Patrick T Stack

US Patent:

20170087771, Mar 30, 2017

Filed:

Mar 19, 2015

Appl. No.:

15/126724

Inventors:

- North Huntingdon PA, US
Patrick Stack - North Huntingdon PA, US
Lawrence Joseph Voss - Pittsburgh PA, US

Assignee:

The ExOne Company - North Huntingdon PA

International Classification:

B29C 67/00
B33Y 50/02
G05B 19/042

Abstract:

Methods are provided for solid free-form fabrication of an article without using a slice stack file quickly and efficiently—in terms of computational resources—converting STL files representing an article or articles to be built by SFFF without the use of a conventional slicing program. An application program interface (“API”) is used to generate a bitmap corresponding to each particular layer of the article that is to be printed directly from the article's STL file. This conversion may done essentially in real time immediately before the particular layer is to be printed. The bitmap is used in configuring the printing instructions for the SFFF printing mechanism to print that particular layer.