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HP Unveils Industrial 3D Printer 10X Faster, 50% Cheaper Than Current Systems
Lucas123 writes HP today announced an 3D industrial printer that it said will be half the cost of current additive manufacturing systems while also 10 times faster, enabling production parts to be built. The company also announced Sprout, a new immersive computing platform that combines a 23-in touch screen monitor and horizontal capacitive touch mat with a scanner, depth sensor, hi-res camera, and projector in a single desktop device. HP's Multi Jet Fusion printer will be offered to beta customers early next year and is expected to be generally available in 2016. The machine uses a print bar with 30,000 nozzles spraying 350 million drops a second of thermoplastic or other materials onto a print platform. The Multi Jet Fusion printer uses fused deposition modeling, an additive manufacturing technology first invented in 1990. the printer works by first laying down a layer of powder material across a build area. Then a fusing agent is selectively applied with the page-wide print bar. Then the same print bar applies a detailing agent at the parts edge to give high definition. The material is then exposed to an energy source that fuses it.
Eh, I think the weakspot in any 3d printing will be the software. As a hobby engineer, I use Solidworks which is several thousand dollars (luckily already on some of my employer's computers so they foot the bill).
But at home, I tried FreeCad, Cubify Invent, and several other free or cheap options and I find them invariably terrible, at least as far my limited experience can discern. FreeCad in particular, asides from UI nonintuitive issues and heaps of bugs (various cuts and operations simply disappearing for no reason), is only up to v0.14 since launching in 2002. It's like the Gnu Hurd of that genre.
I don't see how the 3D printing revolution will remotely come to town without something decent on the software front that's $200 or less.
*Posted this yesterday in a thread, but was too late for anyone to see it.
It's a sign that years and years of mismanagement maybe didn't completely kill the ability for them to come up with interesting stuff This is exactly the kind of thing they need to do. Shore up HP Labs and solve some neat problems and ship cool stuff. Sure, let's be skeptical, but good for them for trying.
Blender, my friend, now has great sculpting tools akin Zbrush and many less travelled options to export for CAM. It is free and supported by a great community.
I used CAD tools as a pro, 10 years ago. I used NX, solidworks, edge, ProE WF, Autocrap, etc. I coded parametric designs from my own designs, I did non-linear hypersonic CFD with fluent and CFX on those designs, I did reverse-kinematic non-linear space robotics on those designs, I did it all.
When I stopped caring about empirical tons of horseshit produced by those software, and starting creating and designing again in the real world, for myself and others where it mattered, I left all of these software behind and went back to my CG roots. No BS, I have not looked back in 10 years, I have not looked back from Blender in 3 years. I am orders of magnitute more prolific than I was.
Blender has easily replaced 3DS, maya, rhino, lightwave, etc for me also, it is a no-brainer and my go-to now. Except for very specialized things at the end of my production pipeline (games, rendering and to convert back to .IGES for CAD exchange). I use blender for most of my workflow now. Each new version of Blender, I use it for MORE of my workflow. For CAM pipelines, I use something akin to freeCAD when .STL export is not good enough and I need a .IGES file format for exchange.
And don't tell me materials, surface specs, coatings, etc.. yada yada. EVERY shop needs me to explain this to them both in conversation and with production anotations to paper drawings, because NO ONE can read a production drawing anymore anyways. I would rather give my design spec to a machine, everytime, with an IGES or STL.