Hi, I'm reaching out to Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton. I recently read your latest update post on the Crowd Supply campaign for the EOMA68, titled: "Existential 3D Printing Moments".
You mentioned that you needed help and/or advice on 3d printing for manufacturing.
I have a lot of very specific experience here. I ran an open source project that required us to set up a 3D printer farm for manufacturing our first run of machines. I've lived in China while trying to get our project ready for mass manufacture. I have some advice for you, if you're willing to listen.
I'd prefer to chat via video or audio, as there's so much to cover, I'd get carpal tunnel typing it all out. I'd be OK with summarizing the meeting minutes here afterwards, as to not exclude anyone else. I can meet pretty much any time regardless of time zone.
Let me know either way. I've been following this project for quite a while (since the Slashdot AMA years ago), and I really want you guys to succeed. I missed the crowd funding round, but would still buy a few after they're fulfilled.
Send me a direct email if you're interested in chatting.
njansen1 at gmail dot com
On Thu, May 18, 2017 at 5:12 PM, Neil Jansen njansen1@gmail.com wrote:
Hi, I'm reaching out to Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton. I recently read your latest update post on the Crowd Supply campaign for the EOMA68, titled: "Existential 3D Printing Moments".
awesome, i'll email you privately. letting people know what's happening is an important part of this project so a summary afterwards would be great. i know the RSI thing well...
l.
On Thu, May 18, 2017 at 12:31 PM, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton < lkcl@lkcl.net> wrote:
awesome, i'll email you privately. letting people know what's happening is an important part of this project so a summary afterwards would be great. i know the RSI thing well...
Notes / minutes from today's voice call are below.
lkcl recently had concerns on the CrowdSupply campaign update page, on how to effectively scale up manufacturing a large amount of parts using a small farm of 3D printers. His concerns were over which type of 3D printer to use, whether to "redesign" a printer vs. just buying them. Which types of filament to trust vs what can't be trusted. Also over where the Western-based 3D printing open source ecosystem is and where it's heading compared to the Asian companies that have popped up. I've ran a 3D printer farm and printed over 100kg of filament for weeks and weeks on end, while trying to fulfill our orders. Our project was a 3D printable SMT pick and place machine that was completely open source. After that I went to China to try and get it designed for manufacturing, so this is an area that I've got some experience in. I'm not really trying to step on any toes, this is all FYI, hopefully it's useful to you.
* I recommended the Lulzbot Taz as a great example of a modern open source hardware company that makes an excellent product that is up to the job of manufacturing at the scale that your require. Aleph Objects literally does this, a significant chunk of their machines are 3D printed on their own machines. That, IMO, is what makes them perfect for this. They're not making a crappy machine and selling it. They're eating their own dogfood, and they're fixing their mistakes. They've been doing that now for YEARS. So it's a very refined design, and there's a reason that they're the so popular. They have auto bed levelling, automated nozzle cleaning, an all metal hotend, geared extruder, heated bed, the list goes on .. it's production ready. The main problem here is their retail cost. But they're open source, and can be built from scratch, they even provide the BOM.
* lkcl mentioned that he's actually been in touch with Aleph Objects who have offered to let him use their bot farm ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_jUObUGLTA) to manufacture the parts.
* I mentioned that he should take them up on the offer immediately. Deals like that don't just fall into your lap that often (if ever). That's fantastic to even get offered a deal like that.
* lkcl says they run 0.5mm nozzles and he needs machines with 0.4mm nozzles, because that's how he designed the parts. I counter that he should just have them print a full set of laptop production parts to see what works and what doesn't. The risk is low to try, and very likely, a bunch of parts will print just fine. Even if a few don't print well, those can be done on a separate machine and at least the bulk of it got done on the Taz farm.
* I mention that 0.5mm is better anyway for production. The rule is to print with as large as a nozzle as you can get away with .. no exceptions. Every part should be optimized for this, from design onward. He mentioned that his design took quite a while to do, but I would say that you've learned an important lesson by this. Don't spend so much time designing before you figure out how to produce it. For reasons like this. I speak from experience here. It's costly to make this mistake.
* Assuming the printed Aleph Objects parts don't come back OK due to nozzle size issues, I would recommend asking Aleph Objects very nicely if they could put 0.4mm nozzles on their machines (if not for free, then what would it take them money-wise to swap the nozzles out for a short period?) Being that their printer farm is sectioned into old machines and new machines, they're very likely running their daily stuff on the new machines, and they've got some older slightly-more-finicky machines sitting in the corner that would still print very accurately, that they're probably not using. It would be cheaper to pay them to change the nozzles out than it would be for you to eat the NRE of making new machines (not to mention your lost time to design and manufacture them). This is the smart choice.
* lkcl commented that the Taz design "wasn't rigid enough", to which I called bullshit. It's actually extremely rigid, I've used it, I have experience with it directly, and I've seen what kind of prints it makes. It makes fantastic prints, and it shouldn't be discounted just because it doesn't look like a MendelMax. I urge you to back up your assumption with actual data before making accusations or assumptions. Actual data, in this case, is seeing how well those parts print on these machines. That's the litmus test.
* I pleaded with him to not "redesign" yet another 3D printer as was proposed in the update post. That's a waste of time, because that's literally saying that there is not a single usable design out of THOUSANDS of pre-existing 3D reprap designs out there. Use something that already exists, that's the best business decision and it's what's best for your customers. Wanting to re-engineer something because it's not perfect is a classic sign of engineer-brain, which gets the best of us. I get the urge from time to time, but it is rarely the correct decision in times like these.
* On the subjects of hotends, I recommended to stick to the tried and true, I've had great experience with the Lulzbot v2 hexagon hotend, and the J-Head. I've had horrible experience with the Makerbot hotends (old and new), and have had mediocre experience with the E3D -- it's finicky.
* On the subject of heated beds, I've had the most luck with Aquanet hair spray on glass, heated to ~60-70C. It allows me to swap the glass plates out and minimize the time spent between runs. This pays off in a production scenario. I had several dozen glass plates cut by a local glass company, for under $4.00 USD each. I used regular old glass, no borosilicate or anything. Never had a problem, not a single one broke. We'd take them out and throw the whole thing in the freezer if we were in a hurry, they literally fall off the glass with no warping or anything. Heated beds are a must for production. Although there are different styles / techniques for bed adhesion, I say go for what you've used, what works. Hair spray works for me, others do other stuff .. to each their own.
* On the subject of bowden vs non bowden setups. I find that the speed is limited by the extruder and hotend's ability to deliver melted plastic, to the point where reducing the mass on the head doesn't matter that much. Bowden setups in my experience complicate matters, and even when retract settings have been tweaked, it's still hit or miss. lkcl mentioned that he recommended some sort of worm drive extruder that had a remote mounted stepper or something like that. As long as the extruder gear is mounted near the hotend, that's all that I think really matters. That's what prints the best.
* On the subject of controllers (not mentioned on the call), the cheap Arduino 2560's and RAMPS 1.4 with Marlin are just fine for production use. Really, any controller is fine as long as it's a Cartesian machine. The new ones with ARM Cortex and fancy drivers are nice, but not required. I did it without the fancy stuff just fine.
* On the subject of designs / frames, building from scratch isn't that difficult, this is the option that I took with our 3D printer farm. I recommended to take a puddle jumper flight to Shenzhen, go to the markets, buy extrusion, screws by the bag, all that, and use Taobao for what's not at the market. It can be done, and literally everything on the BOM can be delivered to your door in less than a few days, tops. That's one thing Asia's great for. Cheap, fast, and good enough when it comes to RepRaps. Our 3d printer farm costed less than $200 USD per machine, built from scratch. They worked admirably.
* On the subject of Chinese clone 3d printers. The Monoprice machine is a rebranded WanHao Duplicator i3. Wanhao is a huge company in China, they're making a TON of these things, mainly intended for the Chinese and Asian markets. Companies like Monoprice and others are approaching them to setup distribution in Western countries. They're actually not that bad! I'm not sure that they could be used for production, but they're better than you'd give them credit for, and they're cheap. Very cheap. Not as good as a Lulzbut Taz or an Ultimaker by any means. But good enough that I'd buy one just to have around.
* On the subject of whether or not Western 3D printer OSS companies are dying or not. The ones that are innovating are doing just fine. Others, like RepRapPro, are dying because they're not innovating. Adrian Bowyer, the founder of the RepRap project and was the owner / founder of RepRapPro, is really solely responsible for his company going out of business. While all of the innovation was happening in the RepRap scene, he sort of turned his nose at it and continued to sell machines with outdated technology. His extruders were crap compared to what's been developed by E3D, Brian Reifsnyder, Aleph Objects, and others. For a guy that literally coined the idea of evolution and self replication of machines, it's odd that he wouldn't be more perceptive to integrating other's ideas into his products. He only has himself to blame. Other companies like Prusa Research, Aleph Objects, and SeeMeCNC are doing just fine, business is booming. While the Chinese machines are selling, there's still a lot of activity and innovation happening right here where it all started. The Chinese aren't really seen as 'trusted' in the Western markets ... What's crazy is, the most trusted brand in 3d printing right now isn't Makerbot or some other closed source company. It's an open source Libre company. That's insane but true.
* On the subject of filaments. lkcl's quote on the update post was: "And no, using a network-3D-printing house is not okay, because the quality of the PLA from such places simply cannot be trusted. It’s Faberdashery’s PLA or nothing. I’ve shared some of the nightmare horror stories of low-quality PLA with people on the list already." So my experience is as follows. I literally ran 100+ kilograms of filament for our production orders. You're saying "Faberdashery or nothing", but I didn't use them and my prints were just fine. Faberdashery's filament are not magical. There's nothing that separates them from other filament manufacturers, other than their Pantone color accuracy. Other than that, it's pretty run-of-the-mill virgin PLA that's been run on a decent extrusion machine. The first step to good filament is to start with virgin PLA. Good PLA will come with a material safety data sheet and will come from known sources, and will be "virgin" aka not recycled / re-used. Other than that, it all boils down to which extrusion machine they're using, and how well they run it. Good extrusion machines will have several thickness sensors and will stop if anything bad happens. A well run setup will be able to do dozens or hundreds of KG's of plastic before those thickness sensors go off. A good modern roll won't have any weird thickness inconsistencies, if it's made on a good machine with a good operator. There are now companies in China making decent filament, although I can't name any names. I could look this info up but it may be a moot point depending on how the Aleph Objects collaboration works out. Anyway the point is that there are plenty of other companies besides Faberdashery that make great filament. And, I'd bet, ALL of them would be cheaper. HOWEVER, this is a MAJOR de-risking point for your whole operation. So use what's worked for you, if it's only a few thousand and that's the difference between your operation running smoothly, and grinding to a halt, then yea, use what you're comfortable with.
I also expressed my interest in the EOMA68 standard and how it may fit in to several of my ongoing projects. Mainly an open source laptop with a mechanical keyboard and 20+ hour battery life, and a portable digital radio system intended mainly for amateur / ARRL type stuff, but could also be used by security researchers or anyone else wanting a powerful yet portable SDR.
I'll hopefully be doing a more formal introduction on the mailing list soon, to keep the topics separate.
That's about it.
Thanks,
Neil
On Fri, May 19, 2017 at 12:35 AM, Neil Jansen njansen1@gmail.com wrote:
Notes / minutes from today's voice call are below.
neil, really really appreciated here, this is amazingly comprehensive, how the heck did you remember all that we said? :)
btw apologise i should have said, the conversation with aleph objects was private and not to be announced, they haven't given permission to do that, as they are *considering* and we are *assessing* - privately - the feasibility.
a couple of things i forgot to mention, one is to emphasise the "bang-per-buck" part. i did this kind of thing back in... 2003 i believe it was, where i was designing an ultra-grade encryption symmetric key algorithm. key sizes of 16384 bits, block sizes of 32768. i used csrc.nist.gov's STS (statistical test suite) to assess it, but it was *literally* taking days to run tests of 1000 groups of 100,000 bits so i decided to buy some computers plural.
now, i set myself a budget of GBP 1,000 and started looking at what i could get. i found a motherboard for GBP 11, a processor for 25 that was a 1ghz Athlon, 256mb RAM for 25 or something, case for GBP 15, no hard drive, PXE-boot them all, bottom line it all came to GBP 125, so i could buy 8 of them.
now, when i talked to a supplier he said, "um, why such slow machines?? why don't you get these 2ghz Athons" and i asked "ok, how much are they?" and he said "200 GBP each processor and you have to have a GBP 75 motherboard" so i said, "ok so i'd only be able to get 3 of those, which gives me a total of 6000 Mhz processing speed. i can make that *8000* Mhz by using the 1ghz processor, for the same money. and that's when the lightbulb went on in the supplier's head.
this kind of design assessment trick i've only ever heard being used by people who make beowulf clusters, the word "cluster" being the key word.
unfortunately, most 3d printers are simply not designed in the west around "clustering". they just aren't designed *and marketed* as "maximising the print output for the money". in china that's probably a totally different matter, so i'll look up the wanhao duplicator later (lead appreciated, neil).
the numbers i did *after* i wrote the update, so haven't published them. here's some of them i worked out, based on a budget of say $USD 2500.
* mendel90 - i've had mine running at 200mm/sec (yes, really, 200mm/sec *print* speed and a 250mm/sec travel speed).
cost is around $500 so 2500 / 500 = 5. 5 x 200mm/sec = 1000 mm/sec
* lulzbot taz 6 - we'll find out the quality on this soon enough but let's assume they run them at 50mm/sec
cost, if sourcing parts instead of buying retail (which is $1250) might be as low as $700, so 2500 / 700 = 3.5 call it 3. 3 x 50 = 150mm/sec. even if you pushed it to 200mm/sec it's still only 3 x 200 - 600 mm/sec
* cheap and cheerful taobao-sourced china clone. would not wish to run it faster than 40-50mm/sec.
cost, maybe $200. 2500 / 200 = 12. 12 x 50 = still only 600 mm / sec!
so there's this strange trade-off between going too cheap so that the print quality is adversely affected by the low quality of the components, and going so expensive that you simply can't multiply them up for the budget.
what i am looking at therefore is parts which will get me sustainable speeds that the MendelFlex can reach, but without the pricetag of an Ultimaker-2, MendelFlex or Lulzbot Taz 6. here's a video of mutley3d running a MendelFlex at 350mm/s printing and 400mm/s travel:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pO4qp_m5Y-E
the sound is frickin hilarious :)
now, neil, this is the kind of speed at which an arduino 2560 *cannot cope*, and, also, where the design flaws inherent in RAMPS - using prototyping Evaluation Boards (polulu-style drivers) - start to show up.
david crocket (dc42) has specifically designed the duet series so that you can consider exceeding PWM rates of 150 khz, which is what you need if you want to sustain 500mm/sec for example (and do not want problems to occur at speeds well below that).
also i forgot to mention that i've been using the E3Dv6 "volcano" which, when you use a 0.5 to 0.8mm nozzle can easily do flow rates of something mad like.... 200c^3/min - particularly when combined with the huge 40:1 gearing of the flex3drive which can *accurately* deliver the kinds of torque needed. the volcano basically turns the heat chamber round, so that the heat area is 20mm long instead of the usual 10mm.
none of this stuff i knew about, the 18 months before i began designing the laptop's parts. oh well.
settings have been tweaked, it's still hit or miss. lkcl mentioned that he recommended some sort of worm drive extruder that had a remote mounted stepper or something like that. As long as the extruder gear is mounted near the hotend,
it is. the automotive-grade flexible driveshaft is 750mm long and would snap (or twist) if used "direct-drive" style. hence the reason for the 40:1 wormdgear. the end result: WAY better than the COMBINED best characteristics of *both* bowden *and* direct-drive extruding.
- On the subject of controllers (not mentioned on the call), the cheap
Arduino 2560's and RAMPS 1.4 with Marlin are just fine for production use. Really, any controller is fine as long as it's a Cartesian machine. The new ones with ARM Cortex and fancy drivers are nice, but not required. I did it without the fancy stuff just fine.
... but not at 200 to 350mm/sec print speeds :)
- On the subject of designs / frames, building from scratch isn't that
difficult, this is the option that I took with our 3D printer farm. I recommended to take a puddle jumper flight to Shenzhen, go to the markets, buy extrusion, screws by the bag, all that, and use Taobao for what's not at the market. It can be done, and literally everything on the BOM can be delivered to your door in less than a few days, tops. That's one thing Asia's great for. Cheap, fast, and good enough when it comes to RepRaps. Our 3d printer farm costed less than $200 USD per machine, built from scratch. They worked admirably.
that's one of the reasons i'm here. to be able to get parts quickly, without tariffs, and at lower cost.
- On the subject of Chinese clone 3d printers. The Monoprice machine is a
rebranded WanHao Duplicator i3. Wanhao is a huge company in China, they're making a TON of these things, mainly intended for the Chinese and Asian markets. Companies like Monoprice and others are approaching them to setup distribution in Western countries. They're actually not that bad! I'm not sure that they could be used for production, but they're better than you'd give them credit for, and they're cheap. Very cheap. Not as good as a Lulzbut Taz or an Ultimaker by any means. But good enough that I'd buy one just to have around.
i took a quick look: the vertical x-rod arrangement is one i know can cause "head bounce" during higher-speed operation, and any "play" in the bearings are amplified.... i explain it here: http://reprap.org/wiki/Mechanical_Rigidity#Vertical_vs_Horizontal_Carriage_M...
- On the subject of whether or not Western 3D printer OSS companies are
dying or not. The ones that are innovating are doing just fine. Others, like RepRapPro, are dying because they're not innovating. Adrian Bowyer, the founder of the RepRap project and was the owner / founder of RepRapPro, is really solely responsible for his company going out of business. While all of the innovation was happening in the RepRap scene, he sort of turned his nose at it and continued to sell machines with outdated technology.
.... oooops....
i knew i could feel that something wasn't quite right on the reprap forum, i just didn't know exactly what. appreciate the heads-up very much.
as 'trusted' in the Western markets ... What's crazy is, the most trusted brand in 3d printing right now isn't Makerbot or some other closed source company. It's an open source Libre company. That's insane but true.
it's no surprise. makerbot was secretly patenting public domain discussions from forums and pissed *everybody* off. the engineers know it, and it's not that uncommon for employees to subconsciously "self-sabotage".
but also this stuff is *really hard*. working in isolation just doesn't cut it, and that's why libre collaboration is pissing all over proprietary companies.
just fine. Faberdashery's filament are not magical. There's nothing that separates them from other filament manufacturers, other than their Pantone color accuracy.
i loove their colours :)
Other than that, it's pretty run-of-the-mill virgin PLA that's been run on a decent extrusion machine. The first step to good filament is to start with virgin PLA.
i'm really really happy to hear of (and then test) known filaments that are of the same quality... particularly if they have the same kinds of eye-popping colours.
I also expressed my interest in the EOMA68 standard and how it may fit in to several of my ongoing projects. Mainly an open source laptop with a mechanical keyboard and 20+ hour battery life, and a portable digital radio system intended mainly for amateur / ARRL type stuff, but could also be used by security researchers or anyone else wanting a powerful yet portable SDR.
love it. well let's get you on the list for a pre-production prototype ok?
welcome to the list neil. really good talking with you.
l.
On Thu, May 18, 2017 at 8:42 PM, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton lkcl@lkcl.net wrote:
btw apologise i should have said, the conversation with aleph objects was private and not to be announced, they haven't given permission to do that, as they are *considering* and we are *assessing* - privately
- the feasibility.
My apologies, the phone was breaking up a bit during the first bit of all that. Feel free to delete my reply or any others that reference it. This is a pretty low-key mailing list so either way I don't think much will come of it. Mostly a miscommunication on my part, for which I apologize.
a couple of things i forgot to mention, one is to emphasise the "bang-per-buck" part. [...] this kind of design assessment trick i've only ever heard being used by people who make beowulf clusters, the word "cluster" being the key word.
Those are fun problems to solve. You're right that there are a lot of variables, and many different approaches. And if you've got a few important criteria like cost or time, it's easy enough to weed out the bad ones.
Speaking of Beowulf clusters .. Not to go too far off topic, but has anyone given any thought to a Beowulf cluster of EOMA68's? I only ask because if Intel and AMD are including so much proprietary crap between you and the processor, it's only a matter of time before other alternatives become important. The way I see it, the current Allwinner based EOMA68's are great for doing what a tablet or netbook can do, but it's not going to replace my workstation with 16GB of RAM (which I run out of probably weekly before needing to restart, but that's another story .. Windows and Chrome, I have no one to blame but myself there). Anyway, assuming that the Linux kernel could scale to maybe 8-16 of these little cores, and being that they're all upgradeable, it actually seems like it could become a neat alternative for workstation usage. I don't even see where cost would be that prohibitive, as workstations actually get pretty expensive often surpassing $1000 USD. Are there any hard realities that would prevent the EOMA68 from working in this fashion? Any bandwidth issues or technical limitations?
unfortunately, most 3d printers are simply not designed in the west around "clustering". they just aren't designed *and marketed* as "maximising the print output for the money".
They're designed and marketed to be a semi-hackable appliance that sits on the corner of your bench or in an office environment. They're certainly not intended to be clustered.
Funny story though, our open source SMT pick and place was intended to do 3D printing, and we were intending for them to be clustered. Too complicated for our small team, but we were laying the ground work down regardless. Our team was so small that we had to throw out 3D printing altogether and concentrate on the minimum viable product, which was SMT pick and place, solder paste dispense, and reflow. Even that kicked our ass. Our mentors wanted us to put a conveyor belt on it but we just couldn't do it in the time allotted. Robotics is hard with a small team, regardless of how small or simple the machine is.
in china that's probably a totally different matter, so i'll look up the wanhao duplicator later (lead appreciated, neil).
They run printer farms of Wanhao Duplicators in China, I've seen them.
How do they do it?
Labor is cheap. Machines are cheap. They make it work. I think that's all I need to say :)
- mendel90 - i've had mine running at 200mm/sec (yes, really,
200mm/sec *print* speed and a 250mm/sec travel speed).
I should have covered print speed in my last email. You would be surprised at how slowly we printed during our production run. We ran them real nice and slow, less than 100 mm/sec. Going back to bang-for-buck, this was how we approached the problem. Lots of slow-ish machines, rather than a few very expensive fast machines. It worked out for us.
Here are a few pics of our farm in the early stages. Don't laugh; they worked well. I'll see if I can dig up some more pictures later.
* http://i.imgur.com/56F2nYP.png * http://i.imgur.com/8cXbl72.png
cost is around $500 so 2500 / 500 = 5. 5 x 200mm/sec = 1000 mm/sec
By that logic, our machines were comparable to that. Slower, cheaper, but the math works out. And if I built them today (and in China/Taiwan), they'd be cheaper and I could probably eek some more out of them. Getting bigger beds on them isn't impossible either .. we had an identical one at our makerspace but with a 200mm x 400mm bed with longer rods. Basically a double-MK2B bed.
what i am looking at therefore is parts which will get me sustainable speeds that the MendelFlex can reach, but without the pricetag of an Ultimaker-2, MendelFlex or Lulzbot Taz 6.
I still propose that you could do cheaper / slower machines and still hit your speed requirement overall. But if I go along with your thinking, why can't you just build a bunch of MendelMax / MendelFlex / whatever-you-call-them over there in Asia? 20mm x 20mm Extrusion like that is RIDICULOUSLY cheap. If you DIY over there period, you'll hopefully find that the extrusion and hardware will be pleasantly cheap.
now, neil, this is the kind of speed at which an arduino 2560 *cannot cope*, and, also, where the design flaws inherent in RAMPS - using prototyping Evaluation Boards (polulu-style drivers) - start to show up.
Yea but Arduino 2560's and RAMPS boards are MUCH cheaper than anything with an ARM Cortex. That was kinda what I was getting at. There's a brick wall that you hit when you want to go that fast. You'll need a better motion control system, more rigidity, better everything really. All of that adds up, especially when you're building so many of them. What's great about the RAMPS boards, the Arduino clones, and all that, is that they're incredibly cheap. You could probably buy a dozen for the price of a single "bleeding edge" type ARM Cortex motion controller. What I'm arguing is that you shouldn't discount slow if it's cheap. You'll have less jams, less filament issues in general, because you're not pushing the hotend and extruder as hard. If something breaks, well shit, replace it and don't sweat it.
As a car analogy, think of a Formula 1 car running in a Le Mans type race. It would probably do OK for the first few laps, but the risk of it breaking down over 24 hours is much higher. Slow and steady and reliable wins here. Le Mans cars aren't pushed into the red like an F1 car is. They're cheaper too. A team can race a fleet of Le Mans cars for the price of F1 cars. If one makes to the end, they still win. If that one F1 car breaks down or crashes, they win nothing. Not a perfect analogy, but you get the idea hopefully.
it's no surprise. makerbot was secretly patenting public domain discussions from forums and pissed *everybody* off. the engineers know it, and it's not that uncommon for employees to subconsciously "self-sabotage".
One of our mentors was an early Makerbot employee that left. Man, the stories from that place. I'm glad that it's going tits up.
i loove their colours :)
Me too, however I do wish that they (or someone else) would make a decent Olive Drab Green.
i'm really really happy to hear of (and then test) known filaments that are of the same quality... particularly if they have the same kinds of eye-popping colours.
Our production runs used PushPlastic exclusively: https://www.pushplastic.com/ USA made, virgin plastic, constant thickness filament, yada yada .. They've got more experience than most and they're finally getting decent non-primary colors. Not faberdashery level or anything .. but enough to keep me happy. There are many others too. That was just who we happened to use (well, who I happen to use to this day).
welcome to the list neil. really good talking with you.
Likewise.
--- crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68
On Fri, May 19, 2017 at 3:02 AM, Neil Jansen njansen1@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, May 18, 2017 at 8:42 PM, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton lkcl@lkcl.net wrote:
btw apologise i should have said, the conversation with aleph objects was private and not to be announced, they haven't given permission to do that, as they are *considering* and we are *assessing* - privately
- the feasibility.
My apologies, the phone was breaking up a bit during the first bit of all that. Feel free to delete my reply or any others that reference it. This is a pretty low-key mailing list so either way I don't think much will come of it. Mostly a miscommunication on my part, for which I apologize.
nono it was me, i just forgot to mention it.
a couple of things i forgot to mention, one is to emphasise the "bang-per-buck" part. [...] this kind of design assessment trick i've only ever heard being used by people who make beowulf clusters, the word "cluster" being the key word.
Those are fun problems to solve. You're right that there are a lot of variables, and many different approaches. And if you've got a few important criteria like cost or time, it's easy enough to weed out the bad ones.
yehyeh.
Speaking of Beowulf clusters .. Not to go too far off topic, but has anyone given any thought to a Beowulf cluster of EOMA68's?
lol yeeees :)
Are there any hard realities that would prevent the EOMA68 from working in this fashion? Any bandwidth issues or technical limitations?
size, power budget. in about 5-8 years it won't be an issue. EOMA200 is better suited to clustering. bigger PCB size and a much higher power budget.
- mendel90 - i've had mine running at 200mm/sec (yes, really,
200mm/sec *print* speed and a 250mm/sec travel speed).
I should have covered print speed in my last email. You would be surprised at how slowly we printed during our production run. We ran them real nice and slow, less than 100 mm/sec. Going back to bang-for-buck, this was how we approached the problem. Lots of slow-ish machines, rather than a few very expensive fast machines. It worked out for us.
Here are a few pics of our farm in the early stages. Don't laugh; they worked well. I'll see if I can dig up some more pictures later.
nice! hey that 2nd one looks pretty much the same as the anycubic i have here.
cost is around $500 so 2500 / 500 = 5. 5 x 200mm/sec = 1000 mm/sec
By that logic, our machines were comparable to that. Slower, cheaper, but the math works out.
yehyeh. if you have 1/2 the speed but 1/2 the cost.... it's the same end-result.
what i am looking at therefore is parts which will get me sustainable speeds that the MendelFlex can reach, but without the pricetag of an Ultimaker-2, MendelFlex or Lulzbot Taz 6.
I still propose that you could do cheaper / slower machines and still hit your speed requirement overall. But if I go along with your thinking, why can't you just build a bunch of MendelMax / MendelFlex / whatever-you-call-them over there in Asia?
that's what i'd like to consider. there are some specific areas where e.g. just an extra $5 on 24v electronics will allow you to then put an extra $5 onto 900steps/rev motors which then allows you to increase the speed by.... say... 20%, for a 2.5% increase in budget.
and now you can use a 24v heater you can spend another extra $5 on an E3Dv6 volcano clone, now you can get *another* 20% increase in speed for only a 2.5% increase in budget.
then you get a mutley3d flex3drive for $100 and because the hotend can now cope you can get a whopping *100%* increase in speed for a 50% increase in budget.
this is the kind of logic that i will be applying.
20mm x 20mm Extrusion like that is RIDICULOUSLY cheap. If you DIY over there period, you'll hopefully find that the extrusion and hardware will be pleasantly cheap.
yehyeh. i was considering optimising the design for minimising extrusion, and rigidising the frame with panels (like the ultimaker), but if it's $1.50 for a 350mm length why bother with minimising extrusion, just get some strips of lexan 50mm wide and strap them in a cross across the diagonals. i've got a little video showing how effective that is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qb-WjZY5qyI
now, neil, this is the kind of speed at which an arduino 2560 *cannot cope*, and, also, where the design flaws inherent in RAMPS - using prototyping Evaluation Boards (polulu-style drivers) - start to show up.
Yea but Arduino 2560's and RAMPS boards are MUCH cheaper than anything with an ARM Cortex.
it may surprise you to know that i'm a big fan of the melzi 2.0.... except they're 1.3A driver ICs and that's not going to be enough. i'm already getting regular extruder-skipping on the anycubic, and that's even at 50mm/sec.
i can't bring myself to use RAMPS. i just... can't. phil hands knows the story very well, he had one of the original sanguilinos (huxleys) just like you: the polulus are *prototyping* boards *specifically* described by the manufacturer as for *evaluation purposes only*. his printer used to stall out for a couple of seconds on one axis as the ICs overheated. he read the datasheet and found that there's a *ceramic insulator* on the *top* of the IC (meaning that a heatsink is pretty useless), and that the IC is designed for heat to be wicked away *through the PCB* via the exposed pad. and a frickin 18x18mm PCB just ain't gonna cut it.
i just... i can't bring myself to spend backers' money on stuff that i know is crud, neil.
sso i've been spending some time tracking down board designs and so on. Arduino Due: https://world.taobao.com/item/539393961702.htm RMB 75 so that's around $12.
and TRAMS uses TMC2100s, where their Reference Design has full PCB and schematics available: if i'm doing 10+ i can just send that to mike and he can make them. TRAMS is *real* basic. 4 steppers, 2 beefy power MOSFETs (extruder, printbed), 2 smaller ones for fans.
does it need ethernet? no... because you can get an ethernet "shield". does it need WIFI? no... because you can get a WIFI "shield". etc. etc. etc. etc.
That was kinda what I was getting at. There's a brick wall that you hit when you want to go that fast. You'll need a better motion control system, more rigidity, better everything really.
... yeh. i know. so that's why i wrote the mechanical rigidity page, so that i remind myself that i know what i'm doing, but also remember and record all of the things that i've seen on the reprap forum, all the tiny little bits of good advice, all documented here: http://reprap.org/wiki/Mechanical_Rigidity
All of that adds up, especially when you're building so many of them.
not necessarily (or, if it does it *has* to be assessed via the same logic above: what percentage speed improvement will be attained divided by what price increase. if number equals greater than e.g. 1.5 then go for it). i've specifically been thinking on and off for a *long* time about how to ensure - *at a low cost* - that a frame and the moving parts remain rigid, so that higher speeds don't shake things to bits.
so far it's 2020 extrusion cube with lexan "X"s on three sides and the base, and open "picture frame" (ultimaker2 style) lexan borders. this makes the extrusion absolutely rock-solid.
MGN9C rails so that the problems associated with rods go away. triple lead screws (i might consider quadruple) on the printbed, NO CANTILEVERING.
i am still debating whether to duplicate the ultimaker-2's XY arrangement or whether to go with a quadruple-pulley variant of the 1990s rikidenki plotter.
What's great about the RAMPS boards, the Arduino clones, and all that, is that they're incredibly cheap. You could probably buy a dozen for the price of a single "bleeding edge" type ARM Cortex motion controller.
... yeh which i wouldn't consider getting - not when the cost of e.g. duet WIFI is the same as an entire taobao cheap-and-cheerful 3D printer, much as i *really* love what dc42 is doing. so that's why i've tracked down TRAMS (which has 2A silent drivers and a single PCB) and a taobao due clone.
i.e. *for the money* TRAMS plus a taobao-due-clone gives that "bang-per-buck increase" that a "bleeding edge" ARM Cortex board simply cannot give. yes i could get a duet WIFI with the 2.5A TMC2660 drivers... but they're *$200* and that extra 20% increase in current for a 150% increase in price over a TRAMS+taobao-due-clone simply cannot be justified.
What I'm arguing is that you shouldn't discount slow if it's cheap. You'll have less jams, less filament issues in general, because you're not pushing the hotend and extruder as hard. If something breaks, well shit, replace it and don't sweat it.
:)
well, here's the thing: i actually quite like trying out things that other people aren't doing. but also taking calculated risks.
As a car analogy, think of a Formula 1 car running in a Le Mans type race. It would probably do OK for the first few laps, but the risk of it breaking down over 24 hours is much higher. Slow and steady and reliable wins here. Le Mans cars aren't pushed into the red like an F1 car is. They're cheaper too. A team can race a fleet of Le Mans cars for the price of F1 cars. If one makes to the end, they still win. If that one F1 car breaks down or crashes, they win nothing. Not a perfect analogy, but you get the idea hopefully.
yehyeh i do. the latest ford GT40 supercar uses a 6 cylinder mass-produced eco-boost engine. its increased fuel economy but also its reliability from huge amounts of testing meant that they pissed all over ferrari at le mans.
One of our mentors was an early Makerbot employee that left. Man, the stories from that place. I'm glad that it's going tits up.
i didn't know it was... but it doesn't surprise me. you isolate yourself from the innovation, it's gonna have consequences
i loove their colours :)
Me too, however I do wish that they (or someone else) would make a decent Olive Drab Green.
i was _so_ disappointed when they stopped the "village green" filament :)
i'm really really happy to hear of (and then test) known filaments that are of the same quality... particularly if they have the same kinds of eye-popping colours.
Our production runs used PushPlastic exclusively:
ahh that was the name i couldn't remember. thank you. that's one to evaluate, then.
l.
On Thu, May 18, 2017 at 11:29 PM, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton < lkcl@lkcl.net> wrote:
size, power budget. in about 5-8 years it won't be an issue. EOMA200 is better suited to clustering. bigger PCB size and a much higher power budget.
I'm not really concerned about size. What do you mean by power budget? What's to stop me or anyone else from buying, say, 8x EOMA68's and networking them? (gigabit or otherwise)? Assuming that a backplane is the only thing in the way, that could happen pretty easily. The only other thing missing at that point would be availability of the 1st gen cards, but that should get better in time, I'd think. Cost wise it's still less than an Intel NUC, if you're not counting the cost of the backplane.
and now you can use a 24v heater you can spend another extra $5 on an E3Dv6 volcano clone, now you can get *another* 20% increase in speed for only a 2.5% increase in budget.
As you can see from the pics, we ran on the cheapest 12V power supplies that we could find. Before that I tested 24V, it wasn't worth the cost. Again, brickwall economics here. We went cheap. The 12V power supplies were purchased in bulk and were maybe $14 USD each? The 3D printed mounts and the little PCB's were practically free and it would turn the supply on and off between jobs whereas our 24V bricks were on all the time. The ONLY thing that we splurged on at the time was the E3D nozzles and that was more of a crapshoot. I would have done better to cheap out on those as well, I could have printed more reliably with the cheaper J-Heads.
yehyeh. i was considering optimising the design for minimising extrusion, and rigidising the frame with panels (like the ultimaker), but if it's $1.50 for a 350mm length why bother with minimising extrusion, just get some strips of lexan 50mm wide and strap them in a cross across the diagonals. i've got a little video showing how effective that is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qb-WjZY5qyI
Don't bother minimizing extrusion if you do end up redesigning (gah!). It's cheap as dirt nowadays if you're buying the generic stuff. If you want rigid, well there you go.
it may surprise you to know that i'm a big fan of the melzi 2.0.... except they're 1.3A driver ICs and that's not going to be enough. i'm already getting regular extruder-skipping on the anycubic, and that's even at 50mm/sec.
I have a junk box full of Melzi's, they were horrible, but it was all manufacturing defects from a crappy Chinese company. The Chinese version took some artistic leeway that the original (British IIRC?) designer probably never intended.
i can't bring myself to use RAMPS. i just... can't. phil hands knows the story very well, he had one of the original sanguilinos (huxleys) just like you: the polulus are *prototyping* boards *specifically* described by the manufacturer as for *evaluation purposes only*. his printer used to stall out for a couple of seconds on one axis as the ICs overheated. he read the datasheet and found that there's a *ceramic insulator* on the *top* of the IC (meaning that a heatsink is pretty useless), and that the IC is designed for heat to be wicked away *through the PCB* via the exposed pad. and a frickin 18x18mm PCB just ain't gonna cut it.
I've used both as I've said. Mine never stalled out. I used cheap-as-dirt A4998's. Of course, I was running them < 100mm/sec and they were happy there. I'm sounding like a broken record again, lol. But, it was cheap but it worked extremely well.
i just... i can't bring myself to spend backers' money on stuff that i know is crud, neil.
You're starting to sound like a German engineer now :) They're not crud if you use them within the constraints that I outlined. No need to turn your nose at them. What I'm trying to get at is that you've got this huge point of diminishing returns, you can place yourself on either side of it. Your choice obviously. But don't act like it isn't viable, because I literally did it.
sso i've been spending some time tracking down board designs and so on. Arduino Due: https://world.taobao.com/item/539393961702.htm RMB 75 so that's around $12.
Dang those Due's are getting cheaper, back in my day those were a pretty penny.
and TRAMS uses TMC2100s, where their Reference Design has full PCB and schematics available: if i'm doing 10+ i can just send that to mike and he can make them. TRAMS is *real* basic. 4 steppers, 2 beefy power MOSFETs (extruder, printbed), 2 smaller ones for fans.
<3 TMC2100's. Our PnP was going to use TMC2130's. Great German drivers. However #1 they're hard as shit to import into China, which sucked for us at the time. You can get damn near anything in China but this was one of those parts that just isn't really something that they use. It was, to this day, the only part that I could not find on Taobao. We may have smuggled our samples in from Hong Kong. #2 they're only really necessary if you want to squeeze performance out of your stepper motors. For our farm we never did that, we didn't need to.
MGN9C rails so that the problems associated with rods go away. triple lead screws (i might consider quadruple) on the printbed, NO CANTILEVERING.
You're a madman. You sure like to over-engineer things, don't you? :)
well, here's the thing: i actually quite like trying out things that other people aren't doing. but also taking calculated risks.
Sounds like you've already got your mind made up. I'm not here to tell you what to do. I'm just sharing my experience and what worked for me. Like many technical problems, it's all about the approach. There are as many different approaches as there are engineers and business men. You know what is ultimately best for your situation. If it were me in your shoes though .. well, I'd never put myself in that position again, haha. Nope, one and done, thank you very much. Any of my future products I make will be CNC machined, laser cut, or injection molded, and then outsourced. As long as it's a durable product, it's not really any worse than the energy expended to setup a printer farm.
...annd from your previous-previous email, I forgot to reply to this little bit:
love it. well let's get you on the list for a pre-production prototype
ok?
Yea, hook a brother up. The pre-production is the A20 or is it the older one? Are there any basic breakout boards or dev boards for it to plug into? If you need an address or anything like that just let me know.
--- crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68
On Fri, May 19, 2017 at 5:08 AM, Neil Jansen njansen1@gmail.com wrote:
and now you can use a 24v heater you can spend another extra $5 on an E3Dv6 volcano clone, now you can get *another* 20% increase in speed for only a 2.5% increase in budget.
As you can see from the pics, we ran on the cheapest 12V power supplies that we could find. Before that I tested 24V, it wasn't worth the cost. Again, brickwall economics here. We went cheap. The 12V power supplies were purchased in bulk and were maybe $14 USD each?
yeh meanwell's my favourite and there's no difference between 12 and 24v prices.
The 3D printed mounts and the little PCB's were practically free and it would turn the supply on and off between jobs whereas our 24V bricks were on all the time. The ONLY thing that we splurged on at the time was the E3D nozzles and that was more of a crapshoot. I would have done better to cheap out on those as well, I could have printed more reliably with the cheaper J-Heads.
i wonder what was going on as the only time i've had problems with an E3Dv6 is when the fan on the heatsink wasn't running. that was bad. heat travelled up the tube and melted the filament *above* the hotend entry point. all bets were off at that point.
Don't bother minimizing extrusion if you do end up redesigning (gah!). It's cheap as dirt nowadays if you're buying the generic stuff. If you want rigid, well there you go.
i do - and i know how it's achieved. i've had an excellent 3D visual manipulation ability for like... 35 years.
I have a junk box full of Melzi's, they were horrible, but it was all manufacturing defects from a crappy Chinese company. The Chinese version took some artistic leeway that the original (British IIRC?) designer probably never intended.
aiyaaa...
I've used both as I've said. Mine never stalled out. I used cheap-as-dirt A4998's. Of course, I was running them < 100mm/sec and they were happy there.
yehyeh.
i just... i can't bring myself to spend backers' money on stuff that i know is crud, neil.
You're starting to sound like a German engineer now :) They're not crud if you use them within the constraints that I outlined. No need to turn your nose at them. What I'm trying to get at is that you've got this huge point of diminishing returns, you can place yourself on either side of it.
i will stop when the speed/$ improvement is parity. anything that gives a 1:1 ratio (or less, obviously) is not worth it and is "out"... *unless* an improvement can in turn have a cascade effect of allowing *another* improvement that *does* increase the speed/$ ratio.
sso i've been spending some time tracking down board designs and so on. Arduino Due: https://world.taobao.com/item/539393961702.htm RMB 75 so that's around $12.
Dang those Due's are getting cheaper, back in my day those were a pretty penny.
yehyeh - my favourite's the STM32F072 as it has a built-in crystal (a not very good one) but then the PLL can phase-lock to the USB bus from whatever it's connected to, compensating for crystal inaccuracies. price? $1.70. STM32F072-NUCLEO board? $10 on digikey.
mad. absolutely mad.
and TRAMS uses TMC2100s, where their Reference Design has full PCB and schematics available: if i'm doing 10+ i can just send that to mike and he can make them. TRAMS is *real* basic. 4 steppers, 2 beefy power MOSFETs (extruder, printbed), 2 smaller ones for fans.
<3 TMC2100's. Our PnP was going to use TMC2130's. Great German drivers. However #1 they're hard as shit to import into China, which sucked for us at the time. You can get damn near anything in China but this was one of those parts that just isn't really something that they use. It was, to this day, the only part that I could not find on Taobao. We may have smuggled our samples in from Hong Kong.
dang.
well.. https://world.tmall.com/item/551108503978.htm?spm=a312a.7700714.0.0.3zdhiQ RMB 23. about $4.
so that looks prooobably like it's sorted...
#2 they're only really necessary if you want to squeeze performance out of your stepper motors. For our farm we never did that, we didn't need to.
$200 for a 50-100mm/sec printer with low-cost steppers... $300 for a 200-250mm/sec printer with only-slightly-higher-cost steppers...
a 2x or greater speed improvement for only a 1.5x cost... that's an opportunity i can't ignore
MGN9C rails so that the problems associated with rods go away. triple lead screws (i might consider quadruple) on the printbed, NO CANTILEVERING.
You're a madman. You sure like to over-engineer things, don't you? :)
no, i simply like to properly and comprehensively assess all six degrees of freedom, which i am honestly constantly amazed that 3d printer designers don't do, and i like to properly and i do _mean_ properly research what the best mechanical options are. but... that's taken me about... 2-3 years to do (!)
well, here's the thing: i actually quite like trying out things that other people aren't doing. but also taking calculated risks.
Sounds like you've already got your mind made up.
i've got an _approach_ (an assessment criteria) where my mind's made up, but nothing else. the one thing that i might add is "risk". as in it would *really* piss me off to have a chain of improvements that, at the end of the design process, there's something i missed which made the whole exercise totally frickin useless.
i had that happen once before. not a huge fan of it happening again :)
I'm not here to tell you what to do. I'm just sharing my experience and what worked for me.
appreciated.
Like many technical problems, it's all about the approach. There are as many different approaches as there are engineers and business men. You know what is ultimately best for your situation. If it were me in your shoes though .. well, I'd never put myself in that position again, haha. Nope, one and done, thank you very much.
:)
Any of my future products I make will be CNC machined, laser cut, or injection molded, and then outsourced. As long as it's a durable product, it's not really any worse than the energy expended to setup a printer farm.
yehh we're not quite at the medium-volume phase yet, i don't want 10,000 people dropping by the forum expecting "user support" on "how to compile and patch linux kernel drivers"
...annd from your previous-previous email, I forgot to reply to this little bit:
love it. well let's get you on the list for a pre-production prototype ok?
Yea, hook a brother up. The pre-production is the A20
yes.
or is it the older one? Are there any basic breakout boards or dev boards for it to plug into?
yeah i have a breakout board PCB done (one component - the PCMCIA socket) and am also planning to get early devs a microdesktop as well.
If you need an address or anything like that just let me know.
later. i just need numbers initially.
l.
Any status update on the 3D printing issues?
On 05/19/2017 07:03 AM, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68
On Fri, May 19, 2017 at 5:08 AM, Neil Jansen njansen1@gmail.com wrote:
and now you can use a 24v heater you can spend another extra $5 on an E3Dv6 volcano clone, now you can get *another* 20% increase in speed for only a 2.5% increase in budget.
As you can see from the pics, we ran on the cheapest 12V power supplies that we could find. Before that I tested 24V, it wasn't worth the cost. Again, brickwall economics here. We went cheap. The 12V power supplies were purchased in bulk and were maybe $14 USD each?
yeh meanwell's my favourite and there's no difference between 12 and 24v prices.
The 3D printed mounts and the little PCB's were practically free and it would turn the supply on and off between jobs whereas our 24V bricks were on all the time. The ONLY thing that we splurged on at the time was the E3D nozzles and that was more of a crapshoot. I would have done better to cheap out on those as well, I could have printed more reliably with the cheaper J-Heads.
i wonder what was going on as the only time i've had problems with an E3Dv6 is when the fan on the heatsink wasn't running. that was bad. heat travelled up the tube and melted the filament *above* the hotend entry point. all bets were off at that point.
Don't bother minimizing extrusion if you do end up redesigning (gah!). It's cheap as dirt nowadays if you're buying the generic stuff. If you want rigid, well there you go.
i do - and i know how it's achieved. i've had an excellent 3D visual manipulation ability for like... 35 years.
I have a junk box full of Melzi's, they were horrible, but it was all manufacturing defects from a crappy Chinese company. The Chinese version took some artistic leeway that the original (British IIRC?) designer probably never intended.
aiyaaa...
I've used both as I've said. Mine never stalled out. I used cheap-as-dirt A4998's. Of course, I was running them < 100mm/sec and they were happy there.
yehyeh.
i just... i can't bring myself to spend backers' money on stuff that i know is crud, neil.
You're starting to sound like a German engineer now :) They're not crud if you use them within the constraints that I outlined. No need to turn your nose at them. What I'm trying to get at is that you've got this huge point of diminishing returns, you can place yourself on either side of it.
i will stop when the speed/$ improvement is parity. anything that gives a 1:1 ratio (or less, obviously) is not worth it and is "out"... *unless* an improvement can in turn have a cascade effect of allowing *another* improvement that *does* increase the speed/$ ratio.
sso i've been spending some time tracking down board designs and so on. Arduino Due: https://world.taobao.com/item/539393961702.htm RMB 75 so that's around $12.
Dang those Due's are getting cheaper, back in my day those were a pretty penny.
yehyeh - my favourite's the STM32F072 as it has a built-in crystal (a not very good one) but then the PLL can phase-lock to the USB bus from whatever it's connected to, compensating for crystal inaccuracies. price? $1.70. STM32F072-NUCLEO board? $10 on digikey.
mad. absolutely mad.
and TRAMS uses TMC2100s, where their Reference Design has full PCB and schematics available: if i'm doing 10+ i can just send that to mike and he can make them. TRAMS is *real* basic. 4 steppers, 2 beefy power MOSFETs (extruder, printbed), 2 smaller ones for fans.
<3 TMC2100's. Our PnP was going to use TMC2130's. Great German drivers. However #1 they're hard as shit to import into China, which sucked for us at the time. You can get damn near anything in China but this was one of those parts that just isn't really something that they use. It was, to this day, the only part that I could not find on Taobao. We may have smuggled our samples in from Hong Kong.
dang.
well.. https://world.tmall.com/item/551108503978.htm?spm=a312a.7700714.0.0.3zdhiQ RMB 23. about $4.
so that looks prooobably like it's sorted...
#2 they're only really necessary if you want to squeeze performance out of your stepper motors. For our farm we never did that, we didn't need to.
$200 for a 50-100mm/sec printer with low-cost steppers... $300 for a 200-250mm/sec printer with only-slightly-higher-cost steppers...
a 2x or greater speed improvement for only a 1.5x cost... that's an opportunity i can't ignore
MGN9C rails so that the problems associated with rods go away. triple lead screws (i might consider quadruple) on the printbed, NO CANTILEVERING.
You're a madman. You sure like to over-engineer things, don't you? :)
no, i simply like to properly and comprehensively assess all six degrees of freedom, which i am honestly constantly amazed that 3d printer designers don't do, and i like to properly and i do _mean_ properly research what the best mechanical options are. but... that's taken me about... 2-3 years to do (!)
well, here's the thing: i actually quite like trying out things that other people aren't doing. but also taking calculated risks.
Sounds like you've already got your mind made up.
i've got an _approach_ (an assessment criteria) where my mind's made up, but nothing else. the one thing that i might add is "risk". as in it would *really* piss me off to have a chain of improvements that, at the end of the design process, there's something i missed which made the whole exercise totally frickin useless.
i had that happen once before. not a huge fan of it happening again :)
I'm not here to tell you what to do. I'm just sharing my experience and what worked for me.
appreciated.
Like many technical problems, it's all about the approach. There are as many different approaches as there are engineers and business men. You know what is ultimately best for your situation. If it were me in your shoes though .. well, I'd never put myself in that position again, haha. Nope, one and done, thank you very much.
:)
Any of my future products I make will be CNC machined, laser cut, or injection molded, and then outsourced. As long as it's a durable product, it's not really any worse than the energy expended to setup a printer farm.
yehh we're not quite at the medium-volume phase yet, i don't want 10,000 people dropping by the forum expecting "user support" on "how to compile and patch linux kernel drivers"
...annd from your previous-previous email, I forgot to reply to this little bit:
love it. well let's get you on the list for a pre-production prototype ok?
Yea, hook a brother up. The pre-production is the A20
yes.
or is it the older one? Are there any basic breakout boards or dev boards for it to plug into?
yeah i have a breakout board PCB done (one component - the PCMCIA socket) and am also planning to get early devs a microdesktop as well.
If you need an address or anything like that just let me know.
later. i just need numbers initially.
l.
arm-netbook mailing list arm-netbook@lists.phcomp.co.uk http://lists.phcomp.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/arm-netbook Send large attachments to arm-netbook@files.phcomp.co.uk
http://forums.reprap.org/read.php?177,767087,778191#msg-778191 --- crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68
On Thu, Jul 20, 2017 at 11:07 PM, Vincent ml.eoma68@eml.cc wrote:
Any status update on the 3D printing issues?
On 05/19/2017 07:03 AM, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68
On Fri, May 19, 2017 at 5:08 AM, Neil Jansen njansen1@gmail.com wrote:
and now you can use a 24v heater you can spend another extra $5 on an E3Dv6 volcano clone, now you can get *another* 20% increase in speed for only a 2.5% increase in budget.
As you can see from the pics, we ran on the cheapest 12V power supplies that we could find. Before that I tested 24V, it wasn't worth the cost. Again, brickwall economics here. We went cheap. The 12V power supplies were purchased in bulk and were maybe $14 USD each?
yeh meanwell's my favourite and there's no difference between 12 and 24v prices.
The 3D printed mounts and the little PCB's were practically free and it would turn the supply on and off between jobs whereas our 24V bricks were on all the time. The ONLY thing that we splurged on at the time was the E3D nozzles and that was more of a crapshoot. I would have done better to cheap out on those as well, I could have printed more reliably with the cheaper J-Heads.
i wonder what was going on as the only time i've had problems with an E3Dv6 is when the fan on the heatsink wasn't running. that was bad. heat travelled up the tube and melted the filament *above* the hotend entry point. all bets were off at that point.
Don't bother minimizing extrusion if you do end up redesigning (gah!). It's cheap as dirt nowadays if you're buying the generic stuff. If you want rigid, well there you go.
i do - and i know how it's achieved. i've had an excellent 3D visual manipulation ability for like... 35 years.
I have a junk box full of Melzi's, they were horrible, but it was all manufacturing defects from a crappy Chinese company. The Chinese version took some artistic leeway that the original (British IIRC?) designer probably never intended.
aiyaaa...
I've used both as I've said. Mine never stalled out. I used cheap-as-dirt A4998's. Of course, I was running them < 100mm/sec and they were happy there.
yehyeh.
i just... i can't bring myself to spend backers' money on stuff that i know is crud, neil.
You're starting to sound like a German engineer now :) They're not crud if you use them within the constraints that I outlined. No need to turn your nose at them. What I'm trying to get at is that you've got this huge point of diminishing returns, you can place yourself on either side of it.
i will stop when the speed/$ improvement is parity. anything that gives a 1:1 ratio (or less, obviously) is not worth it and is "out"... *unless* an improvement can in turn have a cascade effect of allowing *another* improvement that *does* increase the speed/$ ratio.
sso i've been spending some time tracking down board designs and so on. Arduino Due: https://world.taobao.com/item/539393961702.htm RMB 75 so that's around $12.
Dang those Due's are getting cheaper, back in my day those were a pretty penny.
yehyeh - my favourite's the STM32F072 as it has a built-in crystal (a not very good one) but then the PLL can phase-lock to the USB bus from whatever it's connected to, compensating for crystal inaccuracies. price? $1.70. STM32F072-NUCLEO board? $10 on digikey.
mad. absolutely mad.
and TRAMS uses TMC2100s, where their Reference Design has full PCB and schematics available: if i'm doing 10+ i can just send that to mike and he can make them. TRAMS is *real* basic. 4 steppers, 2 beefy power MOSFETs (extruder, printbed), 2 smaller ones for fans.
<3 TMC2100's. Our PnP was going to use TMC2130's. Great German drivers. However #1 they're hard as shit to import into China, which sucked for us at the time. You can get damn near anything in China but this was one of those parts that just isn't really something that they use. It was, to this day, the only part that I could not find on Taobao. We may have smuggled our samples in from Hong Kong.
dang.
well.. https://world.tmall.com/item/551108503978.htm?spm=a312a.7700714.0.0.3zdhiQ RMB 23. about $4.
so that looks prooobably like it's sorted...
#2 they're only really necessary if you want to squeeze performance out of your stepper motors. For our farm we never did that, we didn't need to.
$200 for a 50-100mm/sec printer with low-cost steppers... $300 for a 200-250mm/sec printer with only-slightly-higher-cost steppers...
a 2x or greater speed improvement for only a 1.5x cost... that's an opportunity i can't ignore
MGN9C rails so that the problems associated with rods go away. triple lead screws (i might consider quadruple) on the printbed, NO CANTILEVERING.
You're a madman. You sure like to over-engineer things, don't you? :)
no, i simply like to properly and comprehensively assess all six degrees of freedom, which i am honestly constantly amazed that 3d printer designers don't do, and i like to properly and i do _mean_ properly research what the best mechanical options are. but... that's taken me about... 2-3 years to do (!)
well, here's the thing: i actually quite like trying out things that other people aren't doing. but also taking calculated risks.
Sounds like you've already got your mind made up.
i've got an _approach_ (an assessment criteria) where my mind's made up, but nothing else. the one thing that i might add is "risk". as in it would *really* piss me off to have a chain of improvements that, at the end of the design process, there's something i missed which made the whole exercise totally frickin useless.
i had that happen once before. not a huge fan of it happening again :)
I'm not here to tell you what to do. I'm just sharing my experience and what worked for me.
appreciated.
Like many technical problems, it's all about the approach. There are as many different approaches as there are engineers and business men. You know what is ultimately best for your situation. If it were me in your shoes though .. well, I'd never put myself in that position again, haha. Nope, one and done, thank you very much.
:)
Any of my future products I make will be CNC machined, laser cut, or injection molded, and then outsourced. As long as it's a durable product, it's not really any worse than the energy expended to setup a printer farm.
yehh we're not quite at the medium-volume phase yet, i don't want 10,000 people dropping by the forum expecting "user support" on "how to compile and patch linux kernel drivers"
...annd from your previous-previous email, I forgot to reply to this little bit:
love it. well let's get you on the list for a pre-production prototype ok?
Yea, hook a brother up. The pre-production is the A20
yes.
or is it the older one? Are there any basic breakout boards or dev boards for it to plug into?
yeah i have a breakout board PCB done (one component - the PCMCIA socket) and am also planning to get early devs a microdesktop as well.
If you need an address or anything like that just let me know.
later. i just need numbers initially.
l.
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Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton -
Neil Jansen -
Vincent