Professional Experience

Formlabs: Systems Integration Engineer (2015 to Present)

Based in Somerville, Massachusetts, Formlabs designs professional-grade 3D printers. Unlike most 3D printers which extrude filament through a heated nozzle (fused deposition modeling or FDM), Formlabs printers use a laser to solidify either liquid resin (stereolithography or SLA) or nylon particles (selective laser sintering or SLS) into complex objects. These laser-based techniques can provide better surface finish, finer detail and superior mechanical properties compared to FDM. We were the first to bring stereolithography to the desktop with the Form 1, and its successors, the Form 2 and Form 3, are widely regarded as the best desktop stereolithography printers on the market.

I work on the Systems Integration team, which operates at the intersection of mechanical, electrical and software engineering. We are responsible for assembling the printer’s many subsystems into a reliable, well-oiled machine. The team is highly interdisciplinary, taking on different responsibilities during the product’s development cycle. During the early stages, we design and prototype new subsystems, which includes consulting with hardware engineers to select components and collaborating with software developers to incorporate each system into the firmware. When developing the Form 3 resin level sensor, I narrowed down a list of nearly a dozen options to find which would be most suitable by balancing accuracy, cost and user experience. Once one had been selected, I wrote the code to integrate the sensor into the printing process—code that’s running on tens of thousands of printers all across the world at any given moment.

As the new printer moves towards production, the Systems Integration team oversees extensive validation and lifetime testing to ensure each element performs as expected. We also help to diagnose and resolve issues that arise at the factory during assembly and calibration. For our Form 3L printer, I led the effort to address problems with the optical system that were limiting throughput on the line. The optics of the Form 3L are particularly challenging because it has two lasers which need to be calibrated to one another very accurately in order to eliminate artifacts where they meet. Thanks to my contributions, we were able to increase yield significantly and ship printers to customers more quickly.

Our work doesn’t stop once printers have made their way into customers’ hands. We listen to feedback from our users and continue to make improvements that can be deployed via software and firmware updates. For instance, not long after shipping the Form 3, we uncovered an issue with the its resin level sensor. Even though it only affected a small proportion of printers, those who were impacted had a risk of their prints failing due to lack of resin. To avoid returning the printers for repair, which would have inconvenienced our customers and cost us money, I developed a firmware solution that saved both time for our users and money for Formlabs.

Every year, Formlabs runs a hackathon for all employees. You can read about a few of the fun projects I’ve worked on.