Thursday, 4 September 2014

Software Issues

I have a MendelMax printer with dual bowden extruders, one has a 0.35mm nozzle which I use with ABS, the other nozzle is 0.5mm and I use it for HIPS. Or at least that's the idea. I have found that most slicers have trouble with multiple extruders that are not equal in every way to each other.

This seems to be a general problem with 3D printing software right now. Another example of this problem is that Marlin doesn't seem to allow different PID settings for different hot ends.

A lot of the hardware improvements right now are incremental and I don't see this changing until we get colour mixing or something similar. What we need right now is more and better software. 3D scanning that can be done just with a cell phone, in the future we may have things like project Tango, but we can do this *right now*. Slicing should be better quality, by which I mean the gcode should be valid and produce an actual print if the printer is in working order, and faster, as I expect meshes to get much more complex in the near future.

A few extras would be support for better file formats, I don't love AMF but it's less limited than STL, new file formats for things we just don't do at this point that could really improve constellation support. I would love to see better firmware, but that may require better hardware as it looks like Arduinos are maxed out by current software.

TL;DR: 3D scanning with phones, slicers that are faster and never produce garbage. Extras: AMF, intermediate representations.

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