Will do. The build plate isn’t heated, but I’ll watch my back anyway. Thx
I’m wondering why I haven’t seen any delta style printer farms. Can anyone tell me?
@Dovid_Teitelbaum People do it, but it’s rare… Because getting a delta to print dimensionally-accurate parts across its full build area is really hard. They’re simply much more sensitive to calibration and build precision. Which means the amount of operator expertise required to set up and sustain a delta print farm is quite a bit higher than what is required with a cartesian print farm.
@Ryan_Carlyle thanks for your input. I thought it maybe because you can more easily stack one on another. So you can fit more.
@Dovid_Teitelbaum If you’re tight on space, sure. I don’t know how many print farms are run out of people’s houses, but you really have to have a LOT of printers before floor space is likely to be a meaningful technology selection decision driver to a company.
We like small bots and our offerings compare well to other companies when looking at the real estate needed to pack multiple units in… Not to mention price.
The real math is when considering average build space needed for production. If you know this, the size of the bot needed becomes a prerequisite and you can compare apples to apples.
Also, some like to print one part at a time to reduce risk in case of a failure. Others like a single plate of many multiples but longer print times. Weigh this as well.
Small single prints and little real estate would favor the Printrbot play, where large prints or large plates and no concern for real estate may have you drop to considering price point between two similar machines… Say, a Printrbot plus and a type A machine.
Just something to consider.
Until we see the Botfarm software offerings increase, almost any open printer platform will be on equal footing when considering software. There is just not a lot out there.
@Brook_Drumm is there a way to split parts in a way that when you merge then it looks as good as if it was printed in one go.
Off hand, maybe. Some parts: yes. Some parts no. I usually design the split part assembly from scratch so I don’t have much experience splitting single parts. When I have done it, I didn’t care how it looked. So there is certainly potential, but it depends. Joining the two parts may dork as s snap fit, screws, or glue/epoxy… The part requirements matter. Also take into consideration extra print time and assembly time as well as extra cost for adhesion or hardware.
@Justin_Nesselrotte Not sure how to contact you personally so I wanted to ask the following. Do all farms just have single printers or is there a setup where you would have many print heads on one platform. My idea would be the following. a long frame and the x,y,z all on one rod but have multiple of them? something like the mpcnc setup but with multiple individual extruders. the advantage would be that you can use as much space per job. Like basically you would section off parts of the frame according to what you needed at the moment. Small parts take up small large parts take up larger. Not sure of Im explaining myself well…
I get it. Yes. This setup would be possible with the plus and simple on one big bed. You would need to manually set the X home to run various size jobs and have multiple clients on one of. Until our Botfarm software is done, you would have to manually send files too
@Brook_Drumm I’m asking about printing two separate items at one time on one need. About the botfarm software will it only work with printrbots?
All the software we develop is/will be open source so it will be available for anyone. Since some will be initially tied to custom firmware and our electronics, there may be a need to extend the software to work with other bots. We encourage that but we may not do it for them.
We may start with a cloud solution (free account/ service) to make it easier up front but we definitely want a version that runs in a rpi or something so an Internet connection isn’t needed and others can play… We will show it at maker faire for sure