Prusa XL announced

Pretty cool. Here is the link.

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Here is a video link with most of the highlights.

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I won’t be buying one, but would in a flash if I had a purpose for it.

I may be wrong, but the development time does seem to have been very well spent, and for what it is the cost looks to be in some sweetspot. Having said that you could spend almost $4k if you want to pick all the options but you’d have a pretty cool machine.

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That looks really nice. There are some neat upgrades.

$2500 for two tools and $2000 for one. Doesn’t seem like a huge difference until you realize that my whole printer was near the $500 mark. I love these machines. I hope a lot of this innovation trickles into machines I can afford. But I can’t justify that price.

However, I sure hope they get one at work.

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The bed, the drive gear, harmonic drive, load cells everywhere. Power loss recovery, it seems like a lot less futzing will be required.

I think this is a huge step forward for 3D printers disguised as a big printer. I really hope to get to learn more about how they keep 16 planes, planer, and if that harmonic drive is really accurate. and load cells…yes, how are they tying them into marlin?

On the price discussion. I met a gentleman this evening that brought over an ultimaker, I have never really checked one out in real life. That printer is $3k to $4.3k and has nothing like that xl.

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My Mk3 has saved my bacon twice - on one occasion we had a big outage late in the evening and I didn’t want to wait around till the wee small hours till the power came back on to push the “start again” button, so I unplugged the machine (it knows the difference between being switched off and having a power cut) and plugged it back in at a civilised hour - amazingly it all just worked.

I’d love the challenge of building from scratch, with all the cred that goes with that, but my printer has turned into an essential part of my workflow rather than a hobby - hope that doesn’t happen to the CNC! :smiley: .

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I love so many of these new features! But I agree I can’t afford to pick one of these up. And I am sad that my new job doesn’t let me buy 3D printers like my last one :frowning: .

I really like the tool changer. And I suspect they will get really creative with that. Using different size nozzles in a single print for various affects. I also suspect we will see several creative tools get developed for it as well. Like a hot sculpting tool to iron the prints smooth. It could have a flat bottom a curved side and a flat side. The. They could use that as often as needed to smooth out (iron) sides, angles and tops of prints. Or other tools like low powered mill tool, plotter pen (potentially conductive ink), claw (for placing parts), Soldering iron, I mean this could bridge the gap between 3D printers and many other manufacturing techniques. Fascinating.

I also really like how they implemented the tool changer. So simple. Spring loaded latch that holds it in place. Makes me think how I might be able use a similar design on other projects.

I like the pressure sensor in the tool mount. They are using it for: bed leveling, z height, jam detection, and automatic alignment of the different nozzles. That’s cool!

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It’s a neat printer, but there are some weird design choices in it too. Notice they’re not printing very fast. Also that open front end might cause some rigidity issues. The internal led strips mean you’re not going to be printing the higher tech filaments because it’s going to require hotter chamber temps. Not having a third Z motor means no true bed leveling, though with that build plate I guess it doesn’t matter. You’ll never get all those tiles perfectly flat anyway.
That extruder is pure sex though.

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Just noticed Prusa XL update, blog post shares more details, video and design challenges/changes XL Update #2 - More timelapses, a closer look at the electronics, Nextruder news and schedule update - Original Prusa 3D Printers

Beta in Dec, Production delivery ramp up Jan 2023+…

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WOW, there are so Many things in there that are sooooo far advanced! If they work right that thing is definitely worth 2k. And i have never thought prusas were priced correctly!!

Lol i just had 2 watch a 2nd time. How are they doing that. They now must have 100 percent custom fw. Marlin cant vary bed heat. It cant do dual thermistors, and on and on. Very exciting!

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When I saw it at mrrf this year, I wasn’t impressed. It’s still prints slow as hell, and Angus from maker’s muse touched it while it was printing and knocked the hot end off. They didn’t get it working again after that.

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The cycloidal gear, etc… yeah looks like they took a page out of NASA’s book when they had budget meetings. It is probably intended as a “commercial production” printer, where the prices get inflated and the competition is tight. I hope that doesn’t slow down the aforementioned trickle down that we look forward to… and hopefully it isn’t foreshadowing of Prusa growing out of the hobbyist market and focusing on industry.

I’m curious about the “need for speed” - yep I know when you are prototyping stuff that’s a useful thing, but for now I’m really happy to produce stuff that’s the quality of a “bought one” (or close enough) on a machine that can do that all day every day.

I suspect that the reliability aspect is pretty high on Prusa’s mind in its product development, which is one of the reasons they are still testing it. IF the XL can be anywhere near as reliable as the Mk3, it’ll be worth the wait.

I’m very curious to see how the Bambulab product will fare after a few thousand hours of operation - perhaps that’s my next printer, but I’m not convinced about a few things there either.

Is speed everything?

They’re running a corexy printer at cartesian speeds, and it still isn’t getting proper layer stacking. My slow speeds are 100mm/s with waaaaaay better layer stacking. Speed isn’t everything, but what’s the point of having a Lambo when you drive it like a Geo?

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