Hi! I’m working on a new custom build with many of the latest features in usability and I wanted to add some new feature to it. I had a couple of ideas, and I was wondering which of them the community saw as most useful. I am not as experienced as many members here, and I was wondering what you would foresee as improving usability the most. Thanks!
All the automated stuff for the build plate seems highly impractical to design or produce. While they would be nice QoL improvements,the R&D and components involved in making it a reality are far too hefty to be worth it for the hobbyist community.
Just build a working printer first, then see what your imagination has come up with. Auto bed levelling with contact or magnetic switches is still hit and miss for some printers. Try some other mechanism and see if you can get that working.
@MidnightVisions I already have a working printer. When I said “working on the printer” I meant adding the latest features and improvements. I currently use an inductive probe on Aluminum. I don’t disagree with you though.
@Dyllan_Courtland Ok, how about an automatic build plate changer. Something that removes the build plate and the finished object from a printer, sets it aside to cool, and inserts a new build plate and allows printing on a new object.
I was considering going in that direction, but I have seen a similar feature already in another machine and wanted to try something new. I think a mechanism to remove the part from the plate saves both time and cost.
Belt bed machines do #1, other solutions use a robot arm or make the machine larger. Not sure how to elegantly do #2, but if you’re doing #1 with plates then a stack of plates can be prepped by hand beforehand. #3 is probably unnecessary with decent ambient environment control otherwise you’d have to be a computer vision hot shot programmer to crack that. It would be nice to make progress with #4, there’s lots of approaches being tried with no clear leads yet.
Dual gantry stages. With slower coarse large scale and lighter highspeed gantry mounted inside for short fast moving of the tip.
Wouldn’t automatic part removal and auto cleaning the bed essentially be the same? And what do you mean by “simple universal dual extrusion”?
By auto part removal, I mean that the system detaches a printed part from the bed after a job, and by auto cleaning, I mean the printer removes excess material still on the bed and cleans with alcohol and applies glue, or whatever is needed for a surface. By simply universal dual extrusion, I mean some system that would allow for dual extrusion on a machine without needing firmware modification, and ideally only needing to change out the single extruder for a new one which has both extruders integrated into 1 body.
The only reason to have automatic part removal is if the printer would eject everything from the bed, allowing the user to start a new print without touching the printer or to even queue prints. The need to apply a substance to the bed is usually trivial if you use PEI or Buildtak. In my opinion changing firmware for dual extrusion is trivial, it’s unlikely that most users with a dual toolhead will ever go back to a single head. Only use case I can see is for lower moving mass to give slightly faster print speeds or a slightly larger X print dimension.
Auto part separation/warp detection is a very interesting concept that I haven’t seen implemented anywhere. I believe the average user would get the most use out this feature, the ability to eject and queue prints is amazing but it seems like it would be mostly usefull for print farms. If you don’t mind me asking, how do would you implement auto part separation/warp?
The warp detection would certainly be optically based, as a mechanically based system would be too inflexible for different parts. I was actually thinking of trying to make a holistic automatic print monitoring system with a camera, but I figured I would start small with just warp detection. I think that for some people with more closed printers, it may not be as trivial to modify the software as they may not even have their printer’s marlin distro or the know-how on how to configure marlin from scratch.
Also, @Adam_Steinmark The ability to not touch the machine in between prints is the end goal.
Optical seems like it will be extremely complex. I wish you good luck and I hope you’ll post your progress to this community.