5 ms·
Tinkercad Raises $1 Million, Aims To Popularize 3D Printing
- joshu 15y agoI wonder how they managed to misspell my first name.
- kaib 15y agoKai from Tinkercad here. Happy to answer any questions about the product or space.
- scrrr 15y agoHi, I have an idea for something that I could really use but can't find anywhere.. So let's say I design my thingy, I'm thinking of roughly the size of 20cm x 5cm x 4cm, how much would it roughly cost to have this printed and sent to me? Would it get much cheaper if I ordered 20 or 100 pieces?
- kaib 15y agoThis depends largely on material choice and to a lesser extent on which supplier you choose. Tinkercad is a design package, we don't do the printing ourself but outsource it to printing services like Shapeways and i.Materialise. I would suggest taking a look at their sites to figure out prices and materials.
- replicatorblog 15y agoKai, What are the limitations you'll face in the browser? Will you be able to handle compound curvature in the future? I love the concept and it seemed to be a hit at MakerFaire NYC!
- kaib 15y agoThe first thing you need to realize is that Tinkercad is only partially a browser application, we also run a relatively complex cloud based component. Every operation you make is actually distributed across a 100 core cluster with the result shipped back in a few hundred ms. We try to hide this as much as possible so unless you look at the application with a debugger it's hard to notice. I did a tech talk at Google about the full architecture here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aY4a9QnLhw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aY4a9QnLhw The browser itself is pretty robust. Our biggest issue is with old graphics drivers that cause problems with WebGL, this is an age old problem from game development. Hopefully more 3D web application will help graphics hardware vendors push out more stable software. To answer your specific question. Our stack should be able to handle compound curvatures, the big question for us is how to make the UI manageable.
- replicatorblog 15y agoWow thats pretty impressive. Do you think you'll eventually embrace a "configurator" approach where you give people freeform capabilities, to a degree, and then supplement that with more in depth functionality that is constrained in a way to make the UI easier to handle?
- kaib 15y agoWe definitely want to make an API available that would allow almost anything to connect to the core editor. Using that it should be possible to write specific tools (like a lathe or extrusion style tool). We see Tinkercad as a core around which you can build more specialized tools and we want to give a broader community the ability to do so, not just depend on us to hack out new stuff.
- 15y ago
- jerguismi 15y agoWill you keep your operations in Finland or move somewhere else?
- kaib 15y agoI used to live in Mountain View, CA and only moved back to Finland quite recently so we have a very strong connection to the Valley. It's no coincidence that we took money from the likes of Joshua, Eghosa, Taher and Jyri who all operate in the Bay Area. And True is obviously based there as well. Speculating about the future is always dangerous but I think we will end up having a strong engineering presence in Finland. I also think it's very probable that we'll have another office in North America, maybe in the Valley.
- Mizza 15y agoI LOVE Tinkercad. Really, really cool tool. I've made some stuff that got 3D printed using it.
- joshu 15y agoPost some pictures, please?
- Bdennyw 15y agoCongrats Kai!