It looks like something Spiderman will end up battling.
We have a hard enough time keeping five 3D printers running at the same time; but 16? Fuggeddaboutit.
I often think a lot of time could be saved if it was possible to print on different scales: the long, straight, uncomplicated parts of a model could be printed using a ‘larger head’ (one that is depositing material faster and in ‘bigger blobs’). The more detailed parts could then be printed using a much finer printhead.
Of course, getting those printheads to divide the work amongst them could also be a serious software challenge…
Ultimately, it becomes a challenge of picking the right printhead size for a part of a model…
I had to stop watching after one of the talking heads was matted as “Principle Mechanical Engineer.” Looks cool, though.
It’s an interesting idea, but the errors will be really hard to manage. Material deposited by the coarse print head will have a larger error than that from the fine print head. You would have to figure out a way for the fine print head to account for (and probably correct for) the uneven surface of the coarse blob, or the tolerance of the whole object will be determined by the coarse print head.
Perhaps the there could be a third, subtractive head, that could clean up the errors of the coarse head. Of course this may make things slow again, and you’d have at least two heads moving around each other, so… there would need to be precise movement not on parallel tubular tacks. You could solve part of that by printing upside down… but that might make more… or you could use robotic arms that could swivel around each other, that might work, but that brings up the cost and the intensity of how much the program needs to do…
Lets just use nanites like in Deus Ex’s Universal Constructor.
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
