November Hangout!

There's always a debate in your live assembly/test streams relating to strictly following the provided manuals Vs community guides/mods. While I prefer the streams to be strictly by the manual, I do see merit to the other argument. 3D printing exists in and because of the communities, the modding, and the bootstrapping, and many consider the community as much a part of 3D printing as the printers themselves. Given this, I had some thoughts about a potential product. A printer kit with modding and community "built in". It would take the form of an absolutely bare bones printer, the absolute bare minimum to lay down some filament. Terrible quality printing, but enough to actually print. The first 50% of the manual would be getting you to that point (assembly, testing, etc). The printer would be provided with a large spool of filament, and many spare nuts/bolts. The rest of the manual would then first take you through the steps of finding communities, downloading some mods, slicing, printing and fitting them (these first few "mods" would be pre-created). After this, it would then guide you through designing a mod, measuring, some simple CAD work, exporting, slicing then fitting, testing, and finally uploading for others. The manual/guide would have to be very well executed though (and would likely make up the majority of the value), as if not, it's just a crappy printer kit. Just an idea I had, that I'll probably never follow through on, and will never go anywhere, so throwing it out to the community. Take the idea and do it yourself, work with me, whatever, it's not my idea anymore, it's everyones :)

Hi Tom. I've just started to plan for my "dream" 3D printer with 500x500x500mm buildvolume. I'm planning to go with the Duet Wifi - do you have any opinion on that printer board? Additionally I'd like to implement an IDEX system, but not with a Bowden but with Direct Drive Extruder (Titan Aero with Volcano hotend plus pancake stepper). The 3d printer shall be a cartesian machine, but to reduce the mass on the x-axis sled I'm considering implementing two different y axes sleds (one for each extruder), where one extruder homes at the front right and the other one at the bottom left. The bed shall be guided by 4 linear rods and lifted by 2 lead screws. What are your thought on such a setup? Bowden preferred to Direct Drive? One y axis preferred? Core XY instead of Cartesian? Thanks a ton for all your work.

Benjamin Lakeit