Yeah, they’re definitely pretty interesting. I’m usually interested in the other end of the build volume scale with large machines, but it’s super cool to see how they manage to pack so much into such a small space!

That’s fair, I think I misread the tone of your initial comment and got peeved. Voron could very well be the poster child for open source hardware projects and has a huge community around it.

It’s definitely strange that you had trouble accessing the voron documentation, it’s likely they were just having issues with their site. It can usually all be found at docs.vorondesign.com. RatRig also has pretty solid documentation but it can be a bit harder to find. Afaik it’s all at ratrig.dozuki.com.

Hope that helps!

Plenty of open source projects out there, not sure why you would claim otherwise. The biggest is probably Voron, but it’s far from the only one- Others that I’m familiar with are RatRig, Positron, the 100, the Micron, and Powerbelt3D, but that’s far from an exhaustive list. There’s even an SLS project called SLS4ALL.

Documentation and open source are two orthogonal concepts. I’ve seen plenty of well-documented closed-source projects and just as many open-source projects with no documentation at all.

The OSHWA definition doesn’t really touch on documentation aside from saying that the design should be provided in the “preferred format for making modifications to it.”

Reformatting this as a list for readability.

FDM:

• Voron
• RatRig V-core
• the 100
• Micron by Printers for Ants
• Powerbelt3D

Resin:

• Prometheus MSLA
• Lite3DP

SLS:

• SLS4ALL

What is it with the ads for this site infested with sponsored items and ai slop? I’ve seen a few in the last couple days.

Removed by mod

They only made those changes after several of the people whose likeness they stole called them out. Regardless, it should never have happened in the first place.

You mean the browser that was caught injecting affiliate codes on cryptocurrency sites and misleading users into making donations that were collected by brave instead of the supposed recipient? That browser?

This line of thought is short sighted. Your senior engineers will eventually retire or leave the company. If everyone replaces junior engineers with ai, then there will be nobody with the experience to fill those empty seats. Then you end up with no junior engineers and no senior engineers, so who is wrangling the ai?

That’s cool as hell. My understanding is you have to have extremely high volume before uv makes financial sense. The previously-available commercial uv printers are extremely expensive, so the anker printer is only cheap by comparison. Hopefully we will see some more competition at this level that will continue to bring the price down towards something more affordable!

UV printers are used for direct to object printing, you likely own some stuff that has gone through the process. It’s especially popular for customized promotional items that would be otherwise difficult to print on, like flash drives, golf balls, etc.

Admittedly, I also don’t see much of a reason to buy this for my own use, but one could say the same about other hobbies like 3d printing.

Edit: fixed a typo and formatting

I literally log in every day to play them, then log right back out.

The thing is, running a simulation is a pretty inefficient way to do this. Until relatively recently, most printers lacked the comremovedtional bandwidth to run a simulation in parallel with active control (my ender 3 back in 2018 didn’t even have the capacity to enable all features if you wanted a leveling probe). Even now, you wouldn’t want to run this on the same hardware that’s actually controlling the machine, since the simulation would delay its ability to send control signals in real time. That’s why Klipper uses a secondary control board, it offloads the extra comremovedtion to ensure the primary controller only has to compute the bare minimum to operate with as minimal a delay as possible.

Also, a parallel simulation just isn’t necessarily the most efficient way to catch issues. Thermal control accuracy has been a focus in the printing community at least since Anet A8 printers were burning down people’s homes, and we’re pretty good at preventing thermal runway these days.

On the motor side, the accuracy issues are largely a result of an open loop control system- The steppers have no way of telling the controller that they moved the correct amount. Thus, a simulation wouldn’t help with positional accuracy since the board has no idea if a motor misses a step anyway. There are some mitigating tools like stallguard for load sending, but it’s not really the same thing.

I think this will ultimately fall into the same category as watching a simukated CAM toolpath before running CNC machining operations- it will catch the more obvious mistakes like unsupported surfaces, but won’t be useful at catching more subtle issues caused by specific idiosyncrasies of the machine or material.

The Bambu printers do some cool stuff with measuring resonance to detect lubrication and belt tension issues. This is theoretically possible on any machine that can do Klipper’s inout shaping, but requires a LOT of data to be useful (from what I understand), which is probably why we don’t see many printers on the market that can do that.

For thermals, Marlin (one of the popular printer firmwares) actually evaluates the control response of the heater and thermistor, rather than just looking at a specific temperature range. If the behavior is sufficiently different than what the system is tuned for (not heating up at the expected rate, difficulty maintaining temp, etc), it will throw a temp error and shut down before thermal runaway occurs. I would expect other modern firmwares (e.g. Klipper) do this as well, but I don’t have as much experience tinkering with them and don’t want to make definitive statements.

Very early on, Tesla used lidar radar in addition to optical sensors. However, they only use optical sensors today and have for a while. Like many of the poor decisions at that company, the change to optical-only was made at Musk’s demand.

Edit: misremembered, it was radar not lidar as pointed out below

Thanks for clarifying, I thought the comment above was asking why it needed file access in the first place, not all file access.

At least the HHR had a functional rear-view mirror