PiMaker Rotary 3D Printer in Action - Pretty cool

[AbracadabraMan]

I've never seen a Rotary 3D Printer in action before, so I thought this video fo the PiMaker was pretty cool. Supposedly because it is rotary, (rather than typical xyz) it can print larger objects (I'm not sure the reason). Check out the video below.

It utilizes the Printrboard set of electronics to drive a circular build plate instead of the standard cartesian coordinate based system of most other 3D printers. The benefit is that it has a very large build volume for it's relative chassis size. In fact, this particular configuration utilizes an 11" build platform (with 10.5" usable) and and 8" height, giving it a build volume over 650 cubic inches.It utilizes all the sandard firmware and software with the exception of a single post processor script that does the polar conversion. This utility is currently written in C# (Mono.) It's usage is simple... just pass it the name of the file you wish to convert. It will create a backup of the file and rename the new one with the old name. (There are a few more modifications I'll be making to this file, but it works as is right now.)

You can find this on Thingiverse at: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:128700

[McNabb5]

Pretty cool concept. I think most the printers in the future will end up utilizing the rotary rather than the xyz axis model. I remember seeing another rotary style printer, but I can't remember the name of it.

[Jeremia_Munchkins]

How exactly does this allow for a larger build size? To me it seems as though you are still limited by the platform that the build is printed on.