*** late post -- I had meant to publish this right after CES, but forgot. ***
I flew to Las Vegas early Friday morning to check out CES. Yeah, I knew that one day wouldn't be enough, but armed with my CES mobile app, I was hoping to make it through most of the stuff.
My main goal was to check out 3D printers. Actually, my only reason for going was to check out the new Robox, a 3D printer that I had backed on Kickstarter as a beta user. I ended up seeing a handful of cool things while I was there. I'll cover 3D printers first.
Cel's Robox surprised me -- it was a lot smaller than I had imagined. While the Replicator 2 takes up practically the entire depth of my desk, the Robox would sit very comfortably off to the side of my monitor, and that's probably where it will live once delivered. The frame looks very nicely designed. I should have asked how it was manufactured, but it appears to be a cast aluminum piece with very nice, clean curves. The lid rotates upward nicely to reveal a smallish heated build platform. They are using a custom-made PEI build plate, which is supposed to be the Holy Grail of all build surfaces. The ground rods for the linear axes seem a bit small, but then again the extruder is a light and small package. I forgot to ask them how torquey it is, but it might not be a problem since there is a filament feeder module inside of the Robox. There's also a second space for the extra filament feeder. They have not yet decided how the second spool of material is going to attach (if at all) to the Robox. The spools carry 40% less material than your typical FDM spool (600g vs 1kg), but at least the filament feeder has an encoder that can detect when the filament has run out. You will be able to replace the spool mid-print, though I don't know the details of how they have implemented that feature.
Print quality was very good. I held a tiny print of Yoda's head that was printed without support material. Given those settings, I think it did a pretty good job with the facial features. The buddha figurine showed impressive detail on the back with the "embroidery".
The team was very nice and Ian was especially chatty when I told him I was a beta backer on Kickstarter. It sounds like it will be very fun to work with these guys as we iron out the details of printing a variety of materials. My focus with the Robox is 100% on nylon printing.
Moving on, I saw other garden-variety printers, like the Solidoodle. Their latest gen printer, coming in at just under $1000, is pretty well built, though it's basically just a steel box with a door. There aren't any bells and whistles with this unit. The prints they had on display were very impressive, however. It seems to be able to print large ABS and PLA models without a problem. I believe the build area is 8" cubed.
On the ultra-cheap side is the DaVinci from XYZ. The $499 model is impressive, given that it has dual extruders and a reasonable display. However, I think the dual-color prints were pretty awful. They have some work to do on their software because there are very noticeable gaps between colors. The DaVinci 2.0 has a much nicer display, and while I didn't pay attention to the differences between the two products, the 2.0 also suffered from the same print defects.
MakerBot had a great booth and showed off a wide range of prints from their products. They had the new Mini, Replicator, and Z18 on display, but weren't running any of them. I found MakerBot to be the least-engaging of the 3D printer companies. No one came up to me and asked me if I had any questions. I just took a few pictures and then moved on.
mcor technologies had the most awesome 3D printer I have ever seen. At first glance, when I saw all of the motion and mechanics, I thought, "what is this monstrosity???". Then I took a closer look, and saw what it was -- a copy paper laminator that glued and cut the paper layers! And then a rep walked up to me and asked me if I had any questions (yes!), and that's when I realized how awesome this printer was.
First, I have to say that this is not a printer for home users. I am not going to be buying one of these things any time soon. At $45k (I think that's what he said), it's really aimed at those companies that own the SLS-type machines. But in my opinion, I think this product can blow the competition away.
Here's my understanding of how it works. The printer supports full color prints by using standard copy paper and a special inkjet printer than ensures that the paper is properly saturated with ink. The paper has registration marks printed on it as well, which facilitates consistent paper location as the pages are laminated together.
Lamination is done via a mechanism that drops little glue dots on the page. After the glue is applied, the next sheet is placed on top and the entire stack of pages are pressed against a heated platen at the top of the machine. Following the lamination process, a swiveling knife blade of sorts traces the outline of a single layer of the part. This process is repeated over and over again until the part is fully "assembled". The excess paper is very easily removed by hand. The rep allowed me to take one of their parts and peel away the layers. It was a much more enjoyabled process than removing support material from FDM printers.
I'd love to have a printer like this, but obviously I could never justify it.
