3DQue has released a fascinating online game they call “3DPrintle”.
It’s capitalizing on the worldwide obsession with daily online games pioneered by Wordle. By the way, someone modified a 3D printer to solve Wordle puzzles automatically.
3DPrintle, like Wordle, is an online web-based game where you attempt to guess the type of print failure.
The questions are sourced from 3DQue’s powerful AI system that is part of their production system. As you may know, the company produces a fully controllable print plate that allows for continuous production on a 3D printer. This technology can be leveraged into a print farm, dramatically reducing the human labor required to run the operation.
Part of the system involves detecting failures in print jobs, which also should be automated. 3DQue has developed an image-based AI system that can literally visually recognize all types of common 3D print failures for FFF equipment. This allows their production system to, for example, pause or cancel a job that’s gone awry.
The “QuinlyVision” system was built using thousands of images of all kinds of print failures, and the AI was trained to recognize them.
3DPrintle takes some of these images and presents them to you for a guess as to the type of failure. The answer, of course, is provided by QuinlyVision.
This may seem a bit strange, but it’s actually fun for a while to try 3Dprintle. The images shown are exactly what you’d expect, and I’ve seen many like them in real life over the years. My long and unfortunate experience with print failures allowed me to chock up a lot of successful guesses, but sometimes there are multiple failures within a single image that you might miss.
While experienced 3D printer operators could have some fun with the system for a short while, the best use of 3DPrintle in my opinion is for 3D print newbies. They can very quickly gain an understanding of the various print failures they will almost certainly encounter as they get involved in 3D printing.
It is a bit ironic, however, that an AI would be training a human.
Nevertheless, they would certainly learn what to look for, and with other resources could understand how to resolve the issue.
In the end, however, 3DPrintle is an outstanding demonstration of 3DQue’s powerful AI failure detection system.
