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So let's start by talking
about 3D printing.

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3D printing is a lot like
normal printing,

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but it's in 3D.

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(Laughter)

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Not that kind of 3D.

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But more like this.

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3D printing refers to additive
manufactoring techniques

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that build objects layer by layer,

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starting from nothing

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and ending up with
a completed physical object.

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A common exageration is

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a 3D printer is just like
a Star Strek replicator,

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you can make anything.

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Although you can make
very complex geometries

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with a wide variety of materials

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like plastics, powders and metals.

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3D printing does have its limitations.

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This is why we have
so many kinds of 3D printers.

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These are a lot of
different varieties that exist,

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of different kinds of additive
manufacturing techniques

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that fall within
the field of 3D printing.

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The true magic of 3D printing

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isn't it being a Star Trek replicator.

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It's how we use it.

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A 3D printer is used by designers

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to generate their parts
in the real world.

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So, you can take a design,

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plug it in the printer
and it'll print it out for you.

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And you can take
that part in your hands,

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make adjustments to it,
change your design

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and print another one.

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So it's used for iterative design,

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and it actually checks parts
with the real world.

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So it's a really useful tool.

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A disadvantage of 3D printing
is that it's actually pretty slow.

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So we have a really nice
little 3D printed cup

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over here on the left 
with an integrated straw.

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Pretty cool!

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That takes about the same 
amount of time to print

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or to manufacture 
as these plastic cups

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or a hundred packs of 50 plastic cups,
so 5,000 plastic cups.

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So it's about the same amount 
of manufacturing time,

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That's low-balling it.

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So, this layer by layer
additive process is pretty slow

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compared to a formative
manufacturing technique.

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So, I started to gain interest 
in 3D printing,

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when I was in 
my senior year at MIT.

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And I wanted to make a printer

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that was really fast and really cheap

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and printing with 
a wide variety of materials.

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So I was a little disappointed 
to find out

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that these goals were kind of

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what the entire 3D printing industry 
was already working on.

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(Laughter)

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So, I decided, I needed to take
a different approach

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if I was going to make 
a big impact in this field.

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So, I kinda looked at the trends
that exist within fabrication tools

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and you can plot them 
on this graph here

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where the flexibility and speed 
of a fabrication process

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are inversely proportional.

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So 3D printing on the left is 
very flexible, but pretty slow,

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and injection molding on the right, 
making legos is very fast,

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but can only make the parts 
the mold is designed to make.

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And I needed something 
that was both fast and flexible.

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Instead of our breakthrough technology

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that jumps out of the curve 
and then I found out

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about a little known field called 
reconfigurable pin tooling,

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probably haven't heard of it.

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Essentially, the idea
is to have a bed of pins

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that are adjustable in height

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and with those pins,

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you can generate a surface
for use in molding

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or for other applications,

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this is from science fiction,
this isn't real.

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(Laughter)

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I was surprised to find out 
interesting facts though.

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This is the first patent
in reconfigurable pin tooling,

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in 1863, that's 150 years ago.

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But in comparison to 3D printing,

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the first pattern in 
3D printing was in 1984,

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that's 29 years ago.

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So, if reconfigurable pin tooling is
so cool and such an old idea, 


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why are there no 
reconfigurable pin tools?

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While so many different 3D printers
exist on the commercial shelves.

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Well, it turns out there are 
just really hard to make.

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So, this is a pin art toy,

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you'll probably be familiar with this.

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This is the most classic example 
of a reconfigurable pin tool.

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And if I were to make this
electronically reconfigurable, 


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I would have to add a motor 
to everyone of these pins, right?

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And there's about a thousand pins
in this sort of cheap desktop toy.

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A thousand motors
is a lot of motors

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and that's a really significant
engineering challenge.

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You probably or you might 
have seen this video


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which actually came out
this last week.

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This is a really cool example 
of a reconfigurable pin display,

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that some of my friends 
made at the MIT media lab.

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And this device
is individually actuated,

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so all the pins have 
a single motor on each one.

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There's 900 pins within 
3 inches resolution,

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and it was used for haptic interface

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and for making experimental services.

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So, if I wanted a surface
that was high resolution to use as mold,

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why can't I do this?

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Why can't I make this surface 
super high resolution?

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Math. That's why.

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(Laughter)

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Math is fighting me on this one.

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When I increase the resolution,

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I get this quadratic scaling 
of the area,

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so length times width is area,

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and that's a nonlinear term.

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So, when we get
to high resolutions,

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this becomes a really big problem.

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We get huge numbers 
of pins to control,

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massive numbers of motors

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and it just becomes 
totally unfeasible,

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and everything falls apart.

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So faced with this hopelesness,

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I decided to do this 
for my PhD and Masters.

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(Laughter)

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And undergraduate thesis.

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And I've been working on it 
for about 3 years now.

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And I've developed
a number of techniques

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to actuate pins and to move pins.

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These are some of the prototypes

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and I actually won
an award for one of them,

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which is the reason I'm here,

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because I got picked up after that.

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I was kinda disappointed
in all of them so far.

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Until recently, and that's kinda of

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what I wanted to talk 
to you about today.

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So, I had an interesting idea

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when I was working
on a different project,

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not the reconfigurable 
pin tooling project,

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but I was working on a machine

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that had a lot of vibrations in it

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and what happened is that
I was attaching a part to it

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and the screws in that part
kept on coming loose.

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And it was really frustating at first, 


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but then I realised that 
I could actually use

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this pattern vibration to turn out screws,

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which is actually a really good way 
of getting linear actuation.

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So moving something along its axis.

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So, what I decided to do is apply this
to reconfigurable pin tooling.

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And here it is.

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It actually works pretty good.

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This an array of screws,

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that has a specific pattern
of vibration applied to it,

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and that causes selective screws 
within the array

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to actually turn out and 
turn them back in as well.

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And it works like this:

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this is a schematic 
of the actuaction here.

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We have dislocations within 
the square array of screws

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and if you dislocate it just right,

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around the screw you want 
to turn and you reset it,

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you get a non linear torque 
applied to one of the screws,

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and you get motion, 
so pretty cool.

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And the coolest thing about this
is that the only actuator you need,

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the only motor you need 
for this array is for the edge pieces.

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So the edges are always 
going to scale linearly

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with the resolution versus 
the number of pins scaling

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this huge quadratic term.

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And all the pins actually 
are just little screws.

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Screws are very cheap,

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and you get can cheap
linear actuators on the edges

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for vibration.

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And this works really well 
at high resolutions

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because that ratio becomes 
higher and higher,

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as you get higher in resolution.

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The ratio between linear and
quadratic terms within the array.

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With me so far?

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(Laughter)

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So, after doing this project,

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I'm actually pretty confident

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now more so than 
I have been in the past,

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that this HD pin surface 
could be a reality,

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and you could see one of these
on your desktop

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and download a file into it

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and have it reconfigure its surface

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into an arbitruary file
that you found online

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and you use it as a design tool
because you could use it as a mold

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instead of just 3D printing objects
layer by layer

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or along with a 3D printer as well.

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So, it's really just 
a close cousin to 3D printing

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versus any sort of replacement.

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And here it is, 
this is kind of the pitch,

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the digital mold as the next tool

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to help form and shape the future
of personal fabrication.

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That's it.

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(Applause)