MIT team develops 3D printer that's 10x faster than comparable 3D printers

I wonder why they needed the laser pre-heater. I can&#x27;t imagine it is that dramatically more effective than resistive heating. Even if it is, just having a longer pre-heater to make up for it would have to be cheaper.<p>EDIT: Did a bit of research, a major benefit of laser heating is direct control of energy transfer so you can be sure your heating the plastic to the right temperature regardless of how fast its moving through the heater. Still, aren&#x27;t all these advantages eliminated by the traditional primary heater immediately after?

&gt; All technologies are improved with lasers.<p>I love this writing style, clear and informative but playful at the same time.

Here is the paper they published: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;ftp&#x2F;arxiv&#x2F;papers&#x2F;1709&#x2F;1709.05918.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;ftp&#x2F;arxiv&#x2F;papers&#x2F;1709&#x2F;1709.05918.pdf</a><p>And the press release from last year: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.mit.edu&#x2F;2017&#x2F;new-3-d-printer-10-times-faster-commercial-counterparts-1129" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.mit.edu&#x2F;2017&#x2F;new-3-d-printer-10-times-faster-com...</a>

I dont think I have ever read an article about MIT students that didnt start its headline with MIT, is this university policy of some sort?

10x faster is a substantial achievement for anyone waiting for 3D items being made.<p>For the technology as a whole we need something that changes more than a constant factor, i.e. better than O(n^3) because we&#x27;re still using filament that&#x27;s time proportional to volume of the object.<p>This isn&#x27;t entirely clear cut though. For instance laser printers technically do trace a dot of light across a page, but a single raster scan is almost instantaneous compared to the time scales of larger operations. Not having to physically move a &#x27;print head&#x27; seems to be the winning design.

10x faster is a bit exaggerated; maybe 2-3x faster than typical desktop FFF and still slower than HP or Carbon

Fused filament fabrication (FFF) is fighting against physics in the same way that O(n) vs O(n^2) vs O(n!) algorithms have wildly different performance at scale.<p>It&#x27;s a point solution, depositing ~1 voxel per unit of time. Running print heads in parallel is still O(1). Speeding up the print head runs out of steam because you run into vibration limits for the machinery (you can hear the rattling in the audio for this article). To really scale you need to deposit ~n voxels per unit of time (HP&#x27;s MJF technology) or ~n^2 (Carbon&#x27;s CLIP).<p>You need lots of voxels for high resolution for most applications. There are certain exceptions like prototyping in PETG or 3D printing concrete houses where the speed limitations of FFF may not be a big issue. But for 3D printing to compete with many forms of traditional manufacturing, simultaneous parallel structuring of matter is key.

How does this compare to Carbon?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.carbon3d.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.carbon3d.com&#x2F;</a>

Fast and loud! Holy hell! I thought dot matrix printers were loud.

As hobby goes 3D printer really no good. Laser is fast and even some Cnc ok. But hours and hours ...<p>Hope this help as having a 3D model of your favourite item is great. Especially you can like programming iterate through it quickly.<p>Learning is part of the fun.

From the headline, I assumed this was going to be an MIT writeup of Inkbit. Instead it seems to be another MIT group but at the opposite end of the quality spectrum (this is low-ish quality but super fast, while Inkbit is high quality and yet fast). Cool!

Regarding &quot;normal&quot; 3d printer technology, anyone who&#x27;s thinking of getting a basic one to play around with, take a look at the Creality CR-10S. It sells for $369. There&#x27;s lots of youtube videos of sample output from it and reviews.<p>The bigger version of the same thing which can print 50 x 50 x 50 cm volume, the CR-10S5 is $629.<p>I have no connection to the manufacturer or Chinese vendors, just throwing the name of something I&#x27;m satisfied with out there.

Sweet. Let’s see a benchy.

These are some really cool and novel developments at improving the speed of 3d printers. While some of these might take a while (or forever) to come to desktop 3d printers its great that advancements like these are being made to push 3d printing forward.

I saw this 2 years ago. Long story short, you need a fiber laser and a driving circuit to do this.<p>Sure it&#x27;s 10x the speed, but it&#x27;s almost 100x the price.<p>A Creality Ender 3 is around $200. This printer, with fiber laser, is around $15-20k.<p>And the Ender 3 can&#x27;t make moves that fast. The Atmega chip is just a 16 MHz chip. You can&#x27;t generate the steps required even using Klipper firmware (which is a bitbanging firmware that uses your desktop CPU as motion planner). You could generate the steps using one of the ARM based boards, but you&#x27;d double your BOM - Smoothieboard and Duet both would be around the $150-$200 but can generate the required steps. The BeagleBone Black can generate upwards of 1M steps&#x2F;sec, which is on the high end of pro-sumer.<p>It&#x27;s awesome, but it&#x27;s a pie-in-the-sky that most of us would never even have the source to buy, let alone approach.

I like the last comment, that says the pic is not of the people named, and that one of the professors named is not a professor.<p>Who are those guys, then?

3ders is one of the best blogs in 3D - worth a follow

The threaded filament feed is a really nice touch.

Printer is coming...

&gt;Grace wrote at 12&#x2F;8&#x2F;2018 1:45:34 AM:<p>&gt;That picture is neither Jamison nor Professor Hart; and &gt;Jamison Go is a PhD student, not a professor

If you could have a liquid 3D printer below the starting surface and a solid PLA printer above, you could start in the middle of the object and print into two directions, at twice the speed. Of course- the basic question remains, what holds the middle? Retractable titanium bolt?

I&#x27;ve got a design for a printer that should be about 10,000 times faster than this.<p>It&#x27;s really a game of data transfer speed. How fast can you transfer information about solid vs non-solid into space?<p>The velocity and acceleration of that printer is very impressive, but maxing out the movement speed of a single physical nozzle is not going to get us where we need to be in the future.<p>If anyone is interested in collaborating with me, I&#x27;d love to talk.