This machine is a perfect representation of humanity’s current state. A million-dollar marvel coordinating a thousand individually actuated punch elements to turn flat steel into computationally optimized geometries, with the pin coordinates scrawled on the side in Sharpie.

The Sharpie is the part that actually runs the shop. Same story on our press brake: the program says 90 degrees, the steel springs back, and the number you really dial in lives on a card somebody wrote by hand. No CAD file has ever known that number.

@DanielleFong well that’s certainly one way to form sheet metal

That reminds me of the machine Ken Johnson, Sliman Bensmaia, Steve Hsaio and others were using back in the naughties; Huge thing took up half the faraday cage with 400 linear motors--they all came down to a cm square surface that could provide rapidly changing finger stimuli:

a million dollar marvel that smhw still requires that human operators stick their hands in the anti-hand area

Is the Sharpie mark just a temporary setup note, or is it part of the machine’s normal workflow?

Meh, too much of a jump cut for me and I worry about the low cycle-time relative to an more coarse-grained initial approach with multiple steps in a press-jig. This "looks cool", but the throughput seems abismal.

Who makes this dynamically reprogrammable metal press with many pixels? I have posted this many times to Twitter & it is now deleted from search results.

That is amazing. I have dreamed of a robotic massage table like this.

HT:

Shouldn’t there be datum features to ensure that the sheet metal coupon is aligned properly? If so, then the numbers are useless since the datum features control the positioning. But this machine is a cool way to make large radii stamped prototypes.

beautiful.

The subtlety of using a thing lives in one mind, as Yue Fei put it. The Sharpie is where that part still shows.

So true

Doubt that machine is worth anywhere close to a million.

proof that high-tech still needs a human touch.

I see this in every real system we build. The machine can be computationally perfect, while the workflow around it still depends on a marker and one person who knows why the numbers matter.

Paging @MachinaLabs_

Now imagine 50yrs from now, Robotics (arms) and MFG AI improves enough that the part can be QCd to spec, Assembled entirely automatic Or maybe w/ light intervention by 1-2 specialists Future: 4-5 SME & engineers will over whole factories 1/2 inspecting code, 1-2 finished parts

🤣

Amazing 😍

good luck creating a Sharpie from scratch

Takes away the entire upfront cost of producing moulds for stamping.

amazing!

Oil canning gone too far

to build a cocktail bar...

This machine is interesting; it requires an accessory to be placed on it to operate.

All to make a couch.

I think everyone has had this idea at some point and assumed it was impractical and wouldn’t work. It’s kind of crazy this is a really thing.

This tech removes the need to have multiple molds. I think this is the tech used by shipmakers, and RD wings

That’s how the curve was pressed out.

We need this for boat building! Imagine having this to build a stainless steel yacht!

It's beautiful