Re: Online quoting - some statistics from Materialise

From: Steven Pollack (StevenP@DigitalJeweler.NET)
Date: Fri Mar 01 2002 - 03:54:24 EET


> > - What is the future of e-commerce within prototyping?
> > Seems most of what I hear is that making models is a
> > very skilled art and it's impossible to determine how
> > much it will cost without first seeing the project
> > specs? Is this true?

It seems that the RP machine manufacturers could/should work up a simple
algorithm for combining the volume, Z height, and desired layer thickness
into a time estimate and make this available for shell integration within
the various CAD packages. Then, lets say an engineer designed something
within Solidworks, there would functionality in the file menu for exporting
the model as an .stl to the SLA/Solidscape/etc. estimation module within
Solidworks. A more functional software plugin would allow the prices of
various service bureaus to be input as global values so that the time
estimate would be applied to the cos

That would be handy for anyone using CAD for RP and would give a competitive
advantage to the RP companies that did so. The consumer of RP could then
evaluate for themselves the best technology for a given geometry knowing the
prices per hour charged by the various service bureaus.

Steven Pollack

For more information about the rp-ml, see http://rapid.lpt.fi/rp-ml/



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