Starting up the unit

Impressed by my team’s performance on the Maker Mask initiative, in December of 2020 the leadership of the RPrime Foundation asked me to head up the creation of RPrime Labs. The new unit was to be the in-house research and development arm of the foundation, focused pursuing project ideas that we had generated during the Maker Mask period.  

As the manager of the new unit, I was responsible for creating its foundational structure and operating framework. This included interviewing and recruiting personnel, drafting a unit charter, creating a 12-month budget, and creating a pipeline structure to take projects from conception to partnership & commercialization. I was also responsible for managing its resources and external relationships, deciding which projects were worthy of bringing up the chain and directly managing their execution. Additionally, I reported to the foundation’s leadership and pitched our projects to potential partners and interested parties.

Managing innovation

The primary project that the unit focused on was the development of a new 3D printing method, which works volumetrically as opposed to the traditional planar method of printing. Over several months my team of 5 and I worked to design and produce the physical structure of the machine, its control system, and it’s driving circuitry & firmware. This involved CAD design, firmware programming in Arduino, and the generation of input file creation & processing workflows, resulting in the successful development of two functional prototypes. To validate the technique and explore potential use cases, we applied it to the creation of biomedical tissue scaffold implants and a sensor to monitor the structural health of infrastructure.

This work ultimately led to our filing for an omnibus patent covering the new printing process and the materials it uses, as well as a patent for the structural health sensor. We are currently taking the sensor through the commercialization phase of the pipeline, partnering with Navigator CRE, a Seattle based commercial real estate data analytics firm. This has involved adapting the design to address feedback generated by initial demos given with our alpha prototype, as well as making it suitable for high volume manufacturing. At the moment we are working to produce 100 prototype units for large scale field tests & data collection.