Another day, another 3d-printer-mill-scanner combo kickstarter.
(and yet another mill without a ventilation system)
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/robox/robox-desktop-3d-printer-and-micro-manufacturing-p
Hey, but it does have SmartReel™ - Each reel of filament has an EEPROM which contains material data to allow Robox® to automatically set print parameters.
Quite possibly inspired by UFID, but probably also a DRM scheme.
Yeah, my DRM bone was tingling when I read that.
I was thinking connector conspiracy more so than DRM.
@Thomas_Sanladerer Probably along the lines of the chips in inkjet printer cartridges.
Um designed by designers not engineers and its future proof for all printing.
Metal deposition then …ERM I think not.
Oh and less than £1000 well that sort of puts it in a area where machines can do all those jobs already.
Changeable heads…well I build a delta and have changeable heads.
Really these jump on the wagon guys if they had a good idea the banks or entrepreneur would give them money.
For all our criticisms, they do have a few very good features that I would like to see in others. Needle valves in the hot ends are pretty interesting, but might cause problems and make changing filaments difficult. The feed mechanism on the extruder is good, and the sensing of filament stalls would be handy.
Other than that, I’m not crazy about it, but it might be good for someone like my dad; buy it and go. The price point they have (~$1300) is very good as well.
I hope they make it. It would be a good addition to the 'plug-and-play" type of 3D printers.
Do they have auto bed leveling ? That is pretty crucial for plug-and-play-ness.
@Carlton_Dodd I must disagree - any printer that builds on the RepRap project but takes your liberties away by force is not one that I want to see succeed.
@Thomas_Sanladerer I appreciate your position, and I suppose you’re right. I was just thinking that it would be great for my dad to be able to join the 3D printing community. But, if it’s proprietary, he would really be sitting just outside the community, unable to participate fully.
I LOVE open source, and I would be thrilled to see the word “proprietary” disappear from these projects. I just thought these guys had some good ideas. I wish they’d share them, it could only make them better.
@Carlton_Dodd they have no good ideas only things others have done or in the process of implementing.
They are on the outside looking in and claiming others glory.
Maybe if UFID was to become accepted by filament manufacturers, a Barcode or QR code could be developed for ALL to use …
@Nigel_Dickinson Really? I hadn’t seen them yet. I’d be interested in open-source versions of the needle valve concept and the filament feed monitoring. Do you have links I could look at?
Needle vavle. Mmm a valve means it opens and closes. They dont mean that at all it will be a removable stem. Please read between the lines. They are designers not engineers.
As for UFID and similar the data base is already on the go.
@Nigel_Dickinson The last post I saw on UFID had the format and detail but the implementation by suppliers wasn’t there yet.
A couple of those ideas look pretty interesting to me. I would like to see more of how they operate. Being just a knockoff, maybe but there is only a couple of designs of printers and everything else is a version of. If anybody on this post can build a completely new style printer that has never been seen before i would like to see it, really.
@Billy Thanks for that 1700+ page document. No mention of needle valve or optical tracking of filament in it, BTW.
@Carlton_Dodd I gave you the page number for the valve. 861.
@Billy AH! That didn’t come up with any of the search terms I could think of. Funny thing: The page marked 861 is actually the 889th page of the document, but when I entered 861 in the go to field, I ended up finding (marked) page 832, which has the filament tracking!
Seems like there are no new ideas!
Seriously, thanks for the document. It’s an awesome history.