Project Escher Meant to Speed Up 3D Printing

[Brian_Krassenstein]

Project Escher is Autodesk’s attempt to optimize and speed up the 3D printing process. The Project Escher software is an advanced control technology that was made to coordinate the movements of an entire bank of 3D printing heads. When these multiple printing heads are tied together, the Project Escher software can get them to work in unison to print huge objects all at the same time, which exponentially speeds up the printing process. A 3D printer that is controlled by the Project Escher software will print a large object using its multiple printheads up to 80% to 90% more efficiently than printing it with a single printhead. For each printhead that is networked together, the entire printing process is sped up. You can learn more about Project Escher at 3DPrint.com: https://3dprint.com/127688/autodesk-project-escher/

[Geoff]

Wow that is impressive - I wonder how hard it would be to get them all to synchronise..

What I think would be the really hard part is avoiding the collision of the heads. I mean, what if your object is 1 meter long. You are printing the thing across with all the heads - there will surely be sections in between each print head that would be left out or one of the heads would need to take control of "it's side of the fence" if you get my meaning, so two of the heads are not printing so close that they collide.. I'm guessing maybe they all print over eachother? man this is mind boggling...

[jeffmorris]

Will Project Escher work on 3D printers that have dual extruders?

[Feign]

It looks like it has timing pauses pretty often for when two heads are predicted to be too close, which makes having those wipers pretty essential. The flying Gantry style of the bigger machine cuts down how fast each head can move, but then that's not the point. I can only imagine how crazy this would be with a line of delta printers set edge to edge instead of Cartesian gantries.

As for dual extruders, it's only twice as many paths per layer per head, I don't see why it couldn't be done.

[curious aardvark]

logical progression. Don't see why it should be so difficult.
It's all down to the slicer :-)

But clever and a good idea :-)

And with something like a rep clone. You could extend the printing width to the potential maximum of both heads. As the left head could print max width left and the right max width to the right.
Think I worked out once that it would give you another 3-4 inches length. So take it out to around the 300mm mark.

[technologiclee]

Is there any open source software that can drive a printer like Project Escher?

[compter191]

This is awsome!

Moderator note: hyperlink removed from post