Quote Originally Posted by 3dkarma View Post
This looks to be for creating filament. I see a geared DC motor, a nice big heat sink and what looks to be a heater block. Am I right in saying the cutout forward of the green gears is where the hopper goes?

The design is nice and compact. What I've seen of extruders to date relies on distance and a heat break, rather than having a heat sink, which means they're much larger than your design. Are you going to actively cool it?

I like the fact you're using a heating block. If my assumptions are correct, I think it will allow you much finer control over the heating of the plastic.

I can't see what you're going to use to force material through the machine. Is it custom-machined or a standard off-the-shelf part?

I can't see what sensors you have attached to this (if any). Will you be measuring filament width as it's extruded and fine-tuning heat/pressure to control it?
We are trying to keep this as compact as possible without hindering filament quality. We are currently both designs to dertermine if active cooling is a possibibility.
You are correct about the heating block! We have calculated the mass and power needed for the heating block to produce consistent temprature and uniform heating.
As for forcing the material through the machine, it is a shelf part, however we have tested more than 10 different feed screws in order to assure we are using the best one.

The Strooder doesn't have filamnet measurement as a standard, however pre-sets are being fine tuned in house and these will be accessible via the screen on the Strooder!
There will be an option to manually adjust the variables if needed. What's more, you can also make your own pre-sets for the your favourite flavour of filament. To aid this, we are currently creating an online service providing recomended Strooder settings informing you of the best and latest ways to create desried flavours.

The actual sensors included in the Strooder are for temprature, motor speed and saftey sensors.
We have been planning to create accessories such as filament winders, recylers, filament diameter checkers and others but this will depend on the Strooder's success.

I hope this helped