Visiting SeeMeCNC
Typically, the only time I have the chance to visit with companies that we work with is at CES or at an editor’s day or event that I’m sometimes invited too. There are also a few chances at LAN events as well from time to time. As I mentioned in the opening, SeeMeCNC is fairly close by for me. That is of course relative, they are about an hour and 45 minutes away, but when you sometimes drive half that just to get dinner or to go to a store it is really close. In fact, they are closer than DXRacer and SteelSeries whom I’ve also visited. Anyhow with that in mind working with them or not if I picked up a SeeMeCNC printer I wanted to visit them and check out their facilities.
After talking with Steve, AKA PartDaddy, I got word that the first Eris’s would be finished on a Friday and I left right away. The drive to Goshen Indiana went by smoothly and right before you get into town you can see the large SeeMeCNC sign in bright blue as well as a smaller sign in front of the building. Honestly when I left to visit them I really had no idea what to expect other than a few things I recently saw on the Science Channel when they also visited. Well they are in somewhat large metal building. I guess in my mind they would be a little smaller because when I got in I commented about it being larger than I expected and they all got a kick out of that. This was funny to them because SeeMeCNC is literally bursting at its seams, the building is packed full. The building has a very complete machine shop, offices, and is even taking advantage of a second story for assembly.
I kind of expected maybe one of each machine but they have rows of multi tool CNC machines, laser cutters, and injection molding machines. They even have a robotic arm back in the back corner. It all hardly leaves room for the rows of shelves holding parts for their 3D Printer line and the racks of filament.
Anyhow when I got to the shop I found Steve on the CNC. He had actually kicked the normal guy who runs the machines off and was working on making a few last second changes to the heatsink for the hot end of the Eris. So as I took a few photos around the shop and talked with him it was really cool to see them actually finishing the last part. Once done Steve introduced me to Oly, his co-founder and VP.
We went upstairs where they literally had Eris’s stacked up and covering the floor, ready and waiting for the hotend to be installed. We grabbed one and went down to Steve’s office where he put everything together and then all three of us went outside to take a picture of the guys with their newest printer! Don’t let them full you, they didn’t need the sun glasses they just wanted to look like badasses.
We even took a look at the injection mold area where a lot of the parts for the Eris are made. They had actually just finished up a few changes on the molds for the ducting that goes around the hot end to distribute the airflow across the heatsink as well as out three different outlets for even airflow onto your print.
So during all of this I did get to hear a little more about the history of SeeMeCNC. As it turns out they started out as a full on machine shop that opened up back in 1996 called Blackpoint Engineering. During that time they produced medical instruments then later moved to motorcycle and paintball parts. Well back in 2011 things slowed down and in order to keep the staff on hand they started looking at other options. Leaving a bunch of talented people in a completely stocked machine shop led to them dabbling in designing a 3d printer and things really took off. That is when they renamed to SeeMeCNC.
One thing really stood out to me when talking to Steve and the guys. This is a crew that is really passionate about what they are doing. I don’t blame them though, when things slowed down they had a once in a lifetime chance to just do what they enjoyed and SeeMeCNC is what came out of it. I ended up being at the office a LOT longer than I think any of us planned because Steve and I spoke a lot about the open source community that has helped SeeMeCNC (and all of the other 3d printer manufactures) grow. Both Oly and Steve find it extremely important to keep the books open so to speak by uploading most if not all of their hard work up online for community members to have access too. In fact, the hotend in the Eris was uploaded as soon as they finished up the design. The open source community and SeeMeCNC have a symbiotic relationship where by pooling their ideas and resources it helps overall development grow even quicker. MakerBot for example started from that same community and later on decided to drop open source completely and even went as far as trying to patent designs made by community members. This hasn’t really turned out well for them with them recently moving production.
When wondering around the building I was especially impressed with the entryway. There are shelves of 3d printed objects all over the place, a rack of a few filaments for visitors who need their fix, and a few printers waiting to be picked up as well. Both printers caught my eye because one is one of the new SeeMeCNC DropLit v2’s a resin based 3D printer. The other printer was a factory assembled Rostock Max v2 but it is built to custom specifications for an additional height. Around the room the 3d prints that really caught my eye were printed by their “Part Daddy”, a 16 foot tall custom built printer. These prints are as tall or taller than me like the large rocket. Seriously I don’t know why I need it, but I need one of these giant rocket prints lol.
I took a peak in their design room where I found the original Eris sitting as well as the DropLit v2. Steve gave me a quick rundown on the DropLit v2. The condensed version is that it uses an HD projector to project each layer up into a vat of UV reactive resin. To do that they use a standard Mini-RAMBo controller just like the Eris and to get the projected image it also uses a Raspberry Pi 3. Hopefully I will get the chance to revisit and maybe see one in action in the future.
Lastly before we boxed up our Eris we took a trip up into the parts room. This is where the assembly happens as well. As expected everything is sorted out and inventoried. While I was up there I did find a stack of Matter Control Tablets and an entire box of Raspberry Pi 3’s. When Steve opened up the box of Pi’s I had a hard time not reaching in and snatching one up!
Once both Steve’s wife and my wife were both asking us why we hadn’t left yet I finally grabbed a few filament colors for our testing and packed up our Eris and hit the road! I of course had to rush home so I could dig into everything properly and start printing right!?