Hey, Welcome back, everyone.

I am Chris Williams.

You're semi faithful.

Host this robot's weekly.

We are up to episode number five, the big number five.

As always, I'm here with my co host, Matt.

Papa sake.

How are you doing?

And with us today we have ah, Pete Brown.

Pete's also works at Microsoft and does a lot with, ah, a little bit of electronics.

A lot with with music.

So, uh, go ahead, Pete.

No.

Hey, everybody.

Great to be here.

Thanks.

So Pete's gonna talk to us with last week.

We did interaction interfaces with Connect.

And, um, we're gonna stick a little bit in that Microsoft world, but by no means Onley Microsoft.

Um, Pete, do you want to sort of give us a little preview of your background?

Sure.

So, as method I worked at Microsoft, a CZ Well, I am on the say, what are we calling ourselves these days?

The Ted team, Technical Evangelism and Devices team for client and devices.

So anything that has kind of code on the client is stuff that I'm interested in and stuff that I'm working on.

I tend to focus mostly on windows but also, you know, hobby wise.

As you can probably see from the pile of stuff behind me.

Pretty much anything else I can write code for.

I'm also interested in Perfect.

Yes, it is a great job.

Thank you for asking Exactly, uh, what do we do?

I see a soldering station back there at all.

Of course you didn't saw it.

There's Ah, sauntering station.

There's a hot air station.

There's a monkey.

Don't get me started with stuff out from the back things because here's my keyboard that I need Thio.

Figure out how to integrate with the PC.

But if you see it's not just a regular keyboard, I always thought one of the coolest things would be like, uh, like Web.

Developers have to use this dot com where shows all their tools off and some people dive deeper.

It's almost like I want to take a survey cam over everybody's electron ICS workstation.

You pick up so many different things that other people have that you may never may never have seen or thought of.

Yeah, um, so it's actually cool to have that in the background.

Awesome.

I did.

Ah!

Ah!

With ah Photosynth of this bill of this office, my home office here in the corner of the basement.

My you know.

And if you ignore the fact that there's a spare Free Jovi here next to me and the old kitchen cabinets up here behind me, which Ray bango gave me a hard time for all the time because they look like something from the seventies, which they are.

Uh, it's Ah, it's kind of a fun thing to see all the random, like, little things you confined like, uh, just like if just this corner, you know, the the sketch sees and all this kind of fun things here and the the the idol from Indiana Jones and Star Blazer stuff all sorts of things, Doctor.

Who?

That's awesome.

My kids actually don't have any toys because I spend all the money on myself on toys.

That's awesome.

Do you have a three d printer?

It'll I don't yet, and I feel really behind for not having one.

But what happened is I bought ah, extrude er right that was on Kickstarter is a dual extra time like I'm gonna build a three d printer and I gotta go back and do it.

So I've built CNC machines before, which once you figure out it's just X y motion, you know, with the and the easy stuff is, Well, it's really not that hard to do.

But like so many other projects here, it just requires the time to do it.

So what?

I've decided.

So anybody who works at Microsoft knows September 15th is coming up.

Um, and what I've decided is I'm gonna probably end up buying a three d printer at that point.

Um, cross, possibly a maker.

But, um, mostly because that's one of the out of the box supported Windows 813 D Printers.

And of course I want to be able to make the most of that.

Billy use that as well.

But then I also have back ordered Think they're in November or so There's a company called Maki Box.

I'm sure there's not gonna be a lawsuit there, um, the making box, which has produced a three D printer, which is kind of small, but it's enclosed like it would be okay to have out in, you know, out in the kitchen or something like that.

Where is he?

If you've seen, like the referee, printers and everything, most of those are not things that you want anywhere near Children or any other place where stuff could get caught in them or whatever.

But they produced this printer, and it's like 200 bucks, right?

Ah, And so for that price, I decided I just gonna order one and see what it's like because that's, um, definitely a first world comment.

But that's basically pocket change for gadgets.

And I want to see how that goes.

For those of us that are Microsoft, what is September 15th?

I mean, is that today the world ends and you're just like I'm dumping all the money in our kind of Oh, well, it's ah, you know that the if you are still employed at Microsoft and you did okay on your review, that's your bonus time, right?

So that's always a nice thing to have happened.

Yes, exactly.

S so so going back to this this three d printing, I think.

Can you tell us a little bit about ah, Windows 8.1 and three D printing?

Sure s Oh, there was one of the things that I was most excited about when we announced 81 That's our This isn't gonna be a big show piece here, but I have to talk about this because this is really one of the things I think that we've done.

That is just the most forward thinking that I've seen in a while.

And that is we incorporated three D printing support into Windows a one and it's part of the regular printing pipeline.

So if you think about, um, you know, I don't know how many people ordered or bought very early inkjet printers and early laser printers, remember, they were really expensive and they had a lot of onboard logic.

Ah, and then something came along called the Wind Printer.

Do you guys remember that it was the G D I printers, which got us a lot of flak on other platforms because they didn't because they relied on the PC for all the processing.

But what had enabled manufacturers to do is to create really inexpensive printers.

Such a the point where the ink costs more than it's like it's cheaper these days to buy a new printer every year that ever bother refilling the ink on a lot of them, which is that's a separate problem in and of itself.

But it made the printer's cheap enough, and it really made it so that everybody could have a printer, right?

So by having support for three D printing in Windows 81 I think it's gonna really help pull three D printing out of the hobbyist space.

I mean, it'll it won't yank it like kicking and screaming out of the hobbyist space.

But I think it's gonna, you know, make it Maur consumer friendly because you're going to be able to create less cheaper three D printers that don't have as much on board logic the software burden.

I think we'll go down because the pipeline that's in when there's a one is gonna have Maur of the logic and more the capabilities built into it.

Ah, and just the fact that it's there is part of the OS is going to bring three D printing to a lot more people.

And for me, what I'm really excited about with that is you're going to start seeing three D printers pop up in like staples like there's there's a three D project combine staples Now it's like 1300 bucks, which is still not at the price range where people are just gonna go in and pick one up, I think on a whim.

But as as those get more and more out there and as their ableto ramp up manufacturing from these different companies and have them beam or friendly, like the printer that's at Staples, it's gonna make it easier for everybody to own one.

And of course, the prices will go down all right.

So like most people haven't gotten their hands on 81 and played with it specifically connected to a three D printer, When you say sort of increasing, those pathways are making it easier for somebody to go through that.

Can you provide some color commentary about what that looks like?

Isn't basically like you would with the word doc or pdf be able to right click and just pray and assume that everything's right.

It goes because I know currently I'm like Think of our Earth's and some of the other open repositories for three D models.

They aren't always perfect and primed for a three D printer.

Like most of times, you're gonna have to put it on a platform, scale it to some way or another.

Um, and then summer just perfectly just hit print Go.

Does that ate one software?

Provide any sort of ability to do that automatically?

Or is it is it like make her wear, which is make robots driver suffer or open scan that it'll do that gives you a U IE to work with, and then you go from there.

So this is think of this much Maur consumer oriented.

So think about the types of things that if when you print a document just a regular to D printer, you know you can control the real basics like there's a print on both sides.

You know how many copies per sheet, all those types of things.

It's basically one dialogue page worth of stuff that that you're doing right.

Anything more than that.

And it's typically too much for a consumer.

The idea here is the A P I provides, and it doesn't stop there like he can provide more advanced capabilities and everything as well.

But the a p I provides support for people that build these interfaces for their printers or two declare that they support these capabilities to make it really easy to have a very simple, you know, slide out.

You.

Why, that just has, You know, here's a preview of the image.

Um, you know, what kind of infill do you want?

Do you want to, you know, x percent of infill?

Um, possibly there's some stuffing, correct for correction of errors there.

I'm not sure yet.

If that's part of this pipeline or external to it, you know, copies, raft, all those typical things that you're going to need to do.

Um, as a consumer.

Right now, this is an A p I.

So it's going to require people to develop APS that support it.

But as I understand it, it's, ah, supported on the desktop as well as in modern store up, so you'll be able to do it on both sides.

But again, the idea here, this is like, if you think about what, um, copyists like to really play with tweaking of different parameters.

You know, the you know, a lot to do with the different specific thicknesses of the layers thespian civic heat of the device, the bed, the nozzle, all that type of stuff.

This isn't really geared towards that.

Hobbyists.

I think you're still going to go and tweak away using the software that they use.

But this is mortgaged towards, you know, again, the mass market of three D printer users who are gonna want to just send a couple of basic options, then print and have something decent come out.

So this is like I have a son who's 7.5 on.

I am totally thinking that he could go in and design a Pokemon or download of folk Amman or something like that and printed at the table.

Right?

And it's, Ah, Matt and I, we we've done educational Siri's.

We'll go out to high school kids and they are primed for three D printing like that's the only thing they care about.

We had a drone flying around the room.

They gave zero things that you would give.

They cared more about three D printing in that whole fascinating world.

So I, for one, am super excited about what the mass market is.

You refer to it the common person ends up doing with three D printing because I think it'll go like they, like you mentioned that the dot matrix printers.

The early stage of printers.

Um, tried to discard my wife.

Yes, the my three d printer breaks, but that's part and parcel of being an early adopter of it.

You want that?

If it came out perfect, you'd feel almost shafted.

Um, funding the Matrix printers you mentioned is a perfect example.

Like they used to require significant care and feeding.

I can't tell you how many papers I had in high school that got you know what happened is like one side would get jammed on the other side would start way just get all skewed and all crumpled up.

And, you know, it was really windy.

Like she feed tear off suggestions.

And then you make a little monster with that menu, you through the accordion with it, and and we could quite literally tell our teachers to print a rate my homework.

Right?

And that was so this is this is similar to that.

Yeah, but I don't want you.

I don't want to give folks the impression that this is some dumb down, not ready for pro use type A p I because that's not the case at all.

It's just a and a P I without requiring you to do as much fiddling as you had to do before.

Perfect.

So not to jump tracks to drastically, but, uh, does there won't want to switch over new microcontrollers.

And us is, uh, had one.

Sorry.

Let me have one last thing on the three D printing stuff here for a second.

If you do go into staples and you look a TTE, that three d printer And do you guys remember the neighbor?

I forget.

What the name of the three d printer.

We haven't you.

Is that a yes?

Thank you.

Uh, if you take a look at that, you'll understand just how far things are going to be going to make this more consumer oriented.

Like I personally, I look at the cube, and as a hobbyist, I'm like that filaments expensive, right when I look at that, but the idea is you need to buy the cartridge.

The cartridge has, ah logic chip inside it that knows the color of the filament.