41–50 of 58 posts
Jamison Go reported that his beetleweight fighting robot, Silent Spring, used a drum weapon made using a Desktop Metal system. The drum was printed using 4140 steel, then hardened the traditional way. It apparently yielded very good results, winning the beetleweight category at Bot Blast. You can search YouTube for videos of it in action.
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That's what I was wondering. Shapeways makes metal parts by a similar process as a service. See their 2009 video.[1] There's a mini-industry making metal jewelry that way. I notice that Desktop Metal doesn't show their oven in the video. That's the big, expensive, somewhat hazardous unit. "Easily swappable aluminum gas canisters ... safe to use on the shop floor" says the data sheet.[2] Wazer, the low-end water jet c…
I was pricing out metal casting after I watched this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-FHY5FNsWc 12 minutes uncut. They go from printed model to working cast piece. All new, Kaya Cast vac chamber they use is $1k, the Paragon kiln is $800, and the Electro-melt furnace is $350. Add in safety gear and incidentals and you are looking at 3-4 thousand dollars to go from a 3d print to a cast metal piece. Heck, depend…
(The "maker movement" may have run its course. TechShop seems to be in financial trouble.[1])
Sounds interesting; any details on how it works, what materials it can be used with, what are the consumables, strength, accuracy/resolution, maximum size, etc..?
Looks like fused jet deposited powdered metal printing. Strong but not nearly as strong as casting (especially without secondary processing), as for materials powdered metal printing is usually either ferrite alloys or nobel metals the former is much more common. Resolution is in single digit microns or finer. This is based on similar products not this specific one, it might be faster which is important but there is…
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Very impressive video. Questions that page completely doesn't answer, though: How much does the system cost? ($5k to "reserve", but what's the final cost? Their "downloads" page, of all places, has a price sheet for the "studio" system, but not the "production" system.) What does the software workflow involve, from CAD software to printing? Also disappointing that, despite having an innovative piece of hardware , the…
> despite having an innovative piece of hardware, they still treat the software as heavily proprietary as well. My client created an innovative piece of hardware without investing in proprietary software. In a couple of months, he found cheaper clones offered on aliexpress and taobao. While the design was good, the product failed commercially. Then the company found me, I’ve created heavily proprietary software for t…
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> despite having an innovative piece of hardware, they still treat the software as heavily proprietary as well. My client created an innovative piece of hardware without investing in proprietary software. In a couple of months, he found cheaper clones offered on aliexpress and taobao. While the design was good, the product failed commercially. Then the company found me, I’ve created heavily proprietary software for t…
If I may, what was the product and what is within the proprietary software which differs it from the clones? Because given China manufacturing scale it is given that every other thing will have a clone on aliexpress or taobao.
On the very high level, I’ve implemented a small subset of what Autodesk Netfabb premium does, the subset relevant to the hardware my client is offering. That Autodesk software costs $500/year, I guess that’s what differs our product from the clones: a clone would cost $500/year extra.
Another thing, 3D printers are too different, they use many different technologies (FDM, SLA, DLP, SLS, etc.), and within each there’re different printing materials. These things are very relevant to e.g. slicing and support generation. Compared to the software like Netfabb which has to support all of them, our software only supports a single printer and a carefully selected set of printing materials. That’s why, hopefully, we were able to deliver better overall UX.
Jamison Go reported that his beetleweight fighting robot, Silent Spring, used a drum weapon made using a Desktop Metal system. The drum was printed using 4140 steel, then hardened the traditional way. It apparently yielded very good results, winning the beetleweight category at Bot Blast. You can search YouTube for videos of it in action.
Jamison Go reported that his beetleweight fighting robot, Silent Spring, used a drum weapon made using a Desktop Metal system. The drum was printed using 4140 steel, then hardened the traditional way. It apparently yielded very good results, winning the beetleweight category at Bot Blast. You can search YouTube for videos of it in action.
Video of Silent Spring https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRLupZvjcrk
For a nice CGI movie on their high volume model: https://www.desktopmetal.com/products/production/
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Even if you can print all the structural portions, there's a big problem printing electrical components e.g. motors, and then an even bigger problem printing control electronics... Although, I think if they end up able to print robust, ready-to-use metal components with reasonable strength (say strong enough for a bicycle frame), that would be a pretty good leap forward. The base tech of what you can do on a desktop…
I would think the next logical step (after metal printing comes down in price) will be to start printing mixtures of metals and plastics, which would eventually lead to being able to print more complicated things such as motors.
That being said, I am not sure how competitive the production unit will be. A lot of the commercial industry does not necessary care about weight reduction or aesthetics. I can't foresee that the parts made by these machines will be anymore cheaper than traditional sintering or more accurate than milling.