What has caught your eye at Inside 3D Printing NYC?

[Eddie]

So, you are currently attending Inside 3D Printing in NYC. What has caught your eye so far? We'd all like to hear.

Eddie

[MysteryAlabaster]

Well, if I had to pick, probably everything.

[Geoff]

I was most impressed by the BotObjects ProDesk 3D. It is an FDM printer that prints using multiple colors. The different color filament is channeled through one nozzle to mix colors on demand. It's really a once of a kind printer that I have not heard much about, but does something others don't do. It uses 1 extruder to print in a multitude of different colors. It was priced at a little voer $3,000 I believe.

So it has like several extruders and one nozzle? oh wow, that's pretty much the next step in the evolution for FDM printing I reckon!

[Eddie]

From what I understood it has one nozzle for the fill material and another for the filament. I was very impressed after talking to their CEO and seeing this thing in action. If there was one thing that I would have liked to see more of at the conference from BotObjects, it would be more objects being printed. They kept printing the same bracelet over and over again. I didn't see anything else come off these printers.

All in all, this was one of the printers that I feel could make a huge splash in the market.

BTW, I uploaded some photos of this printer in the BotObjects ProDesk 3D Thread.

[MysteryAlabaster]

Yeah, that's the next printer I'm going to buy.

Well, when I have the money to buy another...

[awerby]

I liked that printer too. They said that it would print soluble support material, and they provide the filament, which as I recall correctly was PVA, and water-soluble. That would be a huge advance in FDM printing that most other printers of this type don't have yet. One issue, though, is that their filament was only available in their own proprietary cartridges, which were rather small, so they could all fit in the bottom of the machine. They were also talking about new software that would let them switch colors more quickly, so something closer to color 3D printing would be possible.

Other machines I liked were the Rostock and Orion printers from SeeMeCNC http://seemecnc.com/; this was a line of parallel-kinematics (hexabot) machines with much smoother action than most of the Cartesian machines out there (some of those booths were really rocking and rolling when the print jobs were happening), a relatively large build volume especially in Z, but only one extruder. Vendors with single-extruder printers mostly said that support's not necessary, and a lot of them recommended MeshMixer http://www.meshmixer.com/, which generates a "tree" structure that's supposed to be more efficient than the typical straight-line supports.

The other FDM printer that stood out for me was the "3dmonstr" http://3dmonstr.com/. It's priced higher than most of the others, but it's really built like a tank, with a solid aluminum structure instead of plywood, metal rods, or sheet metal. It has mounts for 4 extruders, so support material is possible, and it takes generic filament. Instead of (wimpy) belting, it runs on C7 ballscrews, and it boasts 100 micron layers and a huge build volume, especially if you get the 24" x 24" x 24" model. For people who've got the bug and want to make larger and more complex parts than the typical FDM printer allows, this might be the machine to aspire to.

Andrew Werby
www.computersculpture.com