Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1073397
76 FLEX007 MAGAZINE I JANUARY 2019 Feinberg: What I find so fascinating about the tool is it's X, Y, and Z—not just X and Y. Blum: We call these digital joints [shows sam- ple projects]. Matties: It's quite ornate. The puzzle piece is just brilliant, and the tolerance is amazing. Blum: The tolerance is one of the really interest- ing things about the tool. To make a joint like this, you have one design file cut in the posi- tive and negative. When you cut the negative, you start with a perfect interference fit. Origin is extremely precise. You can cut a piece, find that it barely doesn't fit, and because it has a perfect interference fit, you can shave off 1/1000 of an inch; it will let you do that. It's so little you can't even feel it cutting anything, but when you try to put the other piece in again, it fits perfectly. You can keep doing that until you get the fit that you want. This is very difficult to do any other way. Matties: What are the stripes or the dominoes for? Blum: That's ShaperTape, which is a proprie- tary tape that we've developed, and it's how the system does its visual tracking. The tape is key to the accuracy of Origin and how it knows where it is in 3D space. Basically, this is our mechanism for augmenting your workpiece. It can be a flat piece of wood or an existing piece, like a desk—it doesn't matter. If you put tape on a flat surface, Origin scans it, and then has a complete 3D understanding of where it is in that space. We did a lot of custom development work on the tape. We had to teach a manufac- turer how to make this tape. It has a unique, non-repeating pattern on every row of tape, and based on the way you lay it out, it's sta- tistically guaranteed always to have a unique layout of those dominoes. Let's say I'm in a makerspace with 10 people sharing this product with works in progress. I can take this over to another project. As soon as it doesn't see the tape anymore, it loses where it is in space. As soon as it comes back here, it remembers exactly where it was and what design files are linked to this tape. If I have another project that's in progress and has dif - ferent tape on it, when I pop it over there, it's going to remember all the exact design files that are on that and exactly where they are. Feinberg: Without erasing it? Blum: Yes, it's all saved on there. You can erase it if you want, but you can work on a virtually infinite number of projects simultaneously and keep going back to them. Matties: When you were designing the circuits, what's the level of complexity of the electronics? Blum: It's an electromechanically complex product. You can guess that from the form Precision digital joinery created with Origin.