Has anybody tried this? 3D Printering: Non-Planar Layer FDM | Hackaday
I recently got a 3D printer and was looking to upgrade the extruder. I was originally going to go with an E3D head, but this article is making me reconsider and getting a Merlin head so I can try non-planar printing.
IT looks really cool, but not so common place yet. Would be neat if a company like Simplify3D would come up with a slicer. Who knows how reliable the script is with only a few parts done as an example.
E3D Lite would work will with the mini. It doesn’t have the power I feel that you could use a V6 to it’s full capability.
I’ve been wanting to put a two axis gimbal in place of my head to do contour-mapped version of this. By rotating the nozzle into the plane you get rid of almost all of the surface imperfections though you are still limited on your edge sharpness based on the nozzle size.
I recently was given a camera gimbal I was eyeing up for the task but it weighs half a tun and is almost larger than my printer - so that one will have to wait for the next big printer.
I was also contemplating making a stuart platform as a 3d printer.
But ya, as noted, the biggest problem is the slicing software. I can make the hardware all fine but would need to spend another couple weeks (read months) making a slicer for the task.
I’ve done some of this but very basic using hand edited GCode. Its very tedious.
Nice to see the script I’m gonna do some more looking into as but I’ll have to change it to Python to run on Cura.
But to run the script you’ve got to have all the parameters figured out before hand…
Also I’m not seeing it in the script but your going to have to alter the extrusion rate of the nozzle. Increasing it as you increase the hieight of the head. But only in places where your moving away from the height of the previous layer. No way this code has that built in.
We need way better slicers. The GCode though can do its part already. Its pretty mature at least with some things
That being said test a lot before doing the final print.
It seems like a delta-style printer is probably the most promising in this area, as it could be modified to tilt the head to avoid collisions and remain parallel to the non-planar surface. You might need 6 motors, arranged similarly to a stewart platform.