Filabot

[filabot.com]

Anyone know anything about this yet? I just stumbled over it and it does sound cool but I am hesitant to go overboard without other players opinions.

---

_______
I await Skynet and my last vision will be of a RepRap self replicating the robots that is destroying the human race.

You will be on the bleeding edge of 3D home manufacturing if you go there. Be prepared to fail a lot (because that's how these technologies eventually succeed).

Well, I wonder (not counting the failures) if doing your own is worth it in the end? I hear about filaments that are sub par coming out of China and wonder if this would be any better and is it really cost effective to do your own?

---

_______
I await Skynet and my last vision will be of a RepRap self replicating the robots that is destroying the human race.

The Chinese filament really isn't that great, 2to3 out of every ten rolls is lumpy and has thin sections all the way through it, ossacionally you'll get a section that goes really thin or where it's broken and they've bent two ends together,

Anything home made i would be tempted to start leaning towards a completely different size altogether eg 1.5 mm this makes things like winding easier, but also allows the use of even smaller extruder and higher printing speeds,

As far as cost effectiveness it most certainly would be cheaper to produce your own since you would really only extrude what you need and the raw granule depending on grade is very cheap compared to the cost of filament,

For the purposes of making money from it i think you would need some kind of proper quality control on it and even then it doesn't seem to help the Chinese much they are still producing crap

I just wonder if we would produce crap too? I mean the high quality filament has to have been labs and/or environments than we would, right?

---

_______
I await Skynet and my last vision will be of a RepRap self replicating the robots that is destroying the human race.

The filament producer that do the good filament have closed loop feedback mechanism that control things alike screw speed and spooling speeds based on filament diameter,

The Chinese tends to use machines that in a previous life were for recycling plastic, and the quality of the plastic is irrelevant because it used to be chopped up straight away after wards,

I think even with a fairly dodgy filament extruder we can produce filament that is on par with the good stuff if not better i think what we'll see is somthing more akin to a price war where the current filament producers will have to start dropping their prices to make it unviable for people to make their own, pp3dp will be a classic example of this with their rip off $80 per 700 gram spools when you consider the stuff costs sub$5 in granule form per kg

Yeah, they will have to drop their prices or cease to be relevant since you could make your own from pellets.

---

_______
I await Skynet and my last vision will be of a RepRap self replicating the robots that is destroying the human race.

I don't think they will cease to be relevant since there are always going to be people who don't really want to make their own how ever they will simply have more options

Well, in the business world 20-30% of the customers you used to have (meaning you still have 70-80%) makes you irrelevant and they will be forced to make decisions. Either they will close up shop or lower their prices. Even if the customers you had left were 90% a hard decision will be made because I know at least 10%, if not more, would do it. Some companies will jack up their prices to compensate for the loss of customers but those companies don't normally succeed for long in any cut throat business which I think this could turn in to.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/08/2012 07:36PM by Dark Alchemist.

---

_______
I await Skynet and my last vision will be of a RepRap self replicating the robots that is destroying the human race.

Cut throat it will be...

If we had a cheap way to determine mass flow rate then that would remove the problem of creating very uniform filament. The idea of using the filament to control the extruding rate in Reprap is clever, and simplifies the design a lot, but does transfer the problem from the printer to somewhere else (like most of the Reprap design does).

With a different extruder design, perhaps the filament feed and extrusion could be decoupler. For example, a small pump to extrude molten plastic, and a pressure sensor in the melt chamber. The filament feeder would use the same mechanism as current extruders, but the feeder is used to maintain pressure in the melt chamber.

I expect these ideas have been explored already, but rejected due to complexity/cost. There is a trade off between cost of filament, and the cost of the printer.

i have looked into using a loacell to get feedback on how much pressure is on the filament, and i'm looking to use one in my granule extruder however it is yes cost prohibitive

for cheap and easy pressure feedback ,one avenue i'm looking at is using QTC pills , these are just a pill shaped thing that when squeezed drops in resistance, its a rough way of doing it but hopefully it works well enough

I agree the cost is what would kill it for home use. I do like the idea of measuring pressure to determine flow rate as that would even take into account a blocked nozzle, with the right equation, and out pops a chopper blade to remove the obstruction.

Never heard of QTC before though.

---

_______
I await Skynet and my last vision will be of a RepRap self replicating the robots that is destroying the human race.

the original QTC pills aren't even made any more, they now do these pads and strips, the cost of them i think is about $1 a piece