Hi, this is how Prusa Research looks right now. Whole 9-floor factory occupied just by us. Over 410 employees, two huge warehouses, 6 filament lines soon to be 13, public hackerspace on the ground floor and as of right now over
100 000 Original Prusa printers in the world, itās crazy. And hereās how it all started So here you can see my Mendel remix. Z-axis is finally working. Yes, this is my voice in 2010. And that was the very first Mendel Iāve ever
built. It may surprise you, but I didnāt graduate
from some hardcore technical university. I graduated from a normal high school and
as with every parents they wanted me to get a degree. So I enrolled at the University of Economics in Prague. As it happens, I had a lot
of free time during my first semester, so both me I and my brother Michael really got into DJing and building our own music controlers. I was looking for a way to make my own knobs
and faders and I was looking for so long until I found RepRap project and Mendel 3D printer. As you may know, RepRap is a community project started by doctor Adrian Bowyer
at the University of Bath and it kinda kickstarted the
open-source desktop 3D printing revolution. The basic idea is that a 3D printer could
print as many parts as possible for another 3D printer and as a result,
really decrease its cost. If you want to learn more about Rep Rap, Tom has a pretty cool video about it. But when I was building the original Sells Mendel,
it was a bit complicated. You needed many different screw sizes, there
were no slots for nuts and very few parts were push-to-fit. So I didnāt just build it with the original
parts, I started simplifying it and improving it on the way. And as RepRap is an open-source project,
I started to share my designs right away on my GitHub The community quickly caught up with Prusa
Simplified Mendel, yes, thatās how it was called, and started to use it over the original,
now called Sells Mendel. But printers were missing one pretty important
thing to have the ABS prints successful. and thatās heated bed. Without it, prints just warp and deform away
from the bed. This is the first prototype weāve made,
a resistance wire stuck between two sheets of acrylic. You can imagine it didnāt last very long. The second version used a tile instead of
acrylics, which was better, but still, it only reached about 90 degrees Celsius. Who knows how many Fahrenheit is that. After nearly 6 months of work, the PCB Heatbed
MK1 was done, my first real product Iāve ever created. It had 20 by 20 cm heated area and it could
reach 110C, more than enough for ABS and other high temperature plastics. I just checked and you can still buy it today
in its signature red color. And you can see it on almost all desktop 3D
printers in its original form or in some simplified versions. I soon started to receive requests for printing
the parts for Prusa Mendel. And I also organized a few build events, where
everybody built their own. I would still keep posting updates to the
printer every week. And soon one printer was not enough for me,
so I added a second one to be able to print the parts faster. By November 2011 there were so many changes
that I named the release iteration 2, or i2 as you may know it now. And just a few months later in February 2012,
me and my brother Michal founded Prusa Research. It looks crazy from today's point of view,
but at the time it was just the two of us in the basement hacking together some Prusa
Mendels. Founding a company, I wanted a permanent reminder
of my roots in Rep Rap so I got my Open Hardware tattoo. And the design is direct output of how Slic3r
would slice it. As we were selling the Mendel i2 I started
to receive invites to a few very popular shows and, for example, even TedX Vienna, but man, back then I was not a good speaker, it physically hurts me to listen to this now. Which made all these possible. Actually, I will be speaking more about the 3D printing. But it's open-source hardware project. So I guess it's ok. But jokes aside these shows for sure really
helped to kickstart the community in the early days when the general public had no idea what
3d printing is. And I was already working on the next iteration. Do you recognize it? This is the first ever print. I somehow guesstimated the e-steps per millimeter and it worked out quite well. There are few things I need to take care of, for example, this funky extruder mount is not optimal. Also, somehow electronics detached. But it's not a big deal. This Arduino can take a lot of stuff. So that really was the first print of the i3
design, which is now the most cloned design in the world. The wooden frame was quickly replaced with
a metal one and the whole design was quickly shaping up. By the way, did you notice the hotend? Turns out those were pretty expensive and
difficult to get at that time, so I made my own. And I wasnāt the only one with the problem,
so I got a fair amount of orders for that hotend. Funny thing is, we didnāt have any e-shop
or anything like that. We just had our e-mail and phone number on
our webpage, and thatās about it. So someone would just call us ordering a frame, we would pack it in a Pizza box and send it to him. At the beginning of 2013, we started to ship
the nozzles and frames worldwide. I also stopped being so damn nervous at my talks,
so they became much more fun You know it's really bizarre because last time I was in this room, I was sitting in the classroom listening to some economics class So it's really satisfying to show this here. But this one even changes color if you touch it, and... Well Later that year in October 2013 we got our
first employee, Hanka. Hi Hanka. We got our print farm running,
you know the whole 5 printers. We gave them names, Stan, Kyle, Cartman, Kenny,
and Butters. And by the way, you can see Kyle for yourself
in front of the entrance to the PrusaLab, but thatās getting ahead of ourselves, back
to the stone age of 3D printing. The basement where we were had these street-level
windows, which was actually really great, we could pass the boxes to the delivery guys through the window without going all the way up. And remember that the i3 was running on 3mm filament and it didnāt have any screen to control it. We would sell about 5 of these a week and
each Friday weād do a seminar on how to use it. In the spring of 2014, we finally moved from
the basement to a flat just a few streets away. And I got my dog, Buddy! He became one of the symbols of the company. Heās one of the bundled sample objects and we even have cute Buddy stickers that we include with each printer! Later that month, of course while partying
in a club, I met Ondrej. Itās funny, because Ondrejās surname is
also Prusa, but we are not related in any way. This keeps confusing people to this date. Anyway, Ondrej and I instantly clicked and he had a company providing tech support, which was a perfect combo. He brought some more employees to the company
and we were working hard on the Prusa i3. In Februrary of 2015, I launched prusaprinters.org, a hub for everyone with a Prusa printer and for other rep rappers. I posted a few interviews there with the well-known
members of Rep Rap community and a few tutorials. But at that time I would have never imagined
how great it will become. We were growing and the flat was just too
small for us, so it was time for our first actual office. The choice fell on a building in Prague neighborhood
called KarlĆn, in an inner courtyard on the ground floor. Come, letās take a look at it. Ok, so the whole production easily fit into
this room, with the printing farm situated right next to it. And there was a room for development, room
for support and for the first time I actually had my own office. Well, together with Ondrej of course. The Prusa team had about 15 members, so there
was plenty of space for all of us. We expanded the farm to 16 printers so managing
it would be a full-time job. To avoid that, each printer was running on
Octoprint, and I managed to run 4 instances of Octoprint on a single Marsboard. And using the API I was pulling the data to
a tablet app I made, so that there is minimal downtime on the printers. The first big release came in June of 2015,
the Original Prusa i3 kit. It included all the tools you need for assembly,
an LCD screen, so you donāt need to control the printer with a PC, original Rambo board
from Ultimachine, all the wiring already prepared with connectors, labels with one to one representations,
awesome manual, last but least we also include one kilogram of ABS. Well basically something youāre used to
by now, but at the time it was unheard of in this price range. For about two months it was still using 3 mm
filament, so thatās what we call MK0 now. But soon we switched to 1.75 using hotends
from E3D and thatās what we call the MK1. Up to this point, the number of orders was
growing gradually, but now it was basically exponential. By September 2015 we were shipping 100 printers
each month And by the way at around the same time, the
Prusa i3 design was officially the most used 3D printer in the world. The print farm grew to 40 printers, 15 employees
became 30 and by March 2016 we were shipping 500 printers a month. We were spreading and pushing other companies
out of the building. Sorry guys. The storage room was captured and the farm
got more space. However, the big storm was just about to come! In May of 2016, we released the Original Prusa
i3 MK2. It got awesome reviews and reached top positions in the charts. Orders for the new MK2 suddenly flew up and for our production, it was mostly about catching up with the numbers. There was 2 months waiting time but still,
the number of orders wasnāt falling. We had to spread our production, our team
expanded as well. And we occupied the whole ground floor and
some adjacent space. As we improved the printerās firmware and
hardware, we also had to push the Slic3r development, or or is it Slick-three-arr? Anyways at a higher pace. As a result, in October 2016, we created our
own fork, which is called Slic3r Prusa Edition, with Vojta leading the development team. By the Christmas of 2016, there was about
60 of us. Even though we had 3 printing farms, we just
couldn't meet the orders, it was still not enough. Well, when talking about printing farms, it
was about hundred 3D printers, right? Itās significant electricity consumption. And do you remember the flooding in 2002. No? Well, there was a huge flooding in Prague
and KarlĆn was heavily hit. Since then the electric network had not been
stable in our building. Well we had no idea about that and what do you think happened when we plugged more than 100 printers at once? As you have guessed, we blew up the fuses. Even a single day of downtime is too much
for us, we want to get the printers to all of you as soon as possible. So while the electrical wiring was being replaced,
our production was running of a diesel generator. It looks crazy, but it worked! And we ended up using it for a whole month. We had to manage a bigger business, so we
needed more people. Software and hardware developers joined the
team. This is Alex, heās the mastermind behind
many of our products like the MK3 or the multi-material upgrade, which we first released in May of 2017. And he has a thing for sheep. Nobody really knows why, but he just keeps
printing them. So during the MMU testing, there were just
sheep everywhere. We also got process managers, purchasing officers and a lot of other positions were assigned. With this tempo, we couldnāt fit into the
building much longer. We even had problems even with the logistics. As I said before the office was located in
an inner courtyard. All the goods had to go through this tiny
passage, no bigger truck could pass. So all the pallets had to be brought manually
to the street, and trust me, our delivery guys just loved it. Last month before moving, just being in the office was insane and the corridor was covered with boxes. Just imagine, all the MK2s that were made
in this tiny space, crazy, right? Soā¦ We had to move! The choice finally fell on building in Holesovice. Itās still a city center, accessibility
is great, itās right next to tram stop, metro, bust stop, and a train station. Yes, the building is old, but itās huge! And it was completely empty. Well, the new warehouse needed a few adjustments. But guess whatās the biggest fun. We have an awesome new forklift. We built the new printing farm with 200 MK2s. Well you can see that they have removable beds, yeah we were already testing those. Our production got tons of space so we could
finally work on optimizing it. To be honest, we thought the building is way
too huge for us. We only occupied the first 3 floors, even
though that there are 7 floors above ground and 3 more underground floors. Well, one of those floors is an old is an
old war shelter, but that still counts right? At this point we had pretty much everything
under our control. We design the hardware, electronics, software,
print settings, and even the firmware. But there was still one big variable that
has a huge impact on the print quality. And thatās filament. And with the trend of looking for cheap materials,
we couldnāt expect that manufacturers will improve the quality of their products. So now that we had enough space for it, we
ordered our first filament line. We even bought an extra long one with 2 baths
for gradual cooling. We released Prusa Control, which was a parallel
to Slic3r PE for newcomers to 3D printing. We donāt update it anymore but I really
liked it and it was a great test of how a simple user interface can work. So we moved a lot from it to Slic3r PE and now PrusaSlicer. But Iām sure you know what was about to
come next. In September of 2017,
we released the Original Prusa i3 MK3. With the new and expanded production, we thought
we were ready for the first wave of orders. Well oh well, I think we did really well, it
was our smoothest product launch, but still, the factory was working at an insane tempo to keep up with the demand. I met a new employee almost every single day. In October we made over 5000 printers and
the team grew to 170 people! We were the 3rd fastest growing tech company
in the Central Europe. The reviews started rolling in and it was
really hard to push the lead time down. We had to expand our printing farm, so that
the printed parts wouldnāt become a bottleneck, it grew all the way to 300 printers. It took all the way to June of 2018 to get
the lead time down to just a few days. And here I have to mention the powder coated
sheets. Donāt get me wrong the smooth PEI sheet
is great, especially for PLA. But the textured one is simply the best sheet
for 3D printing. Sadly, we made nowhere near enough of them
for the MK3 launch. What sucks even more, is that we tested them
for over a year on the farm. It was only when we wanted to make a lot of
them, and I mean thousands with perfect quality that we suddenly encountered one problem after another. We ended up building our own testing lab to
make sure, that the sheets will survive PETG and even Flexible filament without the texture
peeling off. We have no planned obsolence for our products, so just like with previous models, after releasing the MK3, we made upgrade kits. Mainly the 2.5 upgrade is a really cost efficient
way to get most of the MK3 features, so everyone can get it. But, of course, we made even full upgrades. So technically, if you really wanted to, you
could upgrade the Original Prusa i3 MK1 kit all the way up to MK3S. There was a lot happening in the factory at the same time. One whole floor was completely rebuild and
reserved just for Prusament. We got 4 more filament lines and we started
to create filament for our print farm. There was another project that I wanted to
do for a long time. When I was young and started tinkering it
was really hard to get all the tools and living in the city, space was also a problem. So for months, weāve been re-building the
ground floor and in June 2018 we were ready to open Prusalab, a fully-equipped community
makerspace. There is also space for presentations and
we have free classes each week. And just like when it was just me and Michal,
we still have 3D printing classes every friday By the way, getting the machines down here
was pretty crazy. The only opening big enough for the CNC or
the router was through the ceiling, so we had to use the warehouse crane and slowly
lower it down. But it all worked out in the end. Oh, and thereās tap beer in Prusalab! So it turns into a cool party place from time
to time. And if youāre traveling through Europe, I would
love if you stopped by. We can show you the print farm and also the workshop. We were already in 7 floors and there was
over 250 of us. And as the main partner, we brought the Maker
Faire to Prague for first time. We showed the MMU2.0 in there. Our upgrade
which lets you print with up to 5 filaments at once. And two months later we started
shipping it. By this time it was already a year since we
got our first filament line. Now with 5 of them running and with all the
real-time monitoring and perfect winding figured out, we released Prusament. We overengineered the hell out of it. We target 20 micron tolerance using a 2 axis
laser, but as you can see,
most spools are actually even more precise. We measure and adjust the color in real time
and anything out of spec is instantly discarded. And since we store all the data for every
spool, we thought, why not make it public? So you can check your spool online and see
just how perfect it is. The number of orders for Prusament was overwhelming, itās another product thatās always instantly sold out, so we do have more filament lines
on backorder for the total of 13. But they are pretty complicated pieces of
hardware so itās gonna take us some time to get them modified and running. With the help of robots, we want to achieve
non-stop production. Except for parties, the robots party with
us as cool bartenders. And if you think itās getting a bit
crazy with having Prusa in all the names, I sometimes feel the same. But itās branding and we like to have some
fun with the names and more often than not, we keep the working names because everyone gets simply used to them during development. So hereās that. What I didnāt tell you is that in March
of 2018 we started working on our first SLA printer. We didnāt start from scratch, not at all
actually. The SLA team is lead by Jiri Poslednik, who
has been developing SLA printers for almost 7 years and he had his own company creating
them. But being a small company, they had problems
with things like sourcing the parts in small batches for a reasonable price, and other
problems that I encountered as well when I was starting out. But now being part of Prusa family it
was different. We took what worked on their printer as a
starting point, mixed it with our ideas and polished it for a whole year. And the Original Prusa SL1 is the result of
this work. With all the Prusament spools and parts for
the SL1, the warehouse just like the currently occupied floors
hit its limit. So we filled the last empty rooms, but whatās
cooler is that we managed to rent this building as a secondary warehouse. Itās gigantic, but also beautiful. And as a matter of fact, itās the building where
the first Prague power plant used to be. So we have enough space for all the Haribo
bears in the world. When we were starting out, we wanted to ship
something extra as a thank you gift for the order. And maybe also to make the first customers
a bit more tolerant to our small mistakes here and there. And we just sort stick with it, years go by
and weāre still doing it today. They are a great way to keep your energy levels
high during the assembly. With about 160 thousand packages that include them, thatās 16 tons of Haribo bears shipped. Just to give some scale,
one pallet has 450kg on it. So 16 tons is this whole side of the pallet
rack full of Haribos. Near the end of the year 2018, we had to expand
the print farm even more to a whopping 500 printers and we reached over 1000 packages shipped
per day including printers, upgrades, filaments, and replacements. We ship them to over 160 countries around
the world. To me, itās mind-blowing that you can zoom
on almost any island in the middle of an ocean and youāll find a couple of Prusa printers
in there. Funny thing is that for a long time we managed
orders to all of these countries with just Google Documents. We had sheets for everything
and it was actually pretty crazy. We had some problems whenever Google
did maintenance on their servers. Well, now obviously we have our custom solution,
but these were fun old times. With 500 farm printers, you might wonder,
how does the current farm management look like? Imagine just flashing firmware to all of them
manually. So we have all of them connected with a serial
to network converter and we have our own software to control them. We can see the current status for each printer,
remotely start a print from an SD card or flash the firmware. It's slightly better than running 4 instances of
octoprint on a Marsboard. It may seem crazy, but even with 1000 packages
a day, we still test every single part. Not just a sample from each delivery or each
box. No really, we test everything. This is the part of the development that you
donāt get to see much. We create our own testing stations. And sometimes theyāre really fun, like this
MMU tester, that presses each of the buttons to see if they work. We have PINDA testers that heats them up and
tests their measurings. We have testers for our power supplies, fans, heat beds, filament sensors, and we have these massive test stations that
test the printer as a whole. Everyone gets a testing protocol with their
printer, which is something I think that still nobody else does. Well even with this ridiculous amount of testing, you canāt avoid some replacements. And that gets us to our support Weāve always been praised for it, so how
does it look with that many customers? In the spring of 2019 we now have 45 people. Jakub is leading the team and heās with us since the beginnings in Karlin. We have over 12 000 live chats in 9 languages
each month, but still weāre keeping the chats with a negative rating below 1.6%. But we are still doing our best to make everyone happy. And the most legendary live chats make it
to the wall in front of the support. The community, well thatās you guys watching
this video, has always been so important to me. I try to go to as many shows as possible, just look at this map of all the shows we attend. Itās always so refreshing to talk with our
fans face to face and hear about the awesome projects that came to life with the help of our printers. The vast majority of printers we sell are
kits, over 80% actually. So everyone learns how to build the printer and get a much better understanding of how it works. I like to think that weāre raising a generation
of makers, who can create and fix things, instead of throwing them away. And by the time youāre watching this video, weāve already released a new platform for our community. Wouldn't it be nice to have a map with other
users nearby offering support or printing, so you can ask them for help, or just invite them
for a beer? What about a database of not only models but
also perfect g-codes ready to be printed? PrusaPrinters is something weāve been secretly
working on for a long time and Iām so excited that itās finally out. We have big plans with it and weāll be adding
features over time, but already itās the go-to website
for all Prusa printer owners. I would have never imagined that this is where
weāll be in just a few years when I started. We got literally from hacking together printers
in a basement to this level. Thank you, everyone, who supported us on our
journey, we would not be here without you. Weāll continue our mission of pushing the
3D printing technology further for everyday people and as always, Happy printing!
Are these optical mice being used as filament sensors on this MMU prototype? https://imgur.com/48QPgIW.png
https://youtu.be/xX3pDDi9PeU?t=660
I really enjoyed this video. Makes me wonder what the hell I'm doing with my life!
... off to print a Flexi Rex. Bbl.
Best customer support of any company I have ever dealt with, ever. Fantastic tech company. Can't wait for the SLA printers to come down in price.
https://blog.prusaprinters.org/the-road-to-100k-original-prusa-printers-free-shipping/
Free shipping worldwide! And to celebrate this incredible milestone, starting today, for one whole week, weāre enabling worldwide free shipping for the Original Prusa i3 MK3S kits! And we worked hard to get the lead time down to essentially zero, so if you order the stand-alone MK3S kit, it should be on the way within just a few days. Of course, you can add a few selected products to your order (Prusaments, spare parts (if you have access to this section as an i3 owner) and i3 accessories), but keep in mind, that in this case, your lead time for the order will be 5-8 days. And BTW ā all printers and upgrades (not only MK3S kits) are now available with the powder-coated sheets.
Well now I want to go to Prague even more now!
Awwsome video
I literally just bought mine 2 days ago! I should have waited!
I wish Prusa could do an AMA on Reddit for the occasion.