New Product Announcement for Ulendo at RAPID+TCT Conference

Introducing Calibration-as-a-Service^TM

Announcing the official launch of Ulendo Calibration-as-a-Service™, a cloud-based software solution that enables operators of 3D printer farms to DOUBLE their printing capacity without purchasing additional printers.

ANN ARBOR, MICHIGAN, UNITED STATES, June 25, 2024 – At the RAPID + TCT conference, North America’s largest additive manufacturing event, Ulendo Technologies, Inc. has announced the official release of Ulendo Calibration-as-a-Service™ (CaaS), an automated tool that eliminates the guesswork from vibration compensation tuning of 3D printers.  This is a “first of its kind” hosted software solution that automatically calibrates an FDM (Fused Deposition Modeling) 3D printer to improve its speed and quality.  

Ulendo’s software allows the FDM printer to be operated at more than twice the speed of stock firmware without sacrificing quality. It replaces the current time-consuming, manual and error-prone processes that involve printing and measuring parts and manually entering numbers into equations.

Initially targeted to operators of large print farms, CaaS doubles the capacity of an FDM print farm without having to purchase additional printers. For a print farm operator this translates to:

·       Increased capacity utilization

·       Improved print job margins

·   Faster print job turnaround time

To leverage the benefits of this new software solution, users connect to Ulendo’s Calibration-as-a-Service™ through a print management system. In 2024, the solution comes with a pre-made OctoPrint plugin, but CaaS is compatible with any print management system. The OctoPrint plugin offers a simple push button solution which gathers data from an accelerometer attached to the printer. Using the accelerometer data, CaaS runs thousands of simulations and generates the ideal parameters for the printer which are provided through a firmware update. All in just SECONDS.

CaaS currently supports ADXL345 accelerometers, with support for the ADXL356 and LIS3DH accelerometers coming in Q3 2024. Even more exciting is the planned support for the Arduino Nano, a one device solution that replaces the need for an accelerometer wired to a Raspberry Pi.

The current version of CaaS is compatible with Marlin versions bugfix-2.1.X and higher. The company’s product road map includes future support for Duet. Ulendo can implement with other firmware platforms, including older versions of Marlin.

Additionally, the company continues perfecting the motion control algorithms that power its vibration compensation technique and is adding features such as extrusion control and predictive maintenance in future versions of the software.

To provide CaaS to individual printer users, Ulendo will be incorporating features that further simplify implementation and use and accommodate the nuances of a large variety of printer models. 

In the meantime, manufacturers of FDM printers can leverage the benefits of this ground-breaking software innovation by shipping new units of a printer model with a subscription to Ulendo Calibration-as-a-Service™ included. This can be as a free feature to enhance brand loyalty and/or a “paid” upgrade to generate an additional revenue stream. Manufacturers can also offer the software to their existing customers as an upgrade for previously purchased printers.

The product offering is just one of Ulendo’s responses to the industry’s need for high speed without sacrificing quality. Some of the manufacturers of recently introduced “high-speed” FDM printers have been implementing improvements in their mechanical design, including adopting different designs, lightweighting their printers and adding single board computers to augment their machine control systems. Other manufacturers have opted for the stiffening approach by adding solid aluminum gantries and high powered servo motors resulting in heavier, more expensive machines that require more energy to operate.  Yet others are adopting “input shaping” as a solution. But the quality issues inherent with input shaping render it unacceptable for high-precision, high-volume part applications. For more  details about quality issues with input shaping, refer to Ulendo’s  article "When Input Shaping Isn't Enough...."  

Furthermore, a 3D printer manufacturer can stay on Marlin firmware platform instead of migrating to Klipper firmware in order to leverage their input shaping feature. This also means saving months, if not years, of engineering effort implementing vibration compensation features into their printers.

Ulendo Technologies, Inc. has been at the forefront of the transformation to software-driven vibration compensation in FDM 3D printing. The importance of software driven vibration compensation as a tool for boosting FDM 3D printing speeds was originally popularized by research at the University of Michigan led by the founder of Ulendo Technologies, Inc., Professor Chinedum Okwudire, in 2017. As the 3D printing community grappled with how to introduce vibration compensation to open-source firmware, in early 2020 he encouraged members of the community on a public online forum to explore input shaping as a simpler alternative to the more-advanced FBS (filtered B-splines) approach that he had used in his 2017 research.

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ABOUT ULENDO TECHNOLOGIES, INC.

Founded in 2018 by Chinedum ‘Chi’ Okwudire, Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan, Ulendo is a software company spun out of the University of Michigan. The company’s first product, Ulendo VC (Vibration Compensation), uses an advanced set of algorithms to double the throughput of extrusion-based 3D printers by enabling them to operate at twice the speed without degrading the quality. The software is available for 3D printer manufacturers, 3D printing service bureaus and contract additive manufacturers. The company’s overall goal is to deliver a collection of revolutionary software products to the advanced manufacturing industry (i.e., 3D printers, industrial robots). For more information, visit www.ulendo.io.