Manufacturing: a dot-matrix printer for magnetism

The enabling machine is the MagPrinter — a computer-controlled magnetizing head that writes a magnet’s pattern the way a dot-matrix printer wrote text: one pixel at a time, at speed, from a file.

The print head

A capacitor bank fires a ~0.8-millisecond current pulse through a coil focused by a ~1 mm aperture, slamming the local grain structure of the magnet face into the chosen polarity — one ~1 mm maxel per pulse. The stage steps, the head fires again. A full pattern takes seconds to minutes. Writing technology is covered by US 10,204,727 with a family including US 10,734,016 and 11,270,723.

Crucially, the input is ordinary magnet stock: sintered NdFeB (standard NiCuNi-coated), SmCo for temperature and corrosion, flexible NdFeB sheet, or ferrites. Programmable magnetization is a value-add process, not a new material — it rides the existing magnet supply chain, and the coding step is not part of the China-dominated portion of that chain.

The design-to-part workflow

Pick a function from the software catalog — align, spring, latch, twist-release — or design a custom spatial force function at maxel level in Polyvision, with real-time field visualization.
Insert a blank (or a standard off-the-shelf magnet) into the printer.
Print the pattern — seconds to minutes per part.
Force-test the result and iterate. CMR’s pitch: magnet prototyping in “minutes or hours, not months” — because no new tooling, casting, or sintering run is needed to change the design, just a new file.

This is the actual revolution in the manufacturing story: magnetization became software. The same blank becomes a latch, a spring, or a key by changing the file — the magnet equivalent of moving from cast metal type to the laser printer.

The machines

Machine	Year	What it is
MagPrinter	2013	World’s first magnetizing printer, sold with the pattern/software catalog.
Mini MagPrinter	2014	Desktop version, reported at ~$45,000 — the “lab printer” tier.
Polydesk / Polylab / Polymag 6.2	current	The magnetizer line offered on polymagnet.com today, spanning desktop to lab scale.

Limits, stated plainly

Maxels ~1 mm; smallest engineered parts ~4 mm diameter; standard demo parts rated to ~60 °C / 140 °F (substrate-dependent — SmCo buys temperature).
Coding cannot exceed the material’s energy product (NdFeB ~52 MGOe). It redistributes field; it does not add energy.
The printer is the moat and the bottleneck: ~$45k equipment, design NRE, and a thin sourcing catalog are real adoption barriers (see Market).

What do people build with this? Applications, tagged honestly →