Assuming every hinge there is motorized, that’s 6 servos. That looks like a nightmare to calibrate, which it will need to do a lot of if it’s shoved in some backpack for travel on a routine basis.
And the print head looks like a bitch to take apart to service if you get a jam.
Yeah this thing would suffer really hard from over time degradation and you would have no way to fix it probably. Its like the Iphone of 3D printers. The beauty of 3D printers is exactly that everything is exposed and can be easily modified, repaired or replaced.
Honestly it’s a cool idea to have a portable printer though, and it could be achieved but just differently.
Like what if you just took the basic design of a normal 3d printer, but made it snap apart and back together, and then made those pieces fit into the briefcase?
You’d just need two vertical pillars, one horizontal rod. Then the print bed itself could move in either the x or y dimentions since the print head would be stationary in one direction.
Hope that makes sense but in my head this solution is way more practical even if you needed to do a calibration after each setup.
Have you seen the Positron printer? Fits in a filament box when it’s folded up, and takes just a few minutes to assemble. It’s a very cool design.
Just looked it up. Is it shipping or just an idea? Seems clever tho!
It’s a kit like the Vorons and not a pre built machine, but it’s finished and is shipping.
Somehow this website just goes to https://example.com/ ?
Apologies, should be fixed now
Not to mention the vibration of the head caused from a single mount point. The engineerinh to keep anything close to the 0.2mm resolution common on non mobile printers. Will be expensive.
If you add position sensors to the servos you shouldn’t need much calibration after the first go, no?
Seems like a genuinely horrible idea
Yup. Even assuming this would actually work as advertised, who would actually buy this over a regular printer?
Like, how often do you run into a situation where you need something 3D-printed while on the go, but simultaneously have enough free time to set this thing up in a protected area and wait a long time for the print to finish? Not to mention that you just happen to have brought with you the proper filament as well.
Furthermore, this thing…:
- … doesn’t look like it holds regular spools.
- … looks like a repairability nightmare.
- … would surely be sold at a premium while being worse at everything except portability.
All else being equal, having a 3d printer I can fold up and put away sounds pretty nice to me. I use mine once or twice a month and I could use that space for other things. Of course, all else is unlikely to be equal.
That just looks like it’s going to wobble like all hell, unless it’s ridiculously robust like a manufacturing robot arm.
Nah, but I would expect its price to be in the low 5 figures, maybe 6 figures.
This feels like the right place to link to the Kralyn Positron project which is a compact, open source portable 3D printer.
https://github.com/KRALYN/PositronV3
I started buying parts to make one but haven’t taken the time to get any of the machined parts manufactured yet.
This looks very cool, but I feel like its failure modes would be brutal. I’ve seen some failed prints turn into hairy balls of melted hate, but upside down…I feel like its begging to have a print adhesion failure just break everything.
I imagine there would be a lot of vibration on that arm.
