Is centroid doing any thing in 3D printer world?
Would like to try to convert my router into one.
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Is centroid doing any thing in 3D printer world?
Would like to try to convert my router into one.
For only a little more than a conversion would cost, you can get a dedicated 3D printer that will run circles around a converted router.
CNC Routers do not make good 3D printers.
So that have 3D printer four feet by four feet?Quote:
Originally Posted by ger21
so I have a gantry system with 3 axis centroid and your saying a conversion would be more?
And the servo system is better then centroid?
What do you want to print? What material?
4'x4' is great for a router.... But that is going to take forever to 3d print something that size allowing for thermal movement (contraction)
What z height do you have?
I bought a stand alone creality cr-10S in the end. They do bigger ones but I'd like to put it in an enclosure and use the heated bed to do ASA (external weather / UV resistant ABS for car bits)
Suggest you do a bit of research on what you want it for material-wise and then look at how big you really want to print something....
I have a 3d printer and like most printers the parts are inch sized that I print. Most prints take more than an hour and some take many hours to print. My guess is that anything a foot or more in any direction would take days or even weeks to print for larger items with simple extruders. Considering all the "hickups" hobby (and industrial) 3d printers can have while printing the chances of having a glitch during such a lengthy print time frame would be pretty likely. If you had a high dollar machine that used technology beyond a simple extruder method maybe. But of the largest 3d printers available most are in the 1000mm range and the price points are anywhere from $10k to a quarter million dollars. There are some custom made big & fast 3d printers out there, but the cost to build and operate them are tremendous. I think a hobby 3d printer in the size you are thinking of would be great, but the technology, price point and print speed that 3d printers are at still pretty much means that such an endeavor on a converted CNC router or other homebuild etc to be unrealistic in my opinion.
I could see doing this, if you were willing to accept much coarser output than is usual with 3D prints. The upside would be that you'd be able to make bigger parts than 3D printers usually produce. What it would take would be an extruder with a much larger nozzle size than printers typically have. This would require a thicker filament - or better yet, a hopper-fed pellet auger system that would eliminate the need for filament altogether. And you'd need to figure out how to build a heated bed that was a lot bigger than the normal ones.
But if you just wanted to mount a regular hot end to your router, then I agree with everyone else - it would take forever to make a print, and it probably wouldn't come out too well.
For large format printing you also have some physics issues to contend with - thermal expansion in particular as the plastic cools is a big enough issue on "normal" printers but on a print that big you're looking at some serious warping as the extruded plastic cools.
To the OP: the g-code might be the same-ish and the movement might look the same, but the setup and environment turn out to be quite different.
- You need a heated bed (capable of up to 80ºC at least) for printing useful materials like nylon and ABS.
- Bed levelling is much more sensitive than you'll get from a normal router.
- There's a whole bunch of thermal management, extrusion management etc going on in a controller which most CNC controllers can't deal with.
- The disparity in size. And most of us can't leave a print running for a week because of the fire hazard of these things, so you need to be around when it's running. Better off printing fittings and using some other bulk material to make the size.
- The inconvenience of using one machine. Murphy's law guarantees that it will be set up for printing when you want to use it as a router and vice versa, and you're going to struggle to make the switchover as easy as it first appears it will be.
Really, the only thing in common between a router and a 3D printer is that some printers move in a cartesian way (not all, mine's a delta printer for example). And even there, they're not the same. Because there's no appreciable force on the tooling, printers can be made much lighter and faster than CNC routers. My machine is printing at 300ipm with rapids at 1400ipm, for example, where my router is pushing it for rapids at 100ipm.
Yes, there are some machines out there that are combination laser / printer / milling machines but generally they seem to be rubbish at all three things rather than being good at one. And there are some CNC machines out there (big boys) that have an ATC swappable tool which prints by laser sintering a stream of metal powder carried in a shield gas but there's a half million bucks and then some.
Seriously - the question is asked all the time and at first glance it looks like a logical solution. I asked it myself (well, the other way around, I had the printer first). But anyone who's used both for a while will tell you that they're very different beasts, and given how cheaply you can get a functional printer you might as well just have both.
Hah - 3D printers are (or at least were) kinda my thing - I may be of some help here.
If you're not looking to print in thermoplastics, then a router chassis *could* be used, but you're going to have to think long and hard about the kind of materials you're interested in, and there's also the build height consideration as well. Thermoplastics have the issue of heating/cooling control over a large area like a router bed - you need pretty constant temperature control even with the more basic materials like PLA and ABS - PLA requires a bed temperature of ~60c to get the best adhesion, but active cooling beyond that, whereas ABS needs closer to 100c for the bed temperature, plus the rest of the build envelope needs to be kept warm. Other materials have different requirements, and it all gets complex from thereon out.
If you were interested in printing in ceramics perhaps, then you may be able to use a router chassis - I'd be looking at an archimedes screw as the feed mechanism, and you've have to have a pretty careful regulation of moisture in the entire feed loop prior to that, too. Of course, in doing so, you'd effectively wreck any routing viability, because you'd have clay dust *everywhere* in short order, and that stuff is far more pervasive than wood dust.
Of course, none of this even begins to touch on the fact that build height is the important thing with 3D printing, and is often a sales point of particular 3D printer models al by itself. A router chassis simply doesn't have the kind of height to it that you'd want/need - you'd also ahve to swap out the Z axis control with something that could move the whole gantry up and down, not just the head.
The long and short of it is that if you're just looking for a general 3D printer to mess about with, buy a 3D rinter. If you've got a very specific build project in mind, using a non-standard material like concrete, clay or anything that requir s a really large nozzle, then you'll still have to do a lot of re-engineering to get the best from it, and you're in for a learning curve that is every bit as vertical as coming into subtractive CNC work blind is - it's a completely different process to routing.
Don't do it. Not worth the effort and the money. You'll never be happy with it and is going to be too slow.
What are you planning to print? Do you know how long it will take to print something with that size? A week or more...Quote:
Originally Posted by artracing
I am of the camp now that it would not be a bad thing to depend on already dependable electronics in the router.
I have a couple large format 3D printers that range from $3000 to over $5000.
Fusion 3 F400 and the Raise 3D N2 dual extruder. I pump a lot of filament through those machines to keep up with production. I also have several small printers. All steel frame cube shape printers from different makers.
Fusion 3 has been the best at warranty stuff. 2 year warranty, but doesn't help alot when you have to wait on the parts and this time they sent the wrong part. The raise 3D is a joke. The touch screen went out on it three weeks ago and they said that was not under warranty. Printer is 7 months old. $500.00 later I had it working again. Took two weeks to receive it.
Then when an extruder leaked beyond repair, they wanted me to fix it myself. If you know anything about repairing hot ends, then you know the heat break is very easy to damage. I have had to buy 3 more hot ends from them.
So that American company claims 1 year warranty. Probably on the shipping box and not the printer. That is BS. Fair warning.
The smaller printers were never meant to print this volume of filament, but I have upgraded the hot ends and extruders on those to handle more. They are working overtime now. :)
I have had a couple of those smaller printers fail due to drivers and control board issues too. I would not recommend buying a cheap 3D printer for anything but hobby level interest and to satisfy curiosity.
So it may not be such a bad idea to just convert your own.
If all you print is PLA, you will not need a heat bed.
You can get the extruder and hotend all in one too.
I am working on my own design for my back up printers now.
They will all be dual extrusion with separated hotends so they do not ooze on the print. All will have 12" x 12" heated beds with glass tops. We onlly print using Pet G.
^^ Good point.
Everyone I know who personally owns a 3D printer seems to spend nearly as much time tinkering with it to keep it working as they do actually printing. A slight exaggeration, maybe, but in some cases not by much.
One place I do some work at has a commercial grade printer, cost them $30,000 some time ago. I was interested to have a closer look but, apart from the filament coming in chipped cassettes like printer ink, I couldn't see a lot of differences between it and any other enclosed FFM printer I'd seen. The output was very similar too.
Kinda left me scratching my head about the price difference until I thought to ask about reliability of prints and the machine. The response: "we've had the guy out once in ten years to fix something, and printing issues like corners lifting, stringing, porosity, layer separation, blobbing etc are all very rare and fairly specific to particular prints where we're pushing the boundaries".
BING - there's the difference between commercial and hobby machines. Same as with a router, mill, lathe or any other bit of kit.
They may do essentially the same thing, but the commercial machine's price tag means the manufacturer can afford to remove random factors in the print (enclosed heated build space, tightly controlled filament QA, well tuned printer and slicer configuration etc) and support the machine properly. Meaning less downtime and less scrap.
I love my Omio CNC machine but no way on earth would I recommend it to someone who wanted it for a commercial application. I love my Rostock Max printer but same. If it's for commercial, where downtime and re-runs are expensive, pay the extra up front for gear which keeps those things to a minimum.
Good points. I should have been specific. Just because I have a large table doesn’t mean I want to do large format. I have plenty of real estate on head for for another type of head. If I’m not routering I could be printing.Quote:
Originally Posted by dharmic
I have a great servo system and handler. Hot head and heated base plate is easy fix The problem is there a generic software that can post to my Centroid servo.
You can also run all the thermal parts off of a separate box and run them off of a different power supply or even AC voltage for extremely fast heat up times. This does not place extra draw on the machines power supply.
If you do not need the heat bed like with Pla's and TPU's, then the extruders hotend doesn't actually draw much current and could be easily added to the existing power. You can control it off the board with an SSR, but really a digital temperature controller for the hotend and the heat bed would be the way to go if the controller cannot handle that stuff.
Make the heated bed modular so you can quickly install it and remove it on the bed and then setup it's own machine profile. Just a matter of minutes will get you switched back and forth with a little planning.
Exactly, now need the slicer program and I’m good to go.Quote:
Originally Posted by LeeWay
In addition the the motion control on your router, you're also gonna need a controller for your thermals. Definitely the hot end, the bed if you're going to print things like ABS or nylon, fans for the cooling block and/or layer cooling. Possibly (if you don't have a spare axis on your router) for the extruder drive. And some way of synchronising the g-codes and splitting them to the two controllers.