Hands on with MarkForged's new cloud-based software

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To the untrained eye MarkForged’s booth is easily lost in the flurry of FDM printers printing vividly eye-catching colours in all manner of weird and wacky shapes and sizes. But MarkForged is really not a booth to be missed especially if you’re looking for a machine that can print functional end-use parts at a fraction of the price of industrial metal printers.

Like Formlabs, who we reported on earlier, there’s less of a song and dance about the launches from MarkForged more of a fastidious approach to a development that could mean plenty for the increasing adoption of their machine which prints with materials such as carbon fibre, Kevlar and fibre glass.

This week saw MarkForged launch their new cloud-based software Eiger. Rather than regurgitate the press release we headed over to the MarkForged stand to get a demo from software engineer Abraham Parangi.

The first thing to note, as frivolous as it sounds, is that much like their machine and website the cloud-based software looks absolutely great, it flows from step-to-step in a sleek, unobtrusive modern Apple-esque style (worth noting that Abraham himself was an intern at Apple after graduating Computer Science at Cornell).

The software is run entirely through Google Chrome meaning that there is nothing to install and nothing to download allowing for better collaboration throughout a workflow process in a team. Being in the cloud also means that whenever a user logs in they’re getting the latest working version of the software as opposed to having to download updates.

Abraham walks me through a step-by-step process with ease; showing how the software automatically adds fibre to parts for optimum strength or, if you wish, allows you to add or subtract the fibre in specific areas.

The software also allows for forked iterations with tracked changes beneficial for users with multiple team members who are testing out specific parts with different strengths or materials.

Even for a Luddite like myself everything Parangi showed me seemed simple, intuitive and it all worked. Sending to the printer is easy, the printer even keeps the user updated with emails if you’ve set it to pause in order to embed sensors or electronics.

Yesterday at our 3D printing conference during Autodesk's CEO Carl Bass’s keynote he mentioned MarkForged as a company going places – a friend of Carl’s had trusted a Kevlar strengthened Carabiner printed on a Mark One to go rock climbing.

MarkForged are definitely climbing the 3D printing ladder.