Prusa XL

Has now been announced, shipping mid next year.
https://blog.prusaprinters.org/origi...st-look_58312/

My thoughts.
Some weird - dual bed axis? I expect Prusa can get away with it with their tight manufacturing tolerances, but still an unusual decision.

The good - Extruder has some very cool features, including a load cell to determine first layer thickness, regardless of the print surface, and also to tell if a jam has occurred. Very clever lateral thinking.
Other good - Printer seems designed to be as compact as possible, which is always a good thing, IMO.

The very good - PCB bed in multiple segments with zones. This, IMO is very interesting, opening up the possibility for large DC beds, biased and small area heating, and removing the need to heat up a huge slab of glass or aluminium.

And lots of other interesting stuff. I suspect quite a few of these ideas we'll see adopted by others in the industry.

I've read the linked page, but don't see a reference to "dual bed axis." What does that mean? There are some pretty slick features expected with this new design. E3D has a five tool changer kit on the market, but it appears to be similarly priced without the great tuning features and also requires a ton more work to build.

Oops. Should have been dual Z-axis. Means that the bed is controlled (and can be aligned right-left) using two lead screws. Many printers with larger beds are using 3 leadscrews (and occasionally 4), to allow tilt to be corrected in both X and Y.

Thanks for the clarification. If the two z-axis steppers are independently controlled, that's a bonus. Many multi-motor z-axis configurations are synchronized but not independent. You may be more familiar with the larger bed systems than I.

yeah the full system with 5 tool changers comes in at $3500.
Josef mentions in the interview with joel, that they've been partnering with e3d - so that's definitely where the tool changer is coming from.

Which is pretty good.

It's an interesting looking machine alright.

One thing I really don't like - it's still got all that printed petg - and on the model in the video I watched, you could see holes in the surface of one of the key y axis brackets.
That's really poor for something at this price point.
You'd have though bvy now they could have bought their own injection moulder and employed somebody to cnc the moulds.

It is good to finally see them upgrading the electronics and the multi segment heatbed is really neat. Apparently it's just cheaper to make tiny beds with lots of thermistors than one big bed.

On the whole it's a nice looking corexy - probably not a patch for a voron for speed, but I can see josef selling a lot of them.

The tool changer is not e3d’s design. It’s quite different from e3d’s. “ Our internally developed kinematic coupler mechanism ensures millions of trouble-free tool changes” - Prusa.

Also, Prusa aren’t and can’t go with injection moulding. Firstly it’s core to their whole philosophy to use 3d printed parts. More importantly though, many of their designs require additive manufacturing.

No idea why some people think injection moulding is an improvement over 3d printed parts. A huge amount of my (and others) printer upgrades have been around replacing injection molded or stamped steel parts with better fitting, better designed 3d printed parts.

The heatbed is unlikely to be cheaper than a slab of aluminium. It still requires a large and well machined aluminium carrier (so, like a normal bed, but with loads of machining). It is however, an easy design to power using dc power. That is an important design constraint on a printer designed to be sold internationally and assembled as a kit.

Only just seen this a couple of hours ago.

If I can get a refund for my BCN Epsilon W27 there's a strong chance that a closer look at it will be required.
It seems to have a lot of features that are sadly missing on the BCN, auto bed levelling being just one of them.

@bikeracer2020, I have a BCN Sigma R16 and agree with your assessment. The XL direct drive extruders are icing on the cake. The long Bowden tubes on the Sigma are a frequent nuisance. I wish the XL would (will?) support 2.85/3.00 mm filament, so I won't be left with a personal warehouse of 3 mm filament.

I would expect that could be done, but not with the Prusa design. I doubt they'll do a 3mm extruder. Main challenge would be working the design around the loadcell, heatbreak thermistor and other new bits that don't form part of a traditional hotend+extruder.

as usual you know better martin - josef says it's cheaper to make lots of smaller beds - but what does he know compared to you.

7:00 in the video linked. 'it is cheaper and easier to manufacturer small beds and put them together'.

And if that's not a direct ripoff of the e3d tool changer, it's so close as to make no difference.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhdBLtDVnNc

Injection moulding is superior in a lot of cases.
It's also easier to use different ,materials.

Opensource does not preclude using injection moulded parts.

The xl is a lot less user duplicatable than any of the previous prusas.
There is a lot of propriatary electronics in there that would be really difficult to copy.

So in house injections moulding - would just make sense.

And if i paid that kind of money and the parts had holes in them, i'd be more than a little pissed off.

Prusa have also ripped off autowiz's no crossbeam design for the frame.
The swine !

I think, given that there is almost no chance that the XL bed would be cheaper than a basic slab of aluminium with an AC heatpad slapped on it, that the question that would need to be asked is "cheaper than what exactly". From the context it's pretty likely Joseph was talking about cheaper than building a large PCB bed with the features they were after, which would make sense. It's very unlikely that he was talking about the commonplace Alu bed and silicone heater.

I find it interesting that you're prepared to take what Joseph says in the video as truth (even though it's lacking in context), but not what is written on the Prusa website. Their toolchanger is internally developed, and uses a different mechanism to E3Ds (as can be seen in the video).

Prusa already do in-house injection moulding. They use if for parts that don't make sense to print and to use up waste filament. They don't use it for most parts for the reasons I stated before.

Why would Prusa's electronics be hard to copy? You seem to be assuming they aren't going to be open source and posted up on github. Any reason for that assumption?