2 ms·

I saw this 2 years ago. Long story short, you need a fiber laser and a driving circuit to do this. Sure it's 10x the speed, but it's almost 100x the price. A

I saw this 2 years ago. Long story short, you need a fiber laser and a driving circuit to do this. Sure it's 10x the speed, but it's almost 100x the price. A Creality Ender 3 is around $200. This printer, with fiber laser, is around $15-20k. And the Ender 3 can't make moves that fast. The Atmega chip is just a 16 MHz chip. You can't generate the steps required even using Klipper firmware (which is a bitbanging firmware that uses your desktop CPU as motion planner). You could generate the steps using one of the ARM based boards, but you'd double your BOM - Smoothieboard and Duet both would be around the $150-$200 but can generate the required steps. The BeagleBone Black can generate upwards of 1M steps/sec, which is on the high end of pro-sumer. It's awesome, but it's a pie-in-the-sky that most of us would never even have the source to buy, let alone approach.

ravedave5 8y ago
Don't forget all 3d printers were 15k not that long ago.
- crankylinuxuser 8y ago
  Unfortunately, a large portion of that was due to patent interference from Stratasys. https://hackaday.com/2013/09/11/3d-printering-key-patents/ https://hackaday.com/2013/09/11/3d-printering-key-patents/ 2009 was when the patent expired. And that's when RepRap picked up rather quickly. The patent was handled since 1989 reminded me the same way the Wrights brought avionics to its knees in the US until the US busted the patent for WWI. To make a 3d printer, all you need is a slow controller for handing gcode, 4 stepper controllers, 4 stepper motors, thermistors, heated bed, and heated tip. Worst case, before being able to buy calibrated filament, you could use weed whacker line, and put in its equivalent diameter However, one trend I see, is that optics does not lower in price. Sure, lasers have gotten cheaper. But when you talk about 200 laser diodes at 5w each and using a complicated assortment of lenses and glass fiber optics, that stuff's $$$$$. The costs can come down from $50k to $20k, but it's still way out of the reach of 'buy on ebay or amazon'.
johnday 8y ago
Exactly. Just buy 100 Ender3s for somewhere around £15,000 and run them in parallel.

ravedave5 8y ago

Don't forget all 3d printers were 15k not that long ago.

crankylinuxuser 8y ago
Unfortunately, a large portion of that was due to patent interference from Stratasys. https://hackaday.com/2013/09/11/3d-printering-key-patents/ https://hackaday.com/2013/09/11/3d-printering-key-patents/ 2009 was when the patent expired. And that's when RepRap picked up rather quickly. The patent was handled since 1989 reminded me the same way the Wrights brought avionics to its knees in the US until the US busted the patent for WWI. To make a 3d printer, all you need is a slow controller for handing gcode, 4 stepper controllers, 4 stepper motors, thermistors, heated bed, and heated tip. Worst case, before being able to buy calibrated filament, you could use weed whacker line, and put in its equivalent diameter However, one trend I see, is that optics does not lower in price. Sure, lasers have gotten cheaper. But when you talk about 200 laser diodes at 5w each and using a complicated assortment of lenses and glass fiber optics, that stuff's $$$$$. The costs can come down from $50k to $20k, but it's still way out of the reach of 'buy on ebay or amazon'.

johnday 8y ago

Exactly. Just buy 100 Ender3s for somewhere around £15,000 and run them in parallel.