There has been two interesting announcements from Sigma Additive Solutions.
You may not have heard of Sigma Additive Solutions, but they are one of many software providers for the 3D print industry. Specifically, Sigma Additive Solutions produces PrintRite3D, a utility that provides quality control functions.
The PrintRite3D concept is to aggregate data from a variety of sensors and sources on the printing lifecycle, and then provide analytics and reporting.
Currently, PrintRite3D can produce reports on “Machine Health” (based on machine internal log files), “Process Health” (based on optical and infrared camera sensors collecting data during printing) and “Part Health” (based on melt pool monitoring from either machine or third party sensors).
PrintRite3D is used by a number of additive operations, particularly those in production scenarios where quality is of critical importance.
Recently, Sigma Additive Solutions have made a couple of important announcements that should improve the situation for many of their clients.
The first announcement dealt with machine logs. They’ve released a beta version of PrintRite3D that includes a new Machine Health module. This new module allows operators to standardize machine logs. Sigma Additive Solutions explains:
“This new solution marks the beginning of the company’s software-only approach to quality assurance by allowing users to take disparate machine log files and standardize them. Built upon Sigma’s PrintRite3D monitoring and analytics technology, the company is creating a framework for connecting and standardizing distinct sensors and images into a cohesive product suite.”
This could be extremely important for operations involving mixes of equipment, where they’d otherwise end up with a lot of data to convert for processing.
The solution allows for linking to machines via an API, ability to create a universal data format standard, scalability for fusion of sensor data and more. All of this is then fed through PrintRite3D’s analytic, visualization and report functions to provide a single view of the situation.
The second announcement dealt with an agreement with SLM Solutions, one of the major producers of metal 3D printers for industry.
The two agreed to certify PrintRite3D for use with SLM Solutions’ 3D printing equipment. This brings SLM Solutions’ equipment into the PrintRite3D environment, where it will be able to participate in the centralized quality control functions.
Software to centrally manage quality control is quite important, and even more so when it comes from a third party. Increasingly metal additive operations use equipment from multiple providers, simply because they offer different capabilities. By trying to meet their own customer needs, these operations step outside of the scope of a provider’s tools, and thus a third party is required to bring all the data together.
That’s the job of PrintRite3D.
Via Sigma Additive
