mentioned when the software was launched in July. Typically, if a printer was attached to a University network, for example, more students than intended would be able to send jobs to the machine and stop the jobs of others. Per Heijmans, compliancy and security wise, ‘that’s not so nice.’ With Essentials, access to printers can be properly administered. Another issue addressed is the roll out of software across an organisation. Now, Ultimaker’s Cura Enterprise can be installed by each individual themselves or distributed automatically from a central system to hundreds of workstations. Meanwhile, with upgrades coming twice a year, users can choose to install a new version, while still using the old one if they are midway through a project to avoid disruptions.
“These were all obstacles we’ve heard when we talk to companies, professional enterprises, which often have a champion and he or she is starting with 3D printing, have a couple of printers and then they want to scale out and that IT is becoming very annoying,” Heijmans says. “I have spoken to several who had all these really dirty workarounds to make this work but, at some point, somebody from IT or compliance will come and say, ‘hey, you cannot work like this, this is not secure and this is a huge risk.’”
As such, Ultimaker has moved to provide its users with more control over how they implement additive manufacturing across their organisation, whether that be a single university campus or a multinational company. Through the same Essentials platform, it is also looking to provide educational resources with a ‘continuously developing, continuously evolving’ Academy feature. Here, there is job-specific content designed to existing jobs, with courses ranging from novice to expert level. So far, there is content uploaded for application engineers, helping them to identify potential parts; operators, helping them to set up and maintain the machine; and the IT admin, to securely set up a group of printers.
Ultimaker print farm
“We want bring all our knowledge to the entire workflow and have a nice, open setup that you can easily get a great business case from with our printers, because they’re not super expensive,” says Heijmans. “We believe by providing a great end-to-end user experience and adding more and more features to make users value our solutions then they will stay. I have an Apple MacBook; I have the iPhone. I like this stuff. I won’t go elsewhere because I like the total solution and how it is all integrated. Therefore, we’re also investing to have Cura more integrated with our Digital factory, with our printers so the whole ecosystem, coupled with the knowledge via the learning modules, makes it such a nice set that when you need to scale out or you need to upgrade, you still consider Ultimaker.”
The timing may be significant. As Burger outlines, the COVID-19 pandemic may have sped up the development of distributed and localised manufacturing, of which 3D printing is ‘ideally geared towards’, and per CONTEXT’s latest figures, it’s the professional ($2.5k-$20k) and personal (<$2.5k) 3D printing systems that are most in demand. As organisations far and wide started harnessing 3D printing technology to produce face shield components and the like as the COVID-19 pandemic spread, Ultimaker can roughly attribute 5-10% of this year’s revenue to those buying its products to support their response efforts.
“It’s not dramatic, but it has had a certain effect,” Burger says. “But what is more dramatic is that for a lot of companies, especially since the start of the coronavirus, it has become really hard to get a signature for an investment on $100k, $200k, $300k machine. Forget it. You see those effects on the overall turnover of the likes of 3D Systems and Stratasys in their public statements. In our case, though, it’s so easy to start with 3D printing at this low threshold. It’s completely risk-free. You invest a few thousand, you prove your use case to your boss, and then he or she says, ‘this is great, you can buy number two, number three, number four.’ We have more modularity in the grand scheme of investment and that’s one of the benefits of our positioning.”
That idea of adding a second, third and fourth printer to an organisation’s ranks is part of the reason for the company’s developments this year. An improved Ultimaker 2+ Connect to act as the gateway, the integrated software systems to enhance the user experience, and the bigger, more advanced machines, with their dual printing head capabilities and 150 third-party materials to choose from.
“What we’re going to do is help people scale and collaborate and also have visibility on that,” says Heijmans. “It’s about bringing our knowledge, facilitating collaboration, to make it hassle free. We did this with Cura with these profiles, because it was still pretty complicated, there were all these options and to become more mainstream, more successful, and scale out, you need to make it frictionless, hassle free, so the few smart people can do all the profile kind of tings, and then the rest can just print.
“It’s about the ecosystem,” Burger adds, “being able to give people the best software experience, but also the widest material support, the best hardware experience. We never see the software or the material platform as an excuse not to keep investing in the hardware. I can’t talk about it now, but stay tuned, we will do some fascinating things in the next 12-18 months to support that element and improve the user experience.”
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