A friend of mine referred me to a lab at Harvard in Spring of 2014 that was working on a spin-off company to commercialize their materials technology. This lab was Jennifer Lewis’ lab, and the company became Voxel8. We sought to develop a 3D Printer that would enable 3D circuitry embedded into plastic components. Throughout the summer I worked on some basic research in path planning algorithms and deployed these where I could to help the grad students and post-docs. We chose to work in a new language called Julia, which was similar to Matlab and had a really nice object model that made code functional, easy to write and read, and fast to execute. I took a year off school to do a co-op with Voxel8 and develop the software further.
I was the primary developer of the path planning software and developed a full slicing (path planning) pipeline that executed as fast as C++ counterparts. We called the project “Euclid”. We integrated several cool algorithms to address different material flow types and had a very customization system that made it easy to insert custom events. I worked closely with engineers at Autodesk to integrate with their Project Wire software as well. Most of the good technical details are still proprietary, and Voxel8 has since pivoted into customized footwear. From what I hear they are still using Euclid for their materials R&D.
We launched the full printer at CES in 2015:
The Software Lead at Voxel8, Jack Mindari, also presented a talk at JuliaCon on our work:
S. J. Kelly 