3d printers and robots

[EricH]

Originally Posted by team1165wins

What I am thinking about to boost accuracy and resolution is to make it more "smart." If it is printing a cylinder, the printer should move the head in a circle to improve upon the resolution.

Gcode doesn't exactly do well moving in anything other than a straight line. Most machines, including 3D printers, use Gcode. What this means is that for most machines, the circles are simply very small straight line movements.

Also note: You're talking about simple X-Y movement here. You move a distance X, you move a distance Y, you can do both at once by going point-to-point... but moving in a circle is pretty tough. Not impossible, just tough. You're dealing with two quadratic variables instead of just one or none...

Also, instead of printing a thin layer at a time, print thinker layers where the shape isn't changing and print small layers where accuracy is required. Our school's ten grand 3D printer doesn't have those features!

There's a really good reason for this, that maybe you don't quite realize. One of THE key definers of resolution is the tip size--how thick the material can come out. That does NOT change. It can be changed between builds, true, but then you have to reset the calibration of the machine--there's been previous discussion on the impact of having the tip too high for the tip size or vice versa. Changing during a build means a dual-head model, with both heads having a different tip, which means changing the calibration on the fly, if I'm not mistaken. That could get ugly pretty quickly--imagine rebooting the gyro while it's processing data, because you need to change the zero point.

I bet the reason that $10K printer doesn't have those features is quite simply that the cost/benefit analysis showed that the cost of the company's time and any parts needed for extra resolution/speed would far outweigh any benefits to the consumers, and drive the price up to $15K or higher, which means fewer customers pick that company.