 bingo we're back we're here on think tech tech talks on a given Tuesday and we have an exciting show with Brandon Braden Morena of Robo's in the mainland to talk about 3d printing and his startup for it 3d printing from your cell phone no less welcome to the show Braden it's nice to have you on our think tech yeah thanks a lot for having me I'm excited to show you guys some of the stuff we're doing just just a reference so that you know I can wrap my mind around it where are you I am in San Diego California okay somehow that makes it more understandable relatable we know you're far away we now we know where you are that helps but you could be in Portugal just as easily actually so tell us about your company I'm very excited 3d printing and you have a startup and you're doing kickstart and it's sitting the device or at least one of your devices is sitting right next to you I can hardly wait to know how it's going yeah yeah it's been we started the company back in 2000 actually middle 2012 we started building our first machine and my business partner was making a prosthetic leg using a 3d printer it was an industrial machine very expensive and that's where you got the idea to kind of start building his own machine and so we started working together on making a product for mass consumers around the world because we knew entrepreneurship and building products was becoming a big trend and so you know as old saying goes like the people that were successful in the Gold Rush weren't the people you know seeking hold they were the people selling the tools to seek gold so we figured people sell the tool that could help entrepreneurs build businesses yeah so but that you know that does suggest that you jumped into an area which is highly competitive yeah where the technology is changing as you watch and you jumped in I mean what what made you feel a that you were qualified to jump into such a fast-moving area and be that you could compete with you know the guys who are already there what's your secret sauce man yeah we came in so actually when we first saw the space there wasn't many people that were really trying to build a brand in the space which was interesting to me there's a lot of products out there at the time of probably 10 to 15 other companies but they were just companies there weren't big brands there was one big brand that was dominating the space there was a lot of opportunity as it was growing you know exponentially so we came in and we created really our first model is really nicely looking machine and I think we set the tone to kind of build this this brand around 3d printing and we you know sold at a phenomenal price and it was fully put together we didn't look like an erector set this is really nice ready to go on the box machine I think people were excited about having that kind of plug-and-play as to experience of 3d printing well you know it reminds me of Apple how whatever Apple does Apple does a beautiful job in the in the consumer design the user design if you will and I just came fresh from the Museum of Modern Art MoMA and 53rd Street in New York just a couple days ago and the same thing there you know design is everything you love to have tech you want to have great tech but for it to sell for it to be appealing to send the right message it's got to have good design I'm looking at that machine right next to you and I would say just off and it has very nice consumer design on it yeah it's got it's got not only a nice consumer design but very practical elements you know when you look at 3d printing and all the pain points that we have in consumer machines we've really been able to solve them with this product so even small things like it becomes messy inside the machines and the ability we created this entire structure out here to just be like really easy to clean off I mean just the smallest things we thought about in this machine the way we built it the way we designed the internal components for customer support for manufacturing I mean everything about it is like a consumer designed easy to use you know fun experience end-to-end so where are you building it who's actually manufacturing that machine so we're actually we're talking to a big manufacturer right now about their name yet but they are a massive massive manufacturer we're trying to partner with them you know they do a lot of manufacturing Mexico over in China and in the US as well so we'll probably be doing a diversified manufacturing oh exciting oh now we have pictures there's one there's one model on the left with a red RoboSign and one model a smaller model I guess on the right with a blue RoboSign tell us a difference on the machines the both machines yeah so this right here is a RoboC2 this is a lower end model this one retails at $5.99 right now on our Kickstarter campaign you might it's exclusive pricing but this is kind of the foundation product so this is we started to build a product that we could then scale up into larger machines and add more features so this is kind of your base ready to go plug and play easy to use consumer machine and then as you go to the next step up which is called our R2 the RoboR2 that machine has you know the ability to add an additional head so you can do multiple materials at once it has like an onboard camera so you can monitor your print it has a limited figure of a touch screen so it's got a couple of additional features that I think people are gonna be excited about and a bigger built space so this one is a 5x5x6 envelope that you can print in the other one will have an 8x8x10 envelope so you can print a lot bigger items you have any patents on anything there I mean it sounds like you got you including all the technology one could find about this kind of device have you patented anything in it we have patents are in our business in the industry right now but not on the machines yet we are like lucky to be in this amazing open source community right now yeah printing people are sharing files they've designed I mean amazing designers spent tons of time and they're sharing them with the world for free and so and like with this machine you can use any of the materials that are on the marketplace so other products require you buy their materials the whole razor blade business model just like a printer 2D printer get by the ink from the manufacturer we give you the ability to use any materials so there's fun stuff out there is rubber materials there's wood infused materials there's carbon fiber infused material metal infused and so you can it's all supported by these machines well you know I mean really it's a statement isn't it that modern technology companies like yours don't necessarily have to be you know fascinated with patent protection yeah I don't move fast enough that maybe by the time anybody catches on to what you're doing you'll be ahead of the game anyway with your next version am I right yeah if you're not always competing with yourself you're dying business so that's constant what we're doing with our new machines and we're already working on a machine to help compete these ones in our next generation so you know I think Elon Musk kind of starting that trend of you know getting away from the patent protection and more open source and inviting people to come and enhance technology as a whole and I think there is a lot to be said about doing that especially with this tech yes I agree yeah it's maybe the new the new way the new way is better so how did you how did you get so expert on putting something like that together and designing it with you know all of these features I mean you had to do a lot of training a lot of reading a lot of examination how'd you do with that yeah you know it's kind of interesting and I don't mention this too much unless I'm talking to like students and entrepreneurship classes but none of us are really true mechanical engineers that started the business and is a very mechanically engineered product you know a lot of our I mean we were always makers at heart so we had that side of it we always like to build things you know create things we're always doing stuff like that but with this technology we really just became so intrigued by it and obsessed with it that we went on the forums we went on the YouTube we went on I mean everywhere we can to find out about how to build these machines we just started building our own from scratch it's a fun experience for us and we were frustrated as heck about every you know little piece of it whether it worked or why it didn't work or how do we make it better and it just led us to kind of this all I could call it as an obsession with creating a great story totally appreciate that you know you can that's amazing I mean the amount of content I built a business before this I was fixing cell phones and we learned it all from YouTube so the University of Google and the University of YouTube to create some amazing things okay well let's talk about the software now I mean one of the things that's really catchy about this is you can you can find templates you can design your own products to be to be modeled and you can do all of that from a cell phone yeah that's pretty sophisticated software isn't it yeah it's pretty sophisticated no one's you know one of the benefits of this new line of machines is no one's created this completely mobile experience where you can just print from our mobile devices I mean this is becoming our next computer right so being able to use this to download files you find online using an ipad and iphone have Android soon and then just send them to your machine via wireless and be able to have it print and notify you when it's done I mean that's pretty incredible yes so we're doing a lot of cool stuff in there I mean a lot of enhancements on the app side you know it's it's just it's a cool thing to have that ability now with people's you know their cell phones what about the old guys like me who don't necessarily you know what to do with an ipad or who's eyesight's not good enough to work on a mobile a small mobile device yeah and I have you know I have my apple even my iMac can I use and he's a bigger machine to design for this printer yeah you can use it I mean you can use computers to any computer and just send it directly to the machine so there's kind of the element of there's a couple ways to get files you can design it so you can use a any desktop computer most people do when they design just because the capabilities and you know the big screens and things like that so you design an amazing file and any software that's out there and all you do is take that file you export it as what's called an STL and that's what you just send directly to the machine and they'll print it for you super simple process so you can do that side of it the side we're kind of appealing to with mobile and being able to print from your smartphone is all these marketplaces so we want people to go in and go like yeah I need this piece or I just broke a component let me go in and find it download it and just send it directly to machine and print a replica piece of that product so that's the side I think that there's not gonna be probably so much design done on these but the ability to find files quickly and print them or scan them from your smartphone and print them is is really happening right now well suppose I didn't catch exactly how you connect from you know the device to the printer is it Bluetooth or is it connected by wireless or what do I need so it actually emits its own Wi-Fi signal so and all you're doing is you connect to the Wi-Fi and what it does is once you open up the app it will basically connect to the printer that you have on board so you can see if you look up here it says it's connected right here if I click on the printer I can go into the controls and I can actually control the printer from here so I can make it if you can see a move back there every time I send it a command it will move and then I can actually print directly from this so I can go into a library so we have these cloud libraries that connect either to your Google Drive or your Dropbox account and you can just find a file you want you can just click it you can press this little button that says send a printer send it to the printer and then it will start heating up and it'll start printing back there now do I have to be near the machine I think I have to be within wireless distance of the machine but do I have to be able to see the machine in order to perform those functions yeah you have to be in wireless to actually start it and then you can go completely off the grid so it what it's doing is it transfers it out of the machine and the machine is going to start printing it so in the R2 model you'll be able to actually see it right here with this little camera it'll show you the actual print printing so you can monitor it but as you can see it's starting to print the actual piece right now so really I mean we're trying to make it as simple as possible we want you to literally just unbox this thing find a file send it to the machine it'll do all the work for you all the settings will be there for you just as simple as easy as possible so you get one to 3d printing that's really valuable because you know traditionally 3d printers you know have required a lot of attention and lots of settings and you had to be kind of a semi-expert you know how to run them but this sounds like it's it's got a great interface so that you can do it without a heart hardly trying yeah it's fine we have we have obviously the mobile version you can do anything from a computer and then we have this touch screen that's on it as well that tells you like how long left in the print and you know it shows a little percentage scale and you can that's what the settings on that you can do whatever so we try to make it like as fun as possible as well and one of the things that we are going to be doing inside this too is creating this like gamified experience which I think is going to be interesting so as you print more as you print like a variety of things across different industries you'll get like these tags or these rewards for doing it so we have to send people like new files they print like a lot of specific files on a certain category so we're trying to make it fun I really want people to get into it because once you start using it it's like it's hard to break the barrier to get someone into it once they start using it ideas just start flowing all these amazing things start happening we've seen that so much firsthand that we know you know we just want that to continue well one of the boundaries I mean you know there's some very sophisticated machines out there that can use incredibly hard materials and that are relatively faster than you know 3d printing was a few years ago how far along that continuum are you and if you are not as far as you want to be are you planning to be there further in the next term here yeah I would say so I think the one thing that's tripping up this mass consumption of 3d printing is the time it takes to print something so speed is a huge factor right we have I mean these machines are some of the probably one of the top two fastest FDM machines which is like this plastic layering and building and layers so it prints one layer it moves up builds on top and it keeps building layers until you have this three-dimensional object that's called FDM printing and this one is one of the faster ones in the industry right now but FDM technology eventually is gonna die because it's just you're limited by physics right it can't go it can only go so fast in deposit material so there is other technologies that are more expensive that will come down to a consumer price point and will be accessible to everyone and once that speed if I can take a an hour print and make it in a minute I mean that's a whole different game for everyone right now there's now you're talking about I'm not competing with going to the store I'm not competing with you know Amazon to our delivery I'm literally if I need a piece or I need a component instantly I can print it a matter of minutes yeah that's what I want to talk about in the next part of the show it's a Brayden Morena of robo on 3d printing using your cell phone and other device really exciting technology in a Kickstarter fashion right now we take a short break we're gonna see how far that thing gets during our one minute break we'll be right back and we'll talk about what this means for the community for them for the country for manufacturing hello huh how you doing welcome to you by to talk I'm here Gordo the techs are on think tech Hawaii I'm here with my good old buddy Andrew the security guy hey everybody how you doing a lot good to have good to have Andrew here in the house please join us every Friday from 1 to 130 and follow us up on YouTube and remember as we say at the end of every show how you doing thank you for watching think tech I'm Grace Chang the new host for global connections you can find me here live every Thursday at 1 p.m. we'll be talking to people around the islands or visiting the islands who are connected in various aspects of global affairs so please tune in and aloha and thanks for watching hi I'm Ethan Allen host of likeable science here on think tech Hawaii calm I hope you'll join me every Friday at 2 p.m. to discover what's likeable about science okay we're back we're having a wonderful time with Braden Marina who's in San Diego in a company called Robo which does 3d printers new brand new high tech 3d printers and you can use them from your cell phone they have great implication for this country anyway so let's let's talk about how far you got in a one-minute break that we are we finished yet we are on we're still on the second layer now so this has a cup about a hundred and fifty layers so it's got a while ago but the good thing about 3d printing at this stage it's very autonomous so just like those old rotisserie cookers you can set in forget it so I think you can start it go out to lunch come back and your pieces done or go to sleep I like printing when I'm sleeping so they ever jammed or they ever fail occasionally that is an issue like I think across the industry for these consumer machines but we have this thing we have this little filament sensor on it so if there is a jam it does tell you and it stops the print and it will like basically tell you hey this has happened there's like error and then you can go and change it or fix it and then restart it so just like a normal 2d printer with the paper I guess it's like it's like cars in general used to have a lot of maintenance and issues about breaking down but as the technology gets better you address these problems and fewer problems over time and and in the future there'll be fewer problems well let's let's talk about the capability of a given machine like either the robo was it c2r c2r4 c2r sound like a small robot doesn't it? I know everyone's messaging us saying why didn't you do a d2 or r2d2 and you know we obviously didn't so what you know if I'm really ambitious and I want to you know push the envelope on this what kind of things can I make with these devices that you've built so we started doing prosthetic limbs so it's a huge community this isn't most practical thing for most consumers but from the medical side these we've printed probably over 50 different prosthetic limbs for kids all over the world there's a group called enable foundation which makes these 3d printed prosthetics costs about $20 worth of material when normal prosthetics are 5 to 50,000 so that's a huge use right now for 3d printing and I've seen one and what material they made with PLA so it's just a standard food grade plastic very safe simple to use most popular material that most people print with so that's what these ones are done with still very strong a nice structure to it and yeah they're you know they're having a lot of success making these 3d printed prosthetic hands if I wanted to make that in safe flesh color when I'd be able to do it from the printer will printer print in different colors yep yep we have we sell over 12 different materials but there's probably a hundred different colors and things like that out there so you can print this in any different color any style you want we've made one for there's been ones that are customers that made for kids that look like a Wolverine and you do all sorts of fun stuff and customize and personalize it so it's a cool community especially when you're building it for kids that have all these ideas of how they want to create their custom prosthetic hands you know that may have been born with the effect or something great what else you got this one right here this is actually one of my really good buddies you actually 3d printed this is a GoPro mount that you hold with your mouth when you're surfing and he actually started an entire business off just this design so we designed this PC 3d printed it and he created a Kickstarter campaign a crowdfunding campaign of this business idea to help surfers really get good shots of their surfing using this mouthpiece mount cool so this was like his first prototype that he built and I had him drop it off I want to talk about it because you know now he's in 20 plus stores all across the country selling this mount that he started with you know a robo 3d printer the money he saved and not having to send it out for manufacturing yeah a quick story I my first business with a watch business and it took me a year and $10,000 in my first prototype and this cost this probably took a week and maybe $20 worth of material to perfect this piece so I mean the amount of innovation speed that can happen with 3d printing is incredible yeah I'm excited about that and then this is just a fun piece this is something you know when you talk about the millions of files that are online you can just go and download a print I just search shower head and someone literally had designed a t-rex shower head so you can actually install this great fun present here you can literally just I have it on my shower you can just go like this and twist it on and this thing will be a shower head I want it brain I want to get one but you know you're let your mind as you said let your mind fly once you know that you have the capability of doing this kind of thing all kinds of ideas come to mind yeah I mean iPhone smartphone cases I mean you just get obsessed with oh what can I 3d print now I just got a bluetooth speaker I can make like a little bluetooth shell for it I you know they have little iPhone amplifier docks that you can put in that amplify the sound of your speakers I mean there's just incredible stuff out there that people are making with you know this 3d modeling tools and just sharing them for free so you start going in there and browsing you're really excited about stuff yeah so I can go on the net right now and I can get these templates that people are sharing yeah then I get a printer like yours and I can I can create anything like that and I can design my own I guess yeah you can design your own I mean there's free software out there one called tinker CAD it's made by Otto desk and you can go on there you can download it for free right now anyone that's listening and watching and you can just start designing stuff they have great tutorials and once you design something you literally can just send it to your printer and print it so I would guess I would guess that this is this is happening in other words what's on what's online right now the ideas that are available to me open source right now are probably increasing dramatically and if I look in a month or six months I'm gonna find a lot more am I right thousands a day I mean thousands of files are being uploaded a day marketplaces there's some that are trying to charge money for the files there's some that are keeping it free and open source which is amazing so most of it is still free I mean you can go on and download just about anything and I mean it's gonna be really cool it is customized personalized world where you know I need iPhone case I can go in there and type my name and it's really cool iPhone case comes out and I print it instantly put on my phone and I'm ready to go and it's happening with so many different I mean you buy GoPro there's hundreds of GoPro mounts you can just print and you know add to your GoPro and then start using them so including soft things including right including you said rubber was one of the materials you can have and I suppose there's new materials all the time material science is expanding at a rapid rate so it doesn't have to be something hard you know you think of these printers you think of something hard but it doesn't have to be hard right yeah most people think it's just like this hard plastic material but I mean we've got some cool rubber materials I mean there's certain people that design things that you know create flexible elements to it that even they're using a hard material still feels flexible so but the rubber materials I mean people are loving it it's called ninja flex it's really really cool well-designed strong rubber material and gives you like really nice flexibility so that opens up a whole new genre of things you can print sure for example for example shoes yeah I got you know I got my own my own expectations about shoes and I know what my size is or at least I can design and you know trial and error find exactly the right size for my shoes I can keep that design and whenever I want a pair of shoes I can create a pair of shoes whatever color whatever texture whatever size design right am I right yeah there's a cool company in San Diego that we're friends with called feeds FBETZ and they created this system you actually step into it scans your foot it basically balances it corrects your foot so if you need a lift things like that and then it custom makes you a shoe it sends it to the machine and it'll make a custom shoe that literally fits your foot like to perfection I mean I tried this thing on and I was like this is like a glove on my foot it's just it's there's no other way to make a perfectly customized shoe that with 3d printing so they're doing some amazing stuff you know in software development things like that I mean there's just so much happening in the space it's exciting every single day sure I mean when you think about shoes that the next thing you think about is clothing yeah I know that's not big enough perhaps for you know certain kinds of garments but if you had the right material and you had all the design you could create your own clothing you could well you could build a factory couldn't you that's what I wanted to ask you about how is this you know in your mind's eye and in your wildest expectations how is this going to affect what we have seen over the past few years as the failure of American manufacturing could this make it come back I 100% think so just looking at an example from the prototyping side of things we've been talking with Lockheed Martin and Lockheed Martin puts consumer machines on the desks of a lot of their engineers and they've gone from doing 20 prototypes a quarter to doing 220 prototypes a quarter just by having this on the desk solution because it's so much more effective and quick and so the speed of innovation is happening so much faster and what's going to end up happening is perfecting of the products before they go into manufacturing is going to happen and manufacturers become more efficient and if it becomes more efficient it becomes cheaper and you know hopefully that then brings it back to the US if we can so I 100% agree Invisalign great example they have a factory of the future is what they call it where they did you know 17 to 20 million unique Invisalign retainers all using 3d printing so it was an entire lights on lights off operation using 3d printers to make customized retainers so it's a confluence of everything you know a confluence of the hardware the software the material science the design the art my goodness and this must be very exciting for you it's exciting for me just to hear you talk about it and I think it's exciting for a whole generation of you know American designers American software designers too really incredible and I just want to before we leave we're almost done here before we leave I just want to get you know the address of your Kickstarter campaign and what you're doing and how people can connect with you can you tell us about that yeah so we have two new machines we just launched our Kickstarter that's how we started the business we're kind of going back to Kickstarter to say hey thank you we want to give our backers and fans exclusive pricing so they're $200 $300 off retail if you go there now you can go to our website Robo3d.com you'll see links to the Kickstarter from there or if you just go to Kickstarter.com and search Robo3d you'll see our campaign page come up and we have the Robo C2 and then we have a bigger version called the Robo R2 and you'll see all the features and phenomenal smart 3d printing machine so I'm so glad we connected with Braden that was a great discussion very important and I and I like to reconnect with you at a later time to see how you know how it's worked for you but I I think we're with you on this we want you to succeed okay I appreciate it yeah I'm excited too there's a lot of stuff Braden Marina of Robo Robo company doing 3d printing from your cell phone with new hardware new software new prospects for American manufacturing thank you so much Braden yeah thanks a lot for having me appreciate it take care