Carbon splashed onto the 3D print scene last year when they announced a new method of dramatically speeding up the process of resin 3D printing by applying an oxygen-permeable layer to the bottom of their resin tank. This removed the need for lengthy and tedious “peel maneuvers” as required by most other resin prints.

The Redwood City, California-based company, known for its innovative Continuous Liquid Interface Production Technology (CLIP), which in 2015 secured a $100 million investment from Google Ventures, has over the last year partnered with leading companies in various industries, including Kodak, Ford, andJohnson & Johnson. Now, with the exciting release of their first commercial 3D printer and a slew of new materials, the company’s astounding growth, and success are sure to continue.

In terms of its specs, the Carbon M1 3D printer boasts a building envelope of 144mm x 81mm x 330mm and features a build platform made from billet aluminum, a foot-activated build area door, an oxygen-permeable window cassette, and a high performance LED light engine. Additionally, the new 3D printer is Internet-connected, allowing for the latest in features, performance enhancements, and resins to be instantly available to the M1’s users. The Carbon M1 3D printer is also capable of collecting more than 1 million process control data points a day. In practice, this means that Carbon can provide remote assistance and diagnostics to the printer to help optimize your prints and improve them over time.

Similar to existing stereolithography (SLA) rapid prototyping processes, the Carbon M1 3D printer uses an ultraviolet (UV) light projector under a light-sensitive resin pool. As the platform moves upward, the projector moves light along cross sections of the liquid polymer, solidifying it as it goes and forming objects.

The new UV curable materials unveiled by Carbon are the following:

• Rigid Polyurethanes (RPUs) whose stiffness, strength, and ability to handle stress make them ideal for consumer electronics, automotive parts, and industrial components.
• Flexible Polyurethane (FPU) whose semi-rigidity and resistance towards impact, abrasion, and fatigue are useful for applications and parts which bear repetitive stresses (like hinges and friction fits).
• Elastomeric Polyurethane (EPU) with elastic properties under cyclic tensile and compressive loads, and high tear and impact resistance.
• Cyanate Ester-based resin (CE), a high-performance material with heat deflections up to 219°C (426°F) ideal for under-the-hood applications, electronics, or industrial components.
• Prototyping Resin (PR) a quick printing, high-resolution material meant to withstand “moderate functional testing”. The latter is available in six colors: cyan, magenta, yellow, black, white, and gray.

The difference between CLIP and traditional SLA is that instead of a UV light or laser drawing the design on each layer of the liquid polymer pool, CLIP projects an entire cross section of the object across the pool, something akin to a slideshow that hardens the object continuously as the build platform rises. Unlike SLA methods, CLIP carefully balances the UV light with oxygen – the light cures the resin while the oxygen inhibits that reaction. This results in a far more gentle process, capable of producing “isotropic”, or layer-less parts, according to Phelps.

The difference between CLIP and traditional SLA is that instead of a UV light or laser drawing the design on each layer of the liquid polymer pool, CLIP projects an entire cross section of the object across the pool, something akin to a slideshow that hardens the object continuously as the build platform rises. Unlike SLA methods, CLIP carefully balances the UV light with oxygen – the light cures the resin while the oxygen inhibits that reaction. This results in a far more gentle process, capable of producing “isotropic”, or layer-less parts, according to Phelps.

OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence (AI) research company, associated with business magnate Elon Musk, that aims to carefully promote and develop open-source friendly AI in such a way as to benefit, rather than harm, humanity as a whole. The organization aims to “freely collaborate” with other institutions and researchers by making its patents and research open to the public. The company is supported by over US$1 billion in commitments; however, only a tiny fraction of the $1 billion pledged is expected to be spent in the first few years. Many of the employees and board members are motivated by concerns about existential risk from artificial general intelligence. (wiki)

So why OpenAI?

Scientists believe that if advanced AI gains the ability to re-design itself someday that at an ever-increasing rate, an unstoppable ‘Intelligence explosion‘ would lead to human extinction.

Elon Musk poses the question: “what is the best thing we can do to ensure the future is good? We could sit on the sidelines or we can encourage regulatory oversight, or we could participate with the right structure with people who care deeply about developing AI in a way that is safe and is beneficial to humanity.”

OpenAI Gym

The OpenAI Gym includes environments to simulate situations for your AI to learn from, as well as a site to compare and reproduce results. The tools are designed for use with Reinforcement Learning (RL), one of the technologies used to develop Google’s AlphaGo AI that defeated Go world champion Lee Se-Dol recently. RL works on the principle that a bot will receive a reward every time it completes an action successfully – similar to how you might train a dog.

The environments available in the OpenAI gym include classic control problems like driving a car up a hill, text -based challenges like learning to win at roulette and even Atari games like Asteroids, Air Raid, and Pitfall.

They’re currently available to experiment with in Python; OpenAI says they will soon update them to work with any language, and expand the collection of environments as well.

Visit OpenAI for getting started.