What is most important to you when making a RepRap????

Hi Everyone, I am new here. I am really glad I got into RepRap's. What do you think will be next in the reprap world? or What is most important to you when choosing a printer?

Ideas:
Large Print Area?
Material Diversity?
Glass Build Plate?
Its Looks?
Performance?
Speed?

Thanks ahead for your input.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/02/2014 01:07PM by yoUmake-3d.

All of the above..........

but to me the two main ones are:Material diversity and performance, I don't care too much about the looks or speed (I'm used to print slow for high quality prints) and even though I would like a larger printable area, I know that will increase price and performance issues, so I can split parts and post print process them or just stay in size.

My 2 cents.

Thanks for the fast reply. Yeah I guess the printing of different matierials comes down to the type of hot end and how hot it can get?

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yoUmake-3d
What do you think will be next in the reprap world? or What is most important to you when choosing a printer?

I don't think there is a "next". It's always an evolving ecosystem. Just like with natural evolution I think ideas are naturally developed, mixed with existing concepts, refined, then the process is restarted. Changes are very incremental and while there are some concepts that sometimes take step in a different direction (e.g. Cartesian to Delta), I don't consider it "what's next".

All the things that you mention are things that exist in some form today, and the next generations will improve on all those factors. I would add to the list cost, reliability, and availability.

you left off reliability. that to me is high on the list. it's nice to know that when I turn on my printer, I'm not going to have to tweak(or worse) a bunch of things to get a good print. larger print area would be great too, but you'd also need speed and performance for that.

Yes, I did forget reliability. So far this seems to be one of the greater struggles on my current build - Having the confidence to set it and walk away after sending a print. Thanks for the input. Cat.farmer, I see your point. It seems that speed becomes more critical as the build area increases. Afterall a huge build area would do little good without an increase in speed.

Can anyone share some of the biggest reliability issues they have had to overcome and how they did it? I am in the process of a build and would like to get a good idea of what I need to watch out for.

Thanks everyone!

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yoUmake-3d
Can anyone share some of the biggest reliability issues they have had to overcome and how they did it? I am in the process of a build and would like to get a good idea of what I need to watch out for.

Ultimately does it do what you expect it to do in a repeatable manner.

If you look at a inkjet printer, there's often a calibration step when you install a new cartridge or print head. After that calibration, you're reasonably sure that when you send a page to be printed, it's going to come out looking like it should, the size it should, and on the paper.

With a 3D printer, maybe today when it prints it doesn't want to stick to the bed. Maybe the bed was dirty. Or had a oil finger print. Or the kapton tape was old. Perhaps your filament was a bad batch and absorbed moisture. Or it's cross sectional area is slightly different between the start and end and your flow rates are different. Did your furnace or AC kick on and cause a draft that caused uneven cooling? Is one of your steppers losing a step or otherwise out of sync with the other one and your z-axis is now out of alignment? If your slicer things it's doing one thing, but what the actual extruder is doing can be another...

That's just a few of the things that can go wrong. Some of the things can be prevented: good calibration, quality materials, careful setup/prep. Some of the things are just chance/fate. I think that there's a quite a ways to go to get to the point where I can hit print in my living room on my laptop and I go to another room a few hours later and my part is reasonably guaranteed to be done and just the way I wanted. I can do that with my inkjet printer. I can reasonably do that with some of the basic milling I'm done after initial setup. I can't do that with my printer yet.

In general RepRaps have to worry about those outside environmental factors that are outside the designer's control for reliability in a print. I'm thinking that as time goes by, multi-material paste extrusion with various photoresins as the primary plastic will become the next big thing. Both because of the extreme versatility and because it takes out the least-printable parts in current repraps: the hot end and heat bed.

Also, it seems that photoresins are coming down in price and getting more material options, though they still have a long way before catching up to filament (and probably never will).

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yoUmake-3d

Can anyone share some of the biggest reliability issues they have had to overcome and how they did it? I am in the process of a build and would like to get a good idea of what I need to watch out for.

My opinion - Reliability comes with getting to know your machine. I fought many an issue while designing,building and printing with mine. Some were my fault, or all if you blame my need to be cheep. I think we all start with jamming, bad adhesion, odd produced parts, but once you get those issues worked through, and it may take months, you end up with knowing what your machine is capable of and what you need to do before you hit print. I agree with cdru, you set your expectations for what you think will happen when you hit print, and if all goes right you end up with the product you want. I am lucky enough to get 90%+ success rate with my prints. but I also have to check my z height about every 3 prints.

Just for fun this weekend I pushed the limit of speed on mine, I set the print to 600.. yes 600mm/s.. I have no idea if it was actually going that fast, but it was flying. I think Cura will set whatever speed it feels, based on your print speed, but I was able to do it. It was travel that caused me issues, the acceleration was too much and caused skipping.

To me, the two main factors holding further development are:

Hardware: Hot end.
Software: Slicer.

The slicers are still in infancy, they are less than intelligent. sometimes hitting the slicing button at 2:00 am and not realizing you set a less that perfect extrusion width ends up with a bad mood wake up.....

Hot ends need to be able to keep up with current and future materials, one hot end is good for PLA, another one best for ABS and yet another one for high temp plastics. Yes we are getting close, but still not there "no matter how many people praise the new e3d V6 it still have issues with PLA" not as bad as the v5 though.

I think the next material will be Aluminum alloy, it is within temperature reach of current systems and controlled chambers are not too hard to design and produce. Time will tell.