Icelandic software startup Euler has released Euler Viewer, a real time build viewer for metal LPBF. The product does not need to be installed, and doesn’t require hardware to be attached to the machine. Instead, it takes the layer images your printer generates already and uses those. The Viewer is free of charge, and you can sign up to view your builds in real time here.
The Viewer will eliminate a lot of window staring in the middle of the night. Now, you can analyze and view builds, flipping through them like a film. What’s more, the builds will be annotated, telling you where obstructions, warp, and spatter are to be found. The company hopes that you’ll like this free tool, and then pay them for their machine vision-powered platform that will automatically analyze builds and predict errors. It features “automated defect detection, predictive failure alerts, statistical process control, advanced visualisation tools, and automated build reports.”
With better insight into what is going on and when it is happening, operators can spend less time watching images and more time studying patterns or focusing on those images that matter. Rather than idly thumb a book, you can flip through the pages to see movement come alive, or stop on that one page that really informs you. You can scroll through all your build images and link to specific moments, sharing the link with colleagues.
The Viewer works inside the browser and does not need any additional software. You also don’t need to connect to the printer. You can just upload existing images. The software comes with SOC 2 Type II controls, and the company says that setup takes only a few minutes.
Euler CEO Dr Eyþór Rúnar Eiríksson said,
“We keep seeing the same pattern at AM facilities around the world; thousands of powder bed images captured during every build, and many are not being used. Not because operators don’t care, but because there has never been a simple, dedicated tool to access them. Euler Viewer is our response to that – we believe this is a tool the industry should have always had, and one that should be easily accessible to every operator. By making it free and purpose-built, we’re giving AM professionals a straightforward, secure way to actually view the data their machines already produce.”
Artificial intelligence is probably one of the world’s most talked about topics at the moment. Beyond the future of cat pictures and deceptive websites however, there is a whole other field outside of just the small area of neural networks and LLMs. In machine learning, looking at patterns, finding new patterns, and identifying outliers is something that the software is especially good at. Computer vision, meanwhile, can be trained to clean up images and make them more readable, and easier to interpret and identify patterns. Whereas the OpenAI world is looking at using AI to do your work through copyright theft, the other more serious AI world is looking at designing systems that spot patterns. Rather than teaching your machine to copy, paste, and remix poems, this is teaching your machine to do something that it is good at. We need to focus more on this side of AI and less on the six-fingered cat picture side.
In this case, that technology has led to Euler making a free tool that can be very powerful for operators. For university folks, super weird builds in super strange settings can be studied for free much more easily. For machine operators, differences in parameters, materials, and environmental factors can be more easily traced. For those responsible for operations, insight into machine problems and recurring issues can now be much more easily traced. For designers, design engineers, and product owners, issues with files and designs can be identified earlier. For everyone in the LPBF world, there will be less idle window watching and looking at a stack of images, and more scrolling through them. And there will be more time for interpretation where and when it matters. This seems like it could be a great tool for everyone to use daily.