by Ninjinka on 4/6/24, 12:45 AM with 28 comments
by abetusk on 4/6/24, 2:05 AM
They've come out of left field, with, as of this writing, little to no online presence (low views and followers on Twitter and Youtube) and are promising a machine that's literally 10x cheaper than it's nearest competitor, with promises of having worked out all the reliability details of bed leveling, heating, sintering, cleaning and small feature size (0.15mm).
In addition, they talk about abandoning digital controllers because of cost and going for analog only, which makes my bullshit detector go off. They also talk about recreating slicer software (using the Unreal engine). In other words, they've claimed to recreate the whole hardware, electronic and software toolchain for the industry to offer a high quality and affordable device.
Again, its not like any of this theoretically can't be done, it's that the details are hard and tend to be underestimated by people. When someone promises to breeze past the tripping points of hardware, electronics and software that have been present for the last 20 years, I start to become suspicious.
If this were a company in China (Shenzen, say) I would be much more open to the possibility, because of embedded domain knowledge and easy access to high end manufacturing. Note that fiber lasers have dropped 10x in cost to under $2k from $15k+ from what the were 10 years ago, so its not the price of high end technological devices isn't dropping at an exponential rate.
Maybe someone else can comment on whether this is or looks more legitimate than I'm giving it credit for?
by niccl on 4/6/24, 1:52 AM
by greesil on 4/6/24, 1:37 AM
Oh this is fun: https://www.reddit.com/r/3Dprinting/comments/15eq050/is_it_p...
Apparently the plastic print powder is an explosion hazard. I hope they didn't skimp on safety.
by mvkel on 4/6/24, 2:45 AM
Curious what he meant about not needing support structures, being able to "print in mid air." How exactly do you pull that off? Surely gravity would protest.
by thereisnospork on 4/6/24, 1:49 AM
by floating-io on 4/6/24, 1:55 AM
I'm not in a position to watch the video at the moment, but I don't see where the price was announced other than in the description of said video...
by jascination on 4/6/24, 1:40 AM
by foobarian on 4/6/24, 1:21 AM
by javawizard on 4/6/24, 1:48 AM
I really hope they're able to pull it off. FDM printing is great but not when it comes to arbitrary geometries. I needed to print a 3-way ducting tee the other day that would have been incredibly time consuming to do on my Bambu X1 with all the support filament switching that would have been needed - whereas this printer would have been able to knock it out in no time flat.
Really looking forward to when this releases.
by labster on 4/6/24, 1:56 AM