Topic: x and y resolution?
When talking about printing quality almost every printer mentions layer height (microns, mm). But what about x and y resolution? Isnt that as important. What is it by default on a Solidoodle? Can I change it?
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When talking about printing quality almost every printer mentions layer height (microns, mm). But what about x and y resolution? Isnt that as important. What is it by default on a Solidoodle? Can I change it?
There's lots of discussion on this, it's pretty misleading to use the layer height as a measurement of print quality; there's a lot more to it than that as I'm sure you're learning right now! It's just like measuring the quality of a car by the number of kW it has.
The x/y resolution is normally given as the distance the head moves for a single microstep of the motor. You can work this out: for example, a default solidoodle 3 has (on both x and y axes):
* 18t 2.03mm pitch MXL pulleys
* 200 step/rev (1.8 degree) motor
* 1/16 microstepping
So 1 motor rev --> 18*2.03=36.54mm travel
200 * 16 = 3200 microsteps / rev
So each microstep translates to 36.54 / 3200 = 0.0114mm
So if you think about it, if you tell the machine to move to any arbitrary point, it will move to the closest step it can: which represents a quantization error of +/- 0.0114/2=0.0057mm.
This of course doesn't take into account the machine's parallelness, staightness, rigidity or backlash, which tend to outweigh this error by a fair margin.
Also note that the extrusion process itself is not madly accurate - the nozzle squishes and pulls the plastic around a fair bit, it droops and curls and does all sorts of crazy stuff, so even if you have a perfect motion control system for the nozzle, the parts would still show a level of inaccuracy due to this.
In short, to the best of my knowledge, a finely-tuned machine should give you confidence in a part accuracy in the order of +/- 0.1mm in the x/y plane (not including overall thermal contraction etc, for which you might allow about 0.5% for ABS).
Given this, there would not be a lot of value in changing the drive system for increased resolution, as the other sources of error will mask any improvement.
Just wanted to say THANK YOU to grob on this great explanation!
grob nailed it. You're squeezing plastic through a nozzle, any numbers in the tens of microns are all marketing. The backlash, etc is what matters.
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