I’ve been 3D printing for around 15 years now. Two industrial Stratasys machines (FDM and Polyjet), TronXY and Creality.
And it’s not so much that I think the machines themselves are bad, but I heavily dislike Statasys as a company. Overpriced machines and material. Our company got ghosted on a $55K machine that needed to be repaired 7-8 months each year for 5 years. (The FDM one worked fine though )
And it’s been a while since I’ve posted on CD, but I’m furious on how they “dumped” a bunch of machines on FIRST teams, which I advised ppl to back away from.
Why am I furious? Because I saw this coming.
Statasys didn’t have “helping” low resource teams out in mind. They were dropping old inventory and leaving teams out to dry. I don’t know if they’ve changed in the last 8 years, but previously the machines would only accept their filament rolls which are now going up in price. Any money teams saved in not buying a $200-300 machine will be eaten up in material.
Oh, and if it breaks down? Hope you have a good technician on hand because these machines are not open source and will no longer be supported.
I’m sorry. Last year was my last a coach for a while, but I still care a lot about the program and I hate when I see companies take advantage of the teams like this.
Full disclosure: I work for Stratasys and played a major role in getting these 3D printers approved for FIRST Choice. My words here are my own and in no way represent Stratasys.
I would encourage you to read through the post I made 2 years ago on this donation, there is a lot of good information on this post regarding how to use the printer to its fullest extent. I’ve included a few quotes with what I find to be the most relevant information from that post below.
Finally, I would encourage you to provide feedback on how you think large 3D printing companies (that don’t always have the most affordable printers), could support FIRST teams moving forward. Any thoughts on what we could do better?
that hurts programs like ours. DaVinci does the same thing (I bought an donated those on a flash sale, all of their printers and filament have NFC or chips) and so did Cube3D when they donated EkoCycle printers. We understand the point of the donation is to turn the team into repeat customers, but forcing them to one brand of material sucks. It really limits what the students can do with the equipment and it’s an artificial limit meant to force your company as the sole filament vendor no matter if the price is steeper than what a team wants to pay. They are now stuck with a nice paperweight or pay what you (the 3d printer manufacturer) deem is fair. There are always teams on a budget and hunting for deals. Help them save money and continue to use the equipment by allowing third party filament.
I totally understand your feelings. 177’s school has a stratasys in a random storage room that I’m told is currently not functional and is too costly to have repaired. I have no idea why the school has it or how old it is, but its disappointing that proprietary filaments and repair costs keep these things either in storage, or in landfills/“recycling” sites.
If the product is fundamentally broken for FRC, it’s not going to work. If it only takes proprietary rolls of filament and gets discontinued after a year (cratering the resale value), it would be more worthwhile for Stratasys to sell the printers themselves and donate the money.
Stratasys has hurt the open source community many times now. Unfortunately you’re not going to be able to reconcile that with “free stuff” easily.
EDIT: it does look like there’s a number of 3rd party filaments out there, so it’s not all bad. But they’re still really expensive, and I can’t tell if the chip swap is necessary for them.
EDIT2: Stratasys has held and restricted key parents for many years, such as a recently-expired heated chamber patent and the original FDM printer patent that expired in 2009. These patents have directly held back open source 3d printing. FRC enjoys the use of FDM printers now as a direct result of Stratasys patent expiration allowing the development of cheaper open source printers. FDM is also a Stratasys trademark, so everyone else calls it FFF, which is frankly just annoying. Getting into the range of conspiracy, some people accuse Stratasys of buying up open source 3d printing resources like Thingiverse or GrabCAD with the express intent of making them worse and promoting their own products… but I can’t comment on the validity of these claims.
Evan,
Thanks for the reply and your hard work here. Overall I still feel the Fortus was not a good idea for teams. Choosing between cheaper material and voiding any warranty left isn’t much of an option and hopefully teams that plan on selling did so before this announcement came out.
Aside from purchasing 2,000 competitor machines and donating them to teams. As a large company it would be amazing if they put together a small team to develop a makerbot style machine purpose built for FRC.
Key items on my wish list (from experience both on and off a team):
Assembled by the students (key assemblies preassembled like the print head)
Enclosure with mounting points for a camera/lighting/ect. Plaster FRC and Statasys all over the side if you wish.
Direct drive (PLA/TPU is all our team ever used and it held up to a beating)
Open source (if the company provided everything that would be great, but wouldn’t rely on that long term. Also, this community would go hard on repairs and upgrades. Just look at the support they have for the Omio)
Pretty rare that teams need to print more than 250x250mm. It happens
Bed slinger. Once dialed in you never need a level sensor. I maintain one at work. After about 20 min setting up the bed, I don’t have to touch it except maybe twice a year to relevel.
Klipper firmware and Mainsail pre-installed and configured (or configure example if students want to try it out). Once I made the switch on our printer, I had a headache thinking about how much time I wasted with Marlin
Sub $200 to compete with existing machines and/or available from FirstChoice
They didn’t have to. They chose to. FIRSTChoice Powered by AndyMark is a completely optional program. There were dozens of other options for teams to choose to use their points.
And even if they did make the choice and found that their choice wasn’t compatible with their team, they could have taken the steps outlined by Evan above.
Full disclosure: I work for Stratasys, my words here are my own and in no way represent Stratasys.
The key items on your wish list align pretty well with mine! I’ve been advocating for Ultimaker (formerly Makerbot) to do exactly this over the past few years (I haven’t been successful, yet). A few other questions for you:
What about materials? I have a few friends with Bambu Lab X1Cs (461 also has a X1C and a P1S), I’ve given them spools of ABS-CF, ASA and Nylon-CF from a Stratasys F123 series printer to try. They’ve had a lot of success after tuning the generic profiles for these materials. Do you think Stratasys material spools would be a good donation?
What about parts? There are a lot of 3D printed parts that FRC teams are using today, is there a specific part that if Stratasys manufactured a few thousand of and donated that would be useful?
In case it wasn’t clear, the donation wasn’t only the printer. It included 10 rolls of filament and a cart as well, increasing the resale value significantly.
I’m going to put on my C suite that wants to actually help rather than get a tax write off/PR for helping hat… Let’s start with a goal.
Goal: Enable teams more access to high end 3d printing and encourage more experimentation with 3d printed components.
Proposal 1: Donate our lower cost printers to teams.
Issues: Out lowest cost printers are not cheap and more our material isn’t cheap either which limits “experimentation”.
Proposal 2: Buy competitor printers that can use lower cost filament
Issues: Political non-starter, undercuts business goals.
Proposal 3: One downside to sales of industrial hardware is that it is typically very high touch, this is a massive cost to sell them but it does mean we have a nice network of who owns our printers. Let’s build a website to partner our printer users with teams local to them. Then we will simply donate filament used by the team, or even just flat out pay for the material used in store credit to the company. It shows off what our products can do, doesn’t require teams to maintain a printer on their own, and it helps teams build inroads to local companies too.
Issues: Some teams may not have access to it due to geographic isolation.
I’d go with proposal 3
Hint Hint Form Labs
(As a note, Markforged with Eiger being cloud based has a real advantage here in that doing this could be as simple as submitting which prints were for a team…)
We were one of the teams that received one of the Stratasys 3D printers. We dithered quite a bit on wether or not we should attempt to get one or not. It has turned out to be a very good choice for us so far. Previously we were 3D printing via the personally owned “home quality” units owned by several of our students – most of whom have since graduated.
We have found the Stratasys exceptionally easy to use and incredibly reliable and it came with more consumables than we have been able to use so far. One day the will run out and we will have more decisions to make, but so far it was a big win for us.
PS, if Stratasys wants to “dump” any discontinued consumables, we would be thrilled to help them out
Big disagree here. Unless you take an approach like a Snapmaker 2.0 where the assembly consists of just screwing a few modules together with basically zero manual adjustment, you’re likely to end up with a bunch of non-working or poorly-working “assemble yourself” printers. My team has a whole closet full of “assemble yourself” Prusa printers (of various models), none of which we’ve been able to get working reliably for any significant length of time (even with multiple 1st-party “upgrades” and fixes we’ve tried) after hundreds of hours of tinkering. I’m sure not every team will have these kinds of issues, particularly if you have students/mentors familiar with building 3D printers, but it adds a huge barrier to entry for a lot of teams.
If your goal is to make the 3D printer itself a learning experience for teams, then “assemble yourself” is fine. But if you’re trying to let teams have a printer they can pick up and start making robot parts with, pre-fab (or mostly-prefab) is the way to go. At the peak of the build season rush, you need a printer that “just works”.
This depends on your build methodology, which can change depending on the hardware you have access to. My one printer is 320 × 350 × 330 mm and I’ve printed entire shooter hoods for both our 2020/21 and 2022 robots, which I never would have been able to do on a smaller printer. Not having to break a large model into multiple pieces opens up a lot of options.
I more or less agree with all of these. I personally think auto-leveling is a must-have, regardless of the type of bed. Also, sub-$200 might be a little optimistic, considering the poor quality of most sub-$200 printers (unless we’re talking a >$500 printer that’s on special discount to FIRST teams or something like that), but otherwise the list looks good.
For materials, my team only uses two:
PLA+ for general applications (probably 90% of what we print)
Carbon-Fiber Nylon for high-load applications (printed on a Markforge)
It seems like most off-the-shelf printers are optimized for PLA with other materials being “supported”, but in my experience, aside from a printer like a Markforge that’s specialized for a different material, it’s VERY difficult to work with other materials, even using recommended settings and direct-drive extruders.
Personally, materials like ABS or Nylon sound neat, but dealing with things like moisture, fumes, and shrinkage makes them more trouble than they’re worth the vast majority of the time. Almost any part that needs to be printed for an FRCFIRST Robotics Competition team can be printed with PLA (and if strength is a concern, increase the wall thickness/infill). Dual extrudes can be fun for disolvable support filament, but also not necessary for most parts.
This is a hard question tbh, since we’re talking about, effectively, a 3D printed, non-custom part that many teams could use, preferably that doesn’t change season-to-season, and that isn’t already being produced by other vendors via injection molding or otherwise. I’m not sure I have a good answer.
Quick question, are these genuine prusas or prusa clones… if the former than prusa support has you covered.
I would like to make people aware of the bambu a1 mini which hits most of the points on the list. But i do agree that getting a printer for sub 200 dollars with that list is near impossible.
I’ve been running mine for just under a week now, and while I still need to see how it holds up over time, I fully believe that Bambu Labs has rewritten the book on what an entry level printer can and should be.
At $300 USD, it’s showing to be a phenomenal, feature packed printer, that “just works” straight out of the box.
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