The best bit in their product sales pitch " its not about making the printer work"
It should be mostly about making the printer work.
Calculating a constant speed above ground when moving in R and X at the same time will be…interesting.
(I have that issue with true 4 axis CNC milling. )
My biggest worry is how to get four nozzles reliably aligned – first at the factory in production volume, and more critically in the field when it eventually needs to be serviced.
Extrude a circle and meassure?
I meant vertically.
Adjustment grub-screws and a feeler gauge?
Make nozzle and bed close an electric contact to be even more precise.
The learning curve for one head, and getting it working right is steep. I’ve seen loads of people that never figure it out. I can only imagine the nightmare this would be with so many heads. Virtually any slop in plastic diameter would lead to binds, and epic ruined prints.
It seems to me the future will move away from making the plastic material so important. If slight variations ruin prints, as they would here, it encourages the “machining” of the stock to the point it will get prohibitively expensive.
I played with the idea of having a free-running rotary encoder to detect stalls and measure the actual filament transported (so software can compansate and ultimately initiate a safe pause that can be resumed.)
Never had any idea on how to measure filament cross-section (possibly including enclosed air and water).
There is a guy with an optical one working atm, give it a little time. Things like this can revolutionize 3dp by making materials cheap like they were before it commercialized. I see value though in reducing how much precision you need in the material. leme find the link.
As far as moving the part to get the r/theta, it may actually be less mass for them to be slinging around, considering they have 8 nozzles passing through what looks like a brick of brass.
I love it when we as a community spot a particularly bad 3d printer kickstarter - a lot of knowledge can be spread to beginners out there by pointing out design flaws, as a teaching tool. This printer isn’t as bad as the jopica monstrosity, but it definitely seems pretty crazy. Perhaps the only positive - a software modeling package targeted at kids (although using a video game controller might be easy, but perhaps not the most useful way to impart the knowledge of creating a part.)