In the preliminary talk schedule for this year’s JuliaCon, there’s mention of a new 3D printing slicer, “Euclid”.
First, what’s JuliaCon? It’s an annual conference to support the Julia language. Ok, what’s Julia? Julia is a specialized programming language designed for very high-performance numerical computing. This is a tool you’d do big-data machine learning with.
Now if you think about it, most 3D printer slicing engines, the tools that prepare a 3D model for printing, are pretty slow. They will get worse as machines become more accurate and require more slices, and also as 3D models get increasingly complex. The faster slicers today use multiple CPU cores and threads to parallelize the work to achieve some speedups, but is there more speed to be had?
Apparently so, with Julia. Scheduled at JuliaCon is a talk entitled, “3D Printing with Julia: Presenting ‘Euclid’, a new high performance multimaterial slicer” by one Jack Minardi.
Now this makes sense. Minardi turns out to be a co-founder of Voxel8, a startup with a method of 3D printing electrically conductive traces within a 3D print.
Embedded electrical traces are not something easily handled by common 3D printer slicing software, as they are often internal to the 3D structure. Voxel8 had to develop some type of customized 3D printer slicing software to handle their needs for embedded electrical circuits.
It may be they did so in Julia, and that could be what the talk is about. When we see “multimaterial” in the talk title, we read “plastic and conductive materials”.
No doubt the Euclid slicer will be tremendously fast. Benchmarks of standard algorithms using Julia are almost always ridiculously faster than other environments.
We’re wondering if Euclid is a Voxel8 product, and whether it may be issued to the public as an opensource tool. If so, expect much faster slicing in the near future!
Via JuliaCon 2015 (Hat tip to Eric)
