This has to be the worst concept for a 3d printer I’ve seen in a while (and I’ve seen some doozies). It reads like an entry in to a contest to see how many bad ideas you can cram into one design. To name a few:
• X/Y platform movement, with stationary extruders
• Y axis is actually a rotary table (actually θ/r instead of X/Y)
• Multiple nozzles trying to work on the same part at once
• The custom software appears to work exclusively in big, ugly voxels.
• Scanner and printer in one box
• Ignoring all the work of the community and trying to do all their own electronics/hardware/software/firmware
Worse than that, it appears to be converting imported models and scans into something that looks like it was built in minecraft. That’s what I was getting at with the “big, ugly voxel” comment
I think I read about this in a Madison newspaper a while back. That was when it was a UW research project or something and didn’t have any sort of name. I’ve seen the theta, r system used before, but don’t recall what quality it produced. It does seem like the r axis has a lot of mass and at times I’m sure it has to accelerate quite quickly. I’m curious to see if that extruder suffers from the problems associated with oozing. Conveniently the video of it in action was a PIP and I was not able to see any detail. The software is extremely underwhelming for anyone that is interested in producing quality parts but it’s a good way of telling kids to play Minecraft and print out their design. That’s already possible with a program that turns a section of the save file into an STL. I don’t see where these machines (and software) justify their prices.
I don’t want to knock anyone for trying, but it’s getting a little old seeing all of these crowd funding campaigns that don’t necessarily advance the technology. Why would I take a gamble on something like this when I could buy something that already has a user base and solid reviews?
@Kean_Nam_Yeoh Yeah, it’s a bit like kicking a puppy when they all seam so nice and earnest and all, but a bad idea is a bad idea and if you put it on Kickstarter you’re opening yourself up to people pointing out the flaws.
They’re supposed to make printing faster. Of course, they’re only useful for infill, and anyone with experience with printers knows how limited the utility of something like that is, especially when you consider minimum cooling times.
Their voxel-based prints might make it a bit more useful (at the cost of print quality) if they were using a cartesian system, but since they’re not, I’m not entirely sure how they’re supposed to work.
Hmm, I don’t see the nozzles coming into play often enough to make them of any use, when they are, they’ll be empty, having dripped all over the print.
the voxel based printing system seems like it’s basically guaranteed to produce useless parts… Not only will the surface finish be total crap, but the strength of the part won’t be anything close to a regularly printed part… I routinely lay parts out on the build platform specifically so the “grain” of the print goes in a certain direction for strength, and voxels make that impossible…
I don’t understand how they plan on using multiple nozzles simultaneously, all they showed printing was concentric circles… which I’ll admit, it did very well. I have a hard enough time managing 2 print heads in series, I can’t imagine the failure rate of 8 print heads simultaneously. I wish them luck, but looks like vaporware
@Steve_Kelly1 , look through the comments above. There is justification there. If you think the justifications are indeed unjust, please feel free to counter.
@Tony_Olivo , not for all statements. I’m not here to debate. I will be more verbose; if you want a community to succeed you need to spread knowledge as thoroughly as possible. Criticisms of work enter this knowledge stream and are very important.
Criticism without qualification will lead to an unscientific knowledge base that cannot be rationalized by any member of the community.
What I am asking for is proof, “science”, rather than comments, “arm chair engineering”.
• X/Y platform movement means moving more mass around on axes that need to accelerate as fast as possible. The jerking of this acceleration causes parts to tend to break loose and fail, even if you manage to avoid making the motors skip.
• A rotary table means the theta axis (angle) will have extremely high resolution and will have to move at an extremely high speed in degrees/second (approaching infinity) near the center, while it will have to move at a low speed and have low resolution near the edge.
• Multiple nozzles moving together will rarely all be in a position where you want to extrude plastic at once, particularly if you trace the outline of an object (which results in smoother surfaces and much stronger prints) rather than just drawing it in scan lines.
• Big, ugly voxels vs. vector outlines. I don’t think this one needs much explanation. Honestly, I think voxels are the way of the future, but not with thermoplastic extruders with nozzles that are several hundred microns in diameter. The voxel size has to approach the positioning resolution of our current machines to be useful.
• Scanner and printer in one box means you are limited to scanning the same volume you can print, and has bad consequences WRT the optics required and required volume of the machine (you don’t want your lenses too close to the object). It also necessitates having a rotary table, which is bad for printing for the reasons I already explained.
• The community has made huge advancements in the last few years. By deciding to go a different direction and design their hardware/software/firmware from scratch, they won’t benefit from those advancements, and are certain to make a few additional mistakes that others have already made, and that we’ve all learned from already.
None of these are new ideas. They’ve all been considered and attempted before, whether as hardware or just a gedankenexperiment, and we’ve had good reasons for moving away from each of them.
@Whosa_whatsis I never considered the velocity-radius relation of a rotary table, only resolution. That is a really good point! I totally agree with everything you stated.
