Robo 3D vs Solidoodle 3 vs Aluminatus (Page 1 of 2)

Probably the only real advancements for FDM would be in software- better gcode from slicers, and better firmware (eg Sailfish) for increasing speed while maintaining quality.  The slicing would probably still be a matter of open source versions playing catchup with the more mature pro versions.

Increased size isn't really the big advancement hobby printers need- it's reliable dual extrusion with dissolvable support and heated build chambers which is still a matter of catching up with pro printers (an their patents).  All of it is old technology, the innovation is more about doing it cheaply enough for the individual to afford while producing quality prints.

Interesting you should say that.

http://www.3ders.org/articles/20130108- … today.html

Replicator 2X 3D printer is designed for 3D printing experts working in R&D who want to blaze a trail into the future of 3D printing. It is a more advanced extension of MakerBot Replicator 2 and features experimental dual extrusion, reengineered extruder and an updated heated build platform. It has a full-seal heat-trapping enclosure which could help to stabilize the ABS cooling period and a single-piece, thermal formed magnetic lid to keep or release heat.

Features:

Two color printing
Allows for printing with dissolvable support material like PVA
Possible to create an entirely solid plastic object with a customization density
Can combine the two plastics into a single object that is both flexible and rigid.
Allowing printing two objects, one with each extruder, at the same time.
Two extruders can have variable resolution - With one very fine nozzle aperture and one relatively large nozzle aperture, a single object could be printed with quick printing course features and very high resolution features that take more time.

$2,799
For that price I would buy a Form One.

Seriously?  The home/hobby market didn't, for all practical purposes, exist until the reprap project began.  And the first parts and reprap machines didn't happen until mid-2008, which was less than five years ago.

I grant you that the technology hasn't changed much from the commercial machines, but this is like saying the personal computer wasn't a "remarkable advance" back in the mid 1980's just because computer workstations had been around for the previous decade.  I submit that the cost decreases which enabled the personal computer to appear in most homes was indeed a "remarkable advance".

So the home 3D printer market has gone from zero to tens of thousands of printers in under five years.  Truly remarkable.  And it seems that hardly a month or two goes by that there isn't some advance in larger print volumes, lower costs, better printer software, better and/or cheaper 3D cad software, etc.

I didn't exactly say "obsolete".  I said "relatively obsolete".  This was perhaps a poor choice of words.  I should have said that there might be printers with better "print volume to cost" ratios.

Titanium

They just announced that they're testing a new 1.75mm hot end:
kickstarter.com/projects/1682938109/robo-3d-printer/posts/388092

(Can't post links)

Hi ezra and thank you for your disclosure. Cna you provide us images of the some of the prints i would be interested in seeing some complicated prints. Also will you be providing stl files or replacement parts to make ease of repair?

Let me follow up with some print quality photos, some links to my youtube channel where you can see the past few months of Aluminatus prototyping anfd testing and very large very high speed printing.

But first let me show you why this is not comparable to a mendelmax or a prusa in any shape or form and where the $1800 goes to and why it is worth the money. Have a look at the final production build, this is my personal bot with custom annodized extrusions in the first 3 attached photos( I tried to link to external photo album but forum will not allow me to add links for some reason?)

Now you can clearly see there is a lot more custom machining here then just your standard tslot bot. The tslot is part of the frames rigidity yes, but the lasercut aluminum frame cover plate as well as the 6.5mm thick lasercut Y carriage and the machined Aluminum custom parts scattered throughout the whole printer to make it a step above the others you mentioned.

The X/Y stages are custom co-designed between trinitylabs and PBC Linear to our desired spec for a printer of this size, speed and accuracy. With the triple stack 112oz-in nema17 steppers on X and Y both X and Y are capable of 390mm travel speeds and the acceleration settings in Marlin can be set to a maximum of 50,000! yes 50k not 5k, put it this way, even the ultimaker uses 9k acceleraiton not 50k that these assemblies can handle.

So this printer preffers to print at 126mm/sec perimeters and 200mm/sec infill. This is where the resonance and extrusions speed matcjh up the best to have the priunter just hum and wail out the parts fast while maintaining very high dimensional accuracy and very "crisp" looking prints even on 90degree sharp corners there is no blpbbing even at this high speed.

The X and Y axis actually have 320mm of travel so you can print to the very last mm of the 300mm x 300mm borosilicate heated bed. And a 24V 400W kapton heater stuck to a 0.8mm aluminm heat spreader is right under the glass. Due to the size and wattage of the bed heater the Aluminatus ships with *2* 24V PSU's. One of them is a 24V 400W 17AMP PSU dedicated entirely to the 400W 24v kapton bed heater. The additional 24V 10AMP 250W PSU drives the stepper motors, electronics, fans hot ends and LED lights.

These first 50 units ship with custom built RAMPS built to our spec with all black PCB boards on all electronics. The machine comes with Black RAMPS1.4 on a Black Taurino arduino mega clone that is 12V-36V safe and then we also ship these with 5 black brand name pololu stepper drivers, no clones , direct from pololu only. These are the newer black higher amp, better heat sinking design of the step sticks. We ship the ramps loaded with 5 of these black pololus because we run each Z stepper motor on it's own independant stepper driver. The second extruder stepper spot E1 holds a black pololu that drives the second Z stepper. This is done because stepper drivers were never actually meant to drive two motors off one drive *ever*. Recent versions of Marlin firmware allowyou to specify to use E1 stepper driver as the second Z axis motor drive and this makes the Z axis very fast and strong and capable of very fast z lift and travel even with the heavier linear actuator X axis.

We ship our own custom designed extruder that is available open source on thingiverse under the trinitylabs user account that uses a nema17 5.8:1 planetary gearhead stepper in a direct drive setup for unstoppable direct drive extrusion. We have a customized guidler for the idler that has a closed loop arond the filament instead of a U channel and we have a nice wide funnel underneatrh the hobb and idler so this makes this extruder the easiest extruder to use to swap filament on the fly without pausing your print. Just cut the current filament and let it enter the extruder and then lightly follow it in with the next color or piece of filament and it will suck it in and print without clogging or jamming ever.

(P.S. the entire Aluminatus printer is open source open hardware and CAD models and BOM will be released next week when we get a chance to catch our breath after building and shipping 60 identical units.

These printers also ship by default with a LCD panel and cclickwheel encoder with a 4GB sd card for standalone headless printing and control of the printer.

The Z axis uses custom machined to our spec 400mm long Thomson Linear Robotics 10x2mm leadscrews with acytl nuts that are every bit as straight as linear smooth rod and therefor use thrust bearings on the bottom right above the coupler and 608zz's on the idler end on top sinc they are straight enough that they do not wobble and get over constrained with bearings on both ends of the screw.

For the linear guidance on Z we use PTFE coated 12mm smooth rods and 12mm PTFE linear bearings made also by our partner PBC Linearcalled Simplicty LM12UU plane PTFE linear bearings. These things glide like butter but are utterly silent compared to ball bearing lm12uu's.

I could continue here descibing all the custom work and manufacturing in these printers that make them far and above "just another tslot bot" but I will stop here with the technical details and I will post some print quality photos and link you to my youtube channel where I have openly developed the Aluminatus since it first started printing until now when we are about to ship the first 50 1.0 production units this week.

So I cannot post links here on the forum yet probably because I am a new users so please just search for my username on youtube where I am "ezmobius"  There are many many videos of the Aluminatus prototypes in various states and quality levels and speed leevls printing many different types of objects. I am certain you can get the "impressed feeling" you want by browsing the youtube channel, my google group as well as the photos of print quality I am attaching to this post.

One more thing to note is that these printers come with a full one year manufacturing defect warantee on the entire XYZ cartesian robot. If either the XY or Z axis fails for any reason not caused by user error or abuse I will fedex you a replacement part with a pre-postage paid box to ship back the old part after you install the replacement.

These printers also come 85-90% pre-assembled. The entire bottom rectangle of the frame is pre-assembled and aligned with the aluminum cover plate installed, the two PSU's installed and wired to the RAMPS pre-installed and wired with a full labeled wiring harness. The z axis upright tslot parts will also be pre-assembled but laid down in the shipping container to save on shipping a fully upright printer. The average time it will take a user to go from unboxing to first print is 1-2 hours.

The entire printer is comprised of less then 40 parts(not including fasteners) and there are no printed parts that are used for anything that needs proper alignment or squaring. Basically anything that needs precision alignment or tuning is pre-done for you by us or the part manufacturing plant. So your first print after 1-2 hour assembly will look as good as my prints I will attach to this post.

We will also ship close to 10 custom slic3r profile.ini files for high, mediu,m and low res ABS or PLA as well as thin wall hollow vessels or rigid structural components with infill and custom needs. We have written a small app cross platform that you double click that lest you choose your stl file, select which kind of resolution and plastic you are using as well as what type of slicing you desire and this app will template our the proper slic3r/.ini file, slice your object and open pronterface with the GCODE loaded and ready to be printed just as a nice touch to simplify use. But of course you don't have to use this is you are already an advanced user.

So enough blathering let me attach some print photos and some photos of our new 7000 sq/ft warehouse where we are currently assembling the first 60 1.0 printers...

I hope this gives you more insight into why the price is well justified and of course I am biased being the designer of this printer but I ask you to withold judgement until you see one in person or hear a review from an impartial 3rd party you trust before you leap to judgement about whether this printer is a step forward in tecnology and print quality and speed or whether a $300 prusa can print just as well as this industrial machine that will last you 5 years or more.

(Appears I can only attach 5 images per post so I am going to follow with another post or two containing more print examples.)

Thanks for Reading
-Ezra

And just a few shots of the current build party going on with 60 printers being created.

-Ezra

Gotta say it looks pretty impressive.  Anything being considered to reduce noise?  I print on my kitchen table and my wife would go nuts if I tried to run something that loud. 

Without an enclosure, what do you do to combat cooling and warping that many other ABS printers suffer with?

Well you definitely made a new fan out of me.  Price was an issue for me but I'm excited about the direction you're taking.  Keep us informed.

Also, do you offer an enclosure?  On this board, the conventional wisdom is that you need an enclosure to print large ABS parts without warping and edges separating from the bed.

It is hard to see how the fan that cools the extruded filament is designed.  Is there a cowling to direct air at the print, and away from the hot end?   From the videos, it looks as if the entire hot end is being cooled.

Given the speed with which the extruder moves, is it difficult to clip old filament and insert new while the printer is printing?

Might be interesting to print something on a Solidoodle and again on the Alumatus to see how the print times compare.

The Solidoodle uses a spring to load the bearing against the hob, but your extruder does not seem to have this feature.  Care to explain why?

Do I see a Bowden tube feeding filament to the extruder?  That often is used when the extruder is not mounted on the carriage: why are you using it in this configuration?

Do you have a forum, like this one, for your product?

Man, I can barely hear you over the printer.  That printer is LOUD!