The 3D Printers Of CES

January 10, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 30 Comments

CES is over, and now we can take a step back, distance ourselves from the trade show booths, and figure out where 3D printing will be going over the next year.

The Hype Cycle is a great way to explain trends in fads and technological advances. VR and autonomous cars are very early on the Hype Cycle right now. Smartphones are on the plateau of productivity. 3D printing is head-down in the trough of disillusionment.

For this year’s CES, 3D printing is not even a product category. In fact, the official documentation I found at Prusa’s booth listed their company in the ‘Assistive Technologies’ category. These are dark days for the public perception of 3D printing. The source of this perception can be brilliantly presented in a pair of graphs:

The perception of 3D printing has been tied inexorably to Makerbot. Makerbot presented the only 3D printer on The Colbert Report. Only Makerbot had their 3D printing storefronts featured on CNN. It’s been like this for half a decade, and hopefully things will get better.

This doesn’t mean 3D printing isn’t improving. In fact, it’s the best it’s ever been. CES had the most innovative printers I’ve seen in years. I caught a glimpse of this year’s top-selling printer (and it launches in April). Resin machines are going to be very popular soon. What did CES have to offer? Check it out below.

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CES2017: Lulzbot Has The Best Names For Stuff

January 8, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 16 Comments

Lulzbot is the poster child of the RepRap project. Everything they do is big-O Open. At CES, Lulzbot launched the MOARstruder, a tool head with a 1.2mm nozzle diameter. That pushes a lot of plastic out, allowing for faster print times. This is the same nozzle diameter as the largest E3D Volcano, and from the big prints sitting around the booth, the results are similar: you get faster prints at larger layer heights, and the layer lines become a design feature.

Also announced by Lulzbot this week is the release of Cura 2 (Lulzbot edition), a partnership with the Blender Institute to develop a streamlined version of the best Free 3D modeling software available, and a collaboration with Monkeyprint to develop Free Software for resin-based 3D printing.

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CES2017: Really Fast 3D Printing For Large Builds

January 8, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 44 Comments

About a year ago, Autodesk showed off one of the most innovative filament printers in recent memory. Project Escher is your basic Cartesian filament printer, but with a twist: it has five heads. These print heads work together to build large objects very quickly.

Autodesk open sourced the design of the Escher, and now it’s made it into commercial production thanks to Titan Robotics. The Cronus, which uses the same software as Project Escher, is big! Each of these gantries is driven by closed-loop servo motors and fancy ball screws, producing a total build volume of 77″x30″x20″. This open air version is printing in PLA. If you want to use it with materials where ambient temperature is an issue there is an option for an enclosed build environment.

This printer will be available for purchase starting February but no word yet on cost. They advertise the build volume as customizable so we expect the same of the price.

CES2017: Dissolvable Support Material

January 7, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 20 Comments

Over the last year, it seems the next big thing in 3D printing is dual and multi-extrusion. This gets you multi-colored objects, but if you have the right filament, it also allows you to print objects that would otherwise be impossible to print. This week, Airwolf 3D announced their HydroFill water soluble support material. They had a few sample prints and a fish tank, and yes this stuff does dissolve in water quickly.

There were a few problems with dissolvable support material in the past. PVA is water soluble, but it doesn’t print well. HIPS can be dissolved in limonene, but the resulting goo is toxic. Airwolf’s HydroFill beats both of these filaments, and the prints compare well to what E3D showed off with their Scaffold filament recently.

Check out my video below where [Jack Licorish] goes over the characteristics of HydroFill.

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CES2017: Monoprice Unveils Expanded Line Of 3D Printers

January 7, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 40 Comments

At CES last year, Monoprice introduced a $200 3D printer. Initial expectations of this printer were middling. My curiosity got the best of me, and last summer I picked up one of these printers for a review. The Monoprice MP Select Mini is actually phenomenal, and not just ‘phenomenal for the price’. This machine showed the world how good one of the cheapest printers can be. The future is looking awesome.

You might think Monoprice wouldn’t be able to top the success of this great little machine. You would be wrong. This week, Monoprice announced a bevy of new and upgraded printers. Some are resin. Some are huge. One will sell for $150 USD.

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CES2017: Really, Really Big SLA Printing

January 7, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 13 Comments

Last year at CES, UniZ introduced the Slash, a desktop resin printer. It’s fast, it’s capable, and it’s shipping now, but there was something else in the UniZ booth that had a much bigger wow factor.

The UniZ zSLTV is a gigantic box, a little more than one meter wide, and a little less than one meter tall and deep. Open the lid, and you see a gigantic resin printer turned on its side. The idea here is to fill a gigantic tank with resin, (the build volume is 521 x 293 x 600 mm) and use it as a fairly standard UV LED / LCD resin printer. The only real difference between this machine and any other resin printer is that the part is always submerged in resin.

It’s something we’ve never seen before, and it will be available ‘soon’. The price for this huge machine is in the ballpark of $10,000.

Where There’s Smoke, There’s A Knockoff 3D Printer

January 5, 2017 by Lewin Day 46 Comments

These days, it’s possible to buy clones of popular 3D printers from China for satisfyingly low prices. As always, you get what you pay for, and while usable, often they require some modification to reach their full potential. [g3ggo] recently laid down €270 for a clone of the Prusa i3 by Geeetech, knowing it would require some modifications for safety and performance.

First on the bill was a wobbly Z-axis, which was dealt with by printing some new parts designed to fix this issue which have already been developed by the community. Forums are your friend here – often an enterprising user will have already developed fixes for the most common issues, and if they haven’t, you can always step up to be the hero yourself. There was a darker problem lurking inside, though.

[g3ggo] began to wonder why the MOSFETs for the hot end were running so hot. It turned out to be an issue of gate drive – the FETs were only being driven with 5V, which for the given part, wasn’t enough to reach its lowest R_DS(on) and thus was causing the overheating issue. It gets worse, though – the heatsinks on the MOSFETs were bolted on directly without insulation, and sitting fractions of a millimeter above traces on the PCB. Unfortunately, with a small scratch to the soldermask, this caused a short circuit, destroying the hot end and MOSFETs and narrowly avoiding a fire. This is why you never leave 3D printers unattended.

The fix? Replacing the MOSFETs with a part that could deal with a 5V gate drive was the first step, followed by using insulating pads & glue to stop the heatsinks contacting the PCB. Now with the cooler running MOSFETs, there’s less chance of fire, and the mainboard’s cooling fan isn’t even required anymore. Overall, for a small investment in time and parts, [g3ggo] now has a useful 3D printer and learned something along the way. Solid effort!