0:01 So my name is Florian, and I’m the co-founder and CEO of trinckle, and I brought today my other co-founder Gunnar and CTO. We decided to split this presentation, I will give you a brief overview of Trinkle, and G will share some tech insights with you. So let’s start, we found a Trinkle with a mission to simplify design, and how we use computational design for it, and why we think this is special, beneficial in additive manufacturing. I’m going to show you now, to understand R problem, oh no, teams ring to understand problem, an additive manufacturer we actually targeting.

0:47 Let’s have a look at the very basics, what do we need to 3D print? We basically need two things, we need a 3D printer, and we need, and we need a design, design. The design contains the blueprint of the part, so that the printer knows what to print, and here already the problem appears. Whereas most of the industry has focused on making this machines pretty good and unleashing a lot of great potential, we haven’t seen big improvements in the design side, at least at the point that we still design very manual. Whereas in the world of physical goods it was absolute normal, and this is the still absolute normal, that we try to automate everything that is possible, but in the world of design we’re still somehow stuck to very manual process. That was and is okay in the world of mass production, where you have once very high design efforts at, but can split or distribute them over thousands or million of parts you actually produce.

1:51 But in the world of additive manufacturing, there’s much more complex parts and much smaller batch sizes, and in many cases even batch size one, when it comes to customization. Here we cannot afford this high manual design costs, and we cannot afford this slow manual design processes, and worst, good designers are very rare resource, and this problem actually hinders a lot of fantastic AM applications out there. And, u, we thought, okay, how can we solve this problems, and there we identified three ways of how we can actually solve this problem. One is, we make CAT systems just more powerful, so to increase the efficiency of the existing C, of the existing cat engineers. Second, we make CAT software so easy that even non engineers can use it. And third, we are able to automate design processes to a decree, so that we don’t, do not even need any human interaction.

2:53 There, we are Trinkle, focus at number two and three, we therefore developed our own CAT system called parate, and with parade we’re able to quickly set up configurators for designing, that are so easy that even a doctor could use it, for example designing an implant or an orthosis, without the need of having studied cut, having study cut before. And with spam made we’re also able to automate design processes fully, and this is especially beneficial when it comes to very repetitive work. For example, if you always have to design a robot cripping system according the object it should hold, put it into our system and our system would automatically, for example, provide the arm, and our system would automatically construct the right cripper around it.

3:48 Yeah, in what industries is our software mainly used, we mainly have customers in the automotive industry, more and more in aerospace, and now days also in medical. So, and if you now think, wow, that’s interesting, I want to have a look at it, how can I use your software, then we have two options basically. One is, you define what you need, and rebuild such a custom application for you, we also now have a self service option so you can check it out yourself and work with the solution, and the other’s that use one of our so-called standard applications, where we gathered all, all the knowledge we have in one certain field into one application. For example, with fixure M, here in fixure M a nonexpert can design all kind of different fixures without any experience in a few minutes.

4:46 Yeah, how is it able, how are we able to actually set up so quickly different kind of applications? This is mainly thanks to our param system, which is here on the base, and parate contains all kind of relevant modules and functions that we need to build up these applications, and then it’s pretty easy. We just, once we have a new product like a robot cripper, we just define the specs and definitions of such a robot cripper within the script, our parate system then executes the script, and gives out a configuration or an automation application, then I give would provide the arm it should fit to, and then our system automatically generates the ready to print data.

5:34 So that’s it for my side, and now hand over to G. Okay, I will take over about the technical part. Yeah, automation, automation of design has the following aspect, so you can think of the amount of automation here in the scale between Z and 100%, and if you look at the required knowledge, or, or competence the user would have, actually you have kind of a reciprocal behavior, this means when you have no automation you need to have really a CAT engineer to build your object. The higher you go within this, this automation, actually you come to a point where everybody can use the thing, and that’s actually the goal.

6:20 So when we here at the %, we have classical CAD, so very trained people that actually can use it. Somewhere in the middle of the curve, this is what we call assisted CAD, this is also things that we are building, where we have a certain scope, like the medical case, where people have to have some certain amount of knowledge, but not so much about the constructive parts, but still you have to somehow specify certain points or define certain, certain aspects of the configuration of the, of the construction. And then of course there is this end, and this, what we want to talk today about, what we call fully automation, where at the end you do not need to know anything, I mean you have to know what you want to get, but nothing more, and get something out. So automation for engineering is half the way, and we can go the full way, and this is what we want to present today.

7:23 We have this case, this is something that maybe you have seen this already, already, it’s something that the Deutsche bar currently is installing on many stations, these are small signs at the, at mostly at handrails, but they can also be at some other places, where we have directions or information written in, yeah, kind of Latin language, Latin letters, that everybody can read them, that, but then also in Bri signs, and also visually disabled people are able to, to read them, by touching them with their fingers. This is an interesting aspect because this client really needs a lot of them, and they are very specific, you can think of that, every station has different, different messages written on this, and you have a lot of stations in Germany.

And this case actually now was a real use case where we printed, at the end, or not we, but our client print over 30,000 signs that were already installed in so far, this is has a certain relevance. The system works in a, I will show it in detail in a second, but in, in a brief overview the system works in a way that the client, in this case the do ban, defines in a very easy way what science they want to have, this actually goes into our Trinkle param system, the signs are created in a very robust and functional workflow, they are then produced by a partner of the Doan, the, the company is called cfk, and yeah, then they are handed out, and they save a lot of, it saves a lot of money, because compared to the previous way where they were designed sign by sign in the CAD program, this is now really a use case where you can run big batches of these things through it.

9:27 How does it work for the user? So the user has an Excel sheet where he can define all of his text, all of his signs he wants to build, so I made an example for a conference center, would maybe look like this. He has the option to put additional bright text if he wants to have a different text for this, for this sign, he gives the radius of his handrail, of course this needs to be known because the have different sizes of this, and you can also give the width of the sign, and this is actually pretty easy, so every client can do this, you need no CAD expertise on this point.

10:11 And then you go to the website of the that, that we prepared, where there actually on the back end our CAD system or paramid system is working, only thing you have to do, you have to upload the CSV file, you get an automate, automatically you get the full set of signs as a preview, you can little bit user interface stuff on top, you can see highlight one, look one, you also get the prices of this automatically calculated. And then you press on order, and then of course the, the magic starts in the background, that actually all of the signs are automatically generated, placed into different stacks that can be then easily into the printing build space of, of the producer, and all of this is then transferred to the FTP server of the client.

11:11 So when one wants to do this kind of fully automatization, you have to think of a couple of aspects that are more important here than in other fields. The first thing is, of course, you need to have simplicity, it needs to be that all the different decisions that need to be done during the production or the construction process need to be combined into your automatized solution, that the user using them doesn’t have to know about these things at all. You need very guided processes, this means you take away the freedom of a CAD system where you can do everything, and make it rather very ra, that you can do the stuff that you should be able to do and not more.

11:56 And of course you need a high robustness, because you can always assume that the clients are putting wrong data, wrong stuff in there, and the thing has still to work, or at least give sufficient information back that the, the client sees okay here I did something wrong, I have to provide different data. All of this is covered in our approach Flor, that Flor was showing before, in our script based CAD system, and ideally all of this is then embedded into one CAD PR process.

12:29 This scheme shows it a bit, so CSV file in, and then inside the script you have the different steps, I simplify this a bit, but for, for, for today this is fine. So you have to translation of the clear text into bright text, you have the construction of the parts, you have to build the assembly for the, for the 3D printing machine, and all of this then ends in a 3D model. Of course these things are a bit more complicated internally, and what I said before, that we have to have this simplicity, that we have to somehow combine the complexity and put them into this model, and I want to give at least three examples for this case how this technically works.

13:19 The first thing is that of course you need to translate the clear text into bright text, bright text is, is maybe somebody of you have looked at this at one point, maybe not, is a, is a kind of a language, it is of course every letter in, in, in Latin has some correspondence in brightex, but of course it’s not always a one to1 conversion, there are a lot of different rules, for example according numbers, special characters, and when you look at this it is kind of complex, and the idea is that you can actually encapsulate all of these rules into the CAD system by itself. So you write the rules into the system into the script, and then you don’t have to care about this anymore, so you need no external solution, and then you can actually, then the system knows how to translate your clear text into the bright text, so it’s kind of a certain covering of complexity.

14:26 The next point that is interesting to show is the following aspect, though our client, who was then also producing the, the signs, had a requirement for the C cering process, he said, okay, our signs should not be longer than 20 9 cm because then they would stick out of the build space, they should ideally not be much smaller than 12 CM unless they are very small signs, but, and inside, inside this, this range they should be as small as possible, and he would like to split long signs to reach these requirements. And of course the splitting is also not so easy, because the splitting needs to be done in a way that you only do the splitting in between character blocks of the Bri words and of the Latin text letters, and then of course ideally in a very centralized way, though the split line here is in the middle, and should be evenly spaced on both sides.

And yeah, I mean that was the requirement, and we said, okay, we will, we will do this, and it’s, at the end it’s a logical problem that is not so hard to grasp, it’s a little bit like a text, text editor is doing this as well, but still it needs some thought, because I mean you can have the situation where you say, okay, none of these blocks are actually fitting, so I have to somehow add some spaces in between to make these things fitting, that I really can get this, these cutting lines, and the Logics not super complicated, but it’s still a little bit of logic that you have to apply.

16:10 So you have to walk through this flowchart, for example, where we have to compare the lengths of the, of the price signs in every position, and the length of the letters and every position, then you have to calculate, which is higher than the minimum, which, which then is smaller, where you put the different extra spaces, and so on. So I don’t want to go into this in detail, but it shows a little bit that you need to have a certain amount of Logics, or complexity, that you want to put into your CAD construction as well.

16:43 And especially interesting to see, is you cannot really put this outside, one could of course think, okay, let’s, if I have a classic CAD, I make another program which calculates these things, and then I put the results into the, into the C, but this does not work that well, because you’re also accessing elements from the construction itself. So this red, this red box for example is one, one step where you take the width of your already constructed letters and analyze this, and of course this then is somehow dependent from each other, so you don’t have a simply forward construction where you have input, construction, output, but it can depend on the intermediate process. We have other example where this happens in a more complex way than here, but I mean in this, in this price sign example that I wanted to show, this is here some point where this takes place, so this is something that, yeah, can be introduced then in our system, in our script.

And then we come to the third aspect, where we show that this kind of logical integration into one CAD construction strip is, is very interesting, and this is for the build space preparation. So our client said, okay, I do not want to get all the STLs of all the different signs separately, and then I have to place them manually in my build space, I rather want to have that you give us already batches of signs that are already aligned with a certain angle, that are actually ordered in the way that, that the, the package is as close as possible. This means that we have to order them by hand rail radius, so we have the one with a higher radius on the left, and the one with a smaller radius on the right, that they can be stacked more properly, and then they also need, should be aligned with the, with a spacer support structure at the bottom, that all of this could go directly into the printer.

And yeah, that’s, we could, we could do, so we, we added this also into this CAD construction, and all of together this really became a very nice use case, so the things could be printed, then here, this is how it looks like for the printer, and yeah, all of this goes into the script, all of this can be then combined in, in one module, and I think this is an important aspect that we wanted to show today, where we say, okay, and by doing this one can get this such a system very easy to use, and at the end it’s a fire and forget system for the client, and with that he was then able to produce this larger amount of signs.

19:44 So that’s then, thank you very much for listening, are questions, other questions, or.