I took it to mean that they can do that, and it's compatible with that.... But in a practical setting where companies each have their own way of doing things (not to mention people whose jobs it is to make sure things are going accordingly) they may not all be interested in adopting it right away, near-term. It's a more complicated process than your standard CNC machine (which has had closed loop control for years now) due to having so many different factors going on- the cooling metal, the deformation, etc. My husband just did a project on Scale jacket for a large steel manufacturer trying to figure out why some of their samples turned out flaky and others with a more solid jacket; and while the data showed some loose correlations (he suggested changing the speed at which it is rolled as an option to get it to do what they want) there are so many factors in a real manufacturing environment, some people would still want the option of manual control to tweak it as the parts are being made and/or between parts rather than relying on either our machine or the printer machine itself to handle all the calibration. That's what a lot of the quality and process engineers do in metals manufacturing… it's their job to make sure things run right and sometimes it takes a person who can see not just the local environment of what's going on in the machine, but also the larger factory environment- to get at the root cause, if that makes any sense. Right now my understanding is that Print Rite alerts the engineers monitoring the build to conditions which could lead to a defect so they can stop the problem before it starts, or at the very least before the next run. For instance, if the Quality Engineer sees a bunch of parts flagged as potentially defective, he would know to alert the maintenance tech guys to change a certain parameter that would make the next round of printing go smoothly. If it should happen that they perfect it to the point of operating as flawlessly as a CNC machine, yes that will be like the Holy Grail- but I don't foresee that for another 5, 10 years. It would require us being fully integrated into an actual AM machine (maybe the Additive Industries one, maybe another) written into the controlling software (i.e. why we've partnered with materialize?) and probably a lot of other things I haven't even thought of. It's on the horizon but several years away, IMO. That doesn't mean what we currently have isn't needed- it sounds to me like they need our Quality certificate to assist with certification and liability since printer manufacturers only verify that the machine did what it was supposed to- not the quality of the actual part.
