MakerBot says its new print process reduces times and costs by around 30% | Hacker News Reader

MakerBot says its new print process reduces times and costs by around 30%

techcrunch.com

31 pointsrbanffy10 comments

This algorithm appears to minimize infill time while still supporting the shell during printing. That's useful for prototyping form or fit, but I feel like 3DP for prototyping has been beaten to death already.

I would much rather have algorithms that can improve the performance of production parts. For FDM, that means infill algorithms that vary cell size and structure to optimize some user-defined metric, whether that's rigidity per dollar, per print time, etc. Just having denser infill near the shell like a bird bone would be a nice start.

TL;DR - software update with new algorithm to use less infill material by dynamically generating on a per-model basis rather than filling the whole model with a repeating pattern.

This is not a new product.

From my (outside) perspective, it seems like the consumer/prosumer/hobbyist 3D printing scene hasn't seen any big innovations in a number of years. The last one I can remember was the rise of rostock/delta-bots. Is there something I've missed?

Deltas are great for accelerations, you pay for it with the almost requirement of using a bowden style extruder which makes using some filaments harder (or impossible). There's also additional complexity in bed leveling, though with automated bed leveling probes and smarter controller boards this is getting easier.

I'm really looking forward to when more printers are running CoreXY. One of the two things I hate about my Prusa Original Mk2 is the fact that my Y Axis moves my print bed instead of just the extruder. The other is the stupid zip ties holding my bed on but that's been resolved in the Mk2S revision and is a pretty simple part to make anyway.

I honestly want the next big innovation to be slicer or design software that helps design for what is 3d printable. Or at very least a slicer that will tell me "hey dimwit, this is gonna result in a spaghetti mess of plastic on your print bed and you spending the next 5 hours cleaning off your hot end" You get that with experience but if it's EVER going to get to the masses we need software to stop people from making expensive mistakes.

After 4 Recent gen MakerBots and the whole Print head issue, MakerBot is on my list of products I simply won't buy regardless of their innovations.

Another reason to not buy Makerbot is due to their unethical business practices towards the open source/hardware community [1].

[1] - http://hackaday.com/2016/04/28/the-makerbot-obituary/

Makerbots were the worst products to use for awhile two years back, but in the past few months, their reliability has been unmatched. Have barely had any failed prints.

I have been using a Lulzbot Taz 5 and I find it to be an amazing machine but recently I have gotten an Ultimaker 2 Go and this thing is unmatched in print quality and accuracy to any FDM machine that I have used before. I would highly recommend checking out either of these machines before going down the Makerbot path.

Cura already has a subdivided cubic infill that looks better than this.

It's really too bad that no one will ever be able to see it since they totally abandoned opening their source code.

The time decreases they are getting are very impressive. I'd love to see Cura release this type of infill. For all of makerbots fault, they seem to be doing a lot of cool things with infill. Their cat and shark infills are pretty cool even though worthless.

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