Facility tour and first impressions
Recently, I had the opportunity to take a tour of the Hyrel 3D facilities and see what new stuff they have going on there. While most of the new stuff I saw was covered in their latest UStream broadcast, I figure it would be good to cover some of this cool stuff here for emphasis. Sadly, I wasn't able to take notes on any of the interviews with the staff or any pictures, as both would have required my phone to be working... And it wasn't. (Full disclosure, I'm not a professional journalist by any stretch of the imagination.)
First off, the facility itself. If you've watched the "Quick Tour" video on their Youtube account, then consider that everything has changed since then. The new facility completely fills a two story office building with management, software and production on the first floor and R&D upstairs.
The software and electronics areas are the first you see from the front door. The electronics area looks like it is mostly for assembly of the print head electronics, while the software area is more about making updates, which is understandable, as the new tablet driven printers likely needed some software changes to pork smoothly.
Beyond that is the assembly room and the machining room, These were both very busy when I visited, with around six System printers in various stages of assembly simultaneously. The machine shop was about what one would expect, though mostly geared for working with sheet metal. Most of the printer structure is folded sheet steel and fairly thick steel at that, in the 8 to 10 gauge range. I was impressed at the thickness of the spine on the System printers, which would be a necessity for as much weight as a user could put on the y-axis for one.
Up in the R&D section was the big workshop, with quite a lot of extruders of each type in various disassembled states as well as a System printer with the new tablet-based interface, several iterations of the tablet bracket (the "flagpole") and a few iterations of the tablet interface board were also around to see. The other interesting item in the R&D section was the prototype drilling/milling head, which is definitely bulky, but not as heavy as it looks.
Also upstairs is the filming room where the Hyrel tutorial videos are made, and the demonstration room where Skype lessons are broadcast. Up in this room I got to have a look at the test prints and a more in-depth look at just how the Hyrel printers work. (Also an interesting point of note, the packing foam for new print heads is cut on the Engine printer with the laser cutter head up in this room.)
As for the printer itself, there are a few points of note that I think don't get covered very often about the Hyrel printers. First, the body of the thing is extremely solid and heavy. Something I had been concerned about as the whole thing was an unbalanced cantilever setup was torquing and resonance in the body of the printer, but actually seeing one run in person, it's clear that this is not even close to being a problem.
Second is the integrated user interface, which I never really considered on other printers, since so many other printers in the same market basically don't have one. The System printers and most of the Engine printers have a full computer inside running them with a full GUI and a capacitive touch screen, which I used to think was a bit extravagant but being able to adjust settings on the printer at any time while it is printing is such a powerful tool that it's clearly necessary.
Third, while the hot-swappable heads are the main feature of the Hyrel printers and get talked about all the time, it was interesting to learn that the all of the settings and calibration data for the print head is stored in memory on the head itself. In regular practice, this means there is no load on the computer when adding or removing a head, the settings pop up in the GUI about three seconds after the head is connected, without any kind of processing in the computer itself. It really shines in more unusual circumstances, say if you needed to move a material from one printer to another, or wipe the software on the printer for whatever reason, the head settings stay exactly as they were. Also unmentioned, there are two slots on the printer body away from the y-carriage that have an input for the head to keep a hot end running on idle just in case you're really serious about juggling materials around in a print. (Corrected on this, they are for storage of unused heads.) Lastly, there are two more slots that are on the y-carriage that are away from the printing positions for mounting accessories. Davo mentioned a concept fan accessory and possibly a camera accessory that could go onto these.
To sum up, Hyrel 3D is a decently growing company with a printer that was designed to take just about anything you can throw at it (or install onto it). The System line is definitely be my go-to suggestion for those people whose spec requests include everything and a proverbial kitchen sink. While they're still fulfilling Kickstarter backer pledges right now, the increased capacity of this new facility is very promising for those waiting for the point when preorders are at the front of the line. (Well, I got corrected on this part too, which is very good news.)
