What does it mean to fully develop an LPBF technology (and why does almost no one do it)

Samylabs was founded at the end of 2016 and is the first Spanish company to have developed entirely all the technology necessary for 3D metal laser melting. "Integratedly" has a concrete and verifiable meaning: the optics, control, electronics, and slicing software are all proprietary. It is not an integration of purchased modules.

What can be integrated and what needs to be resolved

Building an LPBF machine from off-the-shelf components is possible. You buy a laser, a galvanometer head, a build chamber, and a controller, and assemble it. What you don't buy pre-made is what happens between those parts: the synchronization between the beam sweep and its power, the infill strategy for each layer, the management of the gas flow that removes spatter, and the compensation for everything that goes astray as the build progresses.

That's where a machine becomes a machine, and that's where ownership of technology ceases to be a brochure ornament.

What does the buyer of the machine gain?

Open parameters. If the software manufacturer wrote the software, they can open the parameters. If you purchased it, they usually cannot. This determines whether you can qualify a material that wasn't on the initial list.

No captive powder. There is no technical reason to tie the machine to a proprietary consumable, and we don't.

A single point of contact. When something goes wrong with a machine built from third-party modules, blame is assigned among suppliers. When the technology is proprietary, there's no one to point the finger at.

Industrial sovereignty. A critical capability that depends on a foreign license is not an in-house capability. In defense, energy, and aeronautics, this is no longer an abstract argument.

Where does it come from, and with whom?

The development has been sustained with support from SPRI, the Provincial Council of Bizkaia and the CDTI —including the NEOTEC call—, and with the industrial collaboration of Ona Electroerosión, which has taken our machines to international fairs as a distributor.

Before that, the project was a finalist in the Bind 4.0 program in 2017, among fifty selected from 385 international applications, and one of the five state winners of the OpenMaker call in 2018. They don't count for much on their own; they count more as a chronology that this wasn't improvised.

The practical consequence

The ALBA 300 was born from an idea: to enable small and medium-sized businesses to have professional metal 3D printing without having to build a factory around it. It fits within a 730 mm width, operates on domestic voltage, only requires a gas connection—argon or nitrogen—and works with 50- to 60-micron layers on 316L stainless steel, C300 tool steel, and Inconel 718.

That combination —compact machine, proprietary technology, open parameters— is what enables the rest of what we do today: a network of shop floors that manufacture on demand with the same equipment and the same parameters, and a price quoter who can estimate the cost of a part because he knows the process from the inside.

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Where it's manufactured and why it matters, in an LPBF machine manufactured in Europe. What closing the loop means and where ours stands, in closed-loop process control. And the machines where it all ends, in ALBA 300 and ALBA 500.