
MIT team develops 3D printer that's 10x faster than comparable 3D printers - sswu
https://www.3ders.org/articles/20181207-mit-team-develop-3d-printer-thats-10x-faster-than-comparable-3d-printers.html
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slededit
I wonder why they needed the laser pre-heater. I can't imagine it is that
dramatically more effective than resistive heating. Even if it is, just having
a longer pre-heater to make up for it would have to be cheaper.

EDIT: Did a bit of research, a major benefit of laser heating is direct
control of energy transfer so you can be sure your heating the plastic to the
right temperature regardless of how fast its moving through the heater. Still,
aren't all these advantages eliminated by the traditional primary heater
immediately after?

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nickparker
The laser penetrates the filament heating it internally instead of only
heating the outer surface. It's near-infrared (808 nm) so it heats the small
cylinder of filament essentially uniformly throughout its volume.

It's also nice because they can vary laser power much more effectively than
you can vary the temperature of a conduction surface.

[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1709.05918.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1709.05918.pdf)

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sometimesijust
And it is low friction since it does not need surface contact.

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japhyr
> All technologies are improved with lasers.

I love this writing style, clear and informative but playful at the same time.

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johnyesberg
Sounds like a quote from Dr Evil.

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kentlyons
Here is the paper they published:
[https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1709/1709.05918.pdf](https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1709/1709.05918.pdf)

And the press release from last year:
[http://news.mit.edu/2017/new-3-d-printer-10-times-faster-
com...](http://news.mit.edu/2017/new-3-d-printer-10-times-faster-commercial-
counterparts-1129)

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dmritard96
I dont think I have ever read an article about MIT students that didnt start
its headline with MIT, is this university policy of some sort?

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suyash
It's the name that sells :)

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karmakaze
10x faster is a substantial achievement for anyone waiting for 3D items being
made.

For the technology as a whole we need something that changes more than a
constant factor, i.e. better than O(n^3) because we're still using filament
that's time proportional to volume of the object.

This isn't entirely clear cut though. For instance laser printers technically
do trace a dot of light across a page, but a single raster scan is almost
instantaneous compared to the time scales of larger operations. Not having to
physically move a 'print head' seems to be the winning design.

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abecedarius
The 'obvious' way to do that: parallel heads across the whole surface, so time
is O(height). Feynman brought this up in
[https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~pister/290G/Papers/Feynman...](https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~pister/290G/Papers/Feynman83.pdf)
(an 80s followup to "Plenty of Room at the Bottom"):

> You should have a thicker machine with tubes and pipes that brings in
> chemicals. Tubes with controllable valves - all very tiny. What I want is to
> build in three dimensions by squirting the various substances from different
> holes that are electrically controlled, and by rapidly working my way back
> and doing layer after layer, I make a three-dimensional pattern.

Added: since mechanical frequencies scale up as size scales down, this sort of
design would ideally scale as O(1). That is, with smaller parts and increasing
resolution, you have O(n^2) parts, each working O(n) faster, to produce O(n^3)
units times O(n^-3) unit volume = O(1) volume per unit time.

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johnday
This form of fabrication exists and is known as DLP. I have a DLP printer that
cost me less than £500.

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abecedarius
Neat, I didn't know of that!

Feynman was looking further out to a machine not limited to one material at a
time.

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tbenst
10x faster is a bit exaggerated; maybe 2-3x faster than typical desktop FFF
and still slower than HP or Carbon

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brandonjm
Just at a glance it looks about 10x faster than my Prusa, but I agree it
wouldn't be much more than 2-3x faster than larger scale printers for sure. I
don't think Carbon would come under "comparable 3D printers" as it is resin
based which is often faster.

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crwalker
Fused filament fabrication (FFF) is fighting against physics in the same way
that O(n) vs O(n^2) vs O(n!) algorithms have wildly different performance at
scale.

It's a point solution, depositing ~1 voxel per unit of time. Running print
heads in parallel is still O(1). Speeding up the print head runs out of steam
because you run into vibration limits for the machinery (you can hear the
rattling in the audio for this article). To really scale you need to deposit
~n voxels per unit of time (HP's MJF technology) or ~n^2 (Carbon's CLIP).

You need lots of voxels for high resolution for most applications. There are
certain exceptions like prototyping in PETG or 3D printing concrete houses
where the speed limitations of FFF may not be a big issue. But for 3D printing
to compete with many forms of traditional manufacturing, simultaneous parallel
structuring of matter is key.

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akhilcacharya
How does this compare to Carbon?

[https://www.carbon3d.com/](https://www.carbon3d.com/)

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pasta
That's a good question because at the moment Carbon printers are the fastest
and (most important) produce production ready materials.

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yosito
Fast and loud! Holy hell! I thought dot matrix printers were loud.

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ngcc_hk
As hobby goes 3D printer really no good. Laser is fast and even some Cnc ok.
But hours and hours ...

Hope this help as having a 3D model of your favourite item is great.
Especially you can like programming iterate through it quickly.

Learning is part of the fun.

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amelius
Well if you order an object online, then you have to wait 1+ days for it to
arrive ;)

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jakobegger
More like 2 weeks for Shapeways...

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boulos
From the headline, I assumed this was going to be an MIT writeup of Inkbit.
Instead it seems to be another MIT group but at the opposite end of the
quality spectrum (this is low-ish quality but super fast, while Inkbit is high
quality and yet fast). Cool!

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samstave
More info on inkbit please.

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walrus01
Regarding "normal" 3d printer technology, anyone who's thinking of getting a
basic one to play around with, take a look at the Creality CR-10S. It sells
for $369. There's lots of youtube videos of sample output from it and reviews.

The bigger version of the same thing which can print 50 x 50 x 50 cm volume,
the CR-10S5 is $629.

I have no connection to the manufacturer or Chinese vendors, just throwing the
name of something I'm satisfied with out there.

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brianwawok
Ender3 can be found under $200 and is excellent. I think it is similar to the
10s

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jmpman
Sweet. Let’s see a benchy.

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LanceH
They should compare speeds printing benches.

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aeleos
These are some really cool and novel developments at improving the speed of 3d
printers. While some of these might take a while (or forever) to come to
desktop 3d printers its great that advancements like these are being made to
push 3d printing forward.

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crankylinuxuser
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.

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ravedave5
Don't forget all 3d printers were 15k not that long ago.

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crankylinuxuser
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'.

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ncmncm
I like the last comment, that says the pic is not of the people named, and
that one of the professors named is not a professor.

Who are those guys, then?

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jeffchuber
3ders is one of the best blogs in 3D - worth a follow

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KaiserPro
The threaded filament feed is a really nice touch.

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crocal
Printer is coming...

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stevespang
>Grace wrote at 12/8/2018 1:45:34 AM:

>That picture is neither Jamison nor Professor Hart; and >Jamison Go is a PhD
student, not a professor

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Pica_soO
If you could have a liquid 3D printer below the starting surface and a solid
PLA printer above, you could start in the middle of the object and print into
two directions, at twice the speed. Of course- the basic question remains,
what holds the middle? Retractable titanium bolt?

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pontifier
I've got a design for a printer that should be about 10,000 times faster than
this.

It's really a game of data transfer speed. How fast can you transfer
information about solid vs non-solid into space?

The velocity and acceleration of that printer is very impressive, but maxing
out the movement speed of a single physical nozzle is not going to get us
where we need to be in the future.

If anyone is interested in collaborating with me, I'd love to talk.

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thanksDr
Can you give us an outline?

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pontifier
Sure, the basic idea is to separate data transfer from what I call locking.
Data transfer can be done quickly, then locking can happen passively at
whatever rate it needs.

Data transfer can take many forms. A simple example is an array of
needles,pointing downward, forming a horizontal plane. The plane of needles is
withdrawn upward through a granular material and dropplets of glue bind the
material only where it should be hardened. In this example there is a
resolution tradeoff, but you can see that the "printing" is basically
completed in one pass of the plane through the print volume.

Holographic processes could transfer data to the entire volume at once.

The key is looking at the problem as a data transfer problem. We are very good
at moving data very quickly.

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analognoise
The number of pins in such a design would dictate your surface roughness.
Where would you be loading the glue from, if they're also being drawn through
the binder.

Also, glue doesn't set instantaneously. I can see only problems with this
approach?

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pontifier
That is the resolution tradeoff with this particular method. Each needle would
be fed from a tube connected to its own control valve. Non bound material
would act as support while the glue (or other binding agent) worked.

In my imagination I see a chair made from shredded tires, and bonded with a
silicon caulking like substance. The shredded tires would be filled into a
container between the needles as the printing array rises.

