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?
MIT team develops 3D printer that's 10x faster than comparable 3D printers
81–86 of 86 posts
Re: MIT team develops 3D printer that's 10x faster than comparable 3D printers
#8210x 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…
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... (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 squir…
This form of fabrication exists and is known as DLP. I have a DLP printer that cost me less than £500.
Re: MIT team develops 3D printer that's 10x faster than comparable 3D printers
#83I 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 firmwa…
Exactly. Just buy 100 Ender3s for somewhere around £15,000 and run them in parallel.
Re: MIT team develops 3D printer that's 10x faster than comparable 3D printers
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
The conceptual targets are printing a chair sized object from granular material in 30 seconds, and a 2 story concrete house in 1 hour, so 10,000 is a very rough "shock marketing number", but yeah.
You can't print a concrete house in a hour. It would collapse. Also, in general, the slower concrete cures the stronger it is - to the point where attempts to have it cure faster will destroy its compressive strength. Concrete walls should remain in forms at least one week and far better for two, and be wetted continuously during that period. 3d printing concrete needs a massive breakthrough in 2500 year old curing t…
With the concrete house in an hour, the idea is that the printing step takes 1 hour. The entire process would be performed in a massive temporary box, and an inert filler material would be placed at the same time as the concrete to fill voids and eliminate slumping. This would allow a second floor to be "printed" over the room voids below.
The printing step would be accomplished in 1 hour. The curing step could happen over a week if need be.
Re: MIT team develops 3D printer that's 10x faster than comparable 3D printers
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
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... (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 squir…
This form of fabrication exists and is known as DLP. I have a DLP printer that cost me less than £500.
Neat, I didn't know of that!
Feynman was looking further out to a machine not limited to one material at a time.
Re: MIT team develops 3D printer that's 10x faster than comparable 3D printers
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can't print a concrete house in a hour. It would collapse. Also, in general, the slower concrete cures the stronger it is - to the point where attempts to have it cure faster will destroy its compressive strength. Concrete walls should remain in forms at least one week and far better for two, and be wetted continuously during that period. 3d printing concrete needs a massive breakthrough in 2500 year old curing t…
With the concrete house in an hour, the idea is that the printing step takes 1 hour. The entire process would be performed in a massive temporary box, and an inert filler material would be placed at the same time as the concrete to fill voids and eliminate slumping. This would allow a second floor to be "printed" over the room voids below. The printing step would be accomplished in 1 hour. The curing step could happe…
So you would have house specific forms requiring massive reuse? You can pour into a typical form in an hour too. The hard part is the forming and installation of rebar. It might work, but it seems tough to make it marketable.