Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Waiting for each part of a 3D-printed project to finish, taking it out of the printer, and then installing it on location can be tedious for multi-part projects. What if there was a way for your printer to print its creation exactly where you needed it? That's the promise of MobiPrint, a new 3D printing robot that can move around a room, printing designs directly onto the floor.
MobiPrint, designed by Daniel Campos Zamora at the University of Washington, consists of a modified off-the-shelf 3D printer atop a home vacuum robot. First it autonomously maps its space---be it a room, a hallway, or an entire floor of a house. Users can then choose from a prebuilt library or upload their own design to be printed anywhere in the mapped area. The robot then traverses the room and prints the design.
[...] Campos Zamora and his team started with a Roborock S5 vacuum robot and installed firmware that allowed it to communicate with the open source program Valetudo. Valetudo disconnects personal robots from their manufacturer's cloud, connecting them to a local server instead. Data collected by the robot, such as environmental mapping, movement tracking, and path planning, can all be observed locally, enabling users to see the robot's LIDAR-created map.
Campos Zamora built a layer of software that connects the robot's perception of its environment to the 3D printer's print commands. The printer, a modified Prusa Mini+, can print on carpet, hardwood, and vinyl, with maximum printing dimensions of 180 by 180 by 65 millimeters. The robot has printed pet food bowls, signage, and accessibility markers as sample objects.
[...] We had to step back and build this entirely different thing, using the environment as a design element. We asked: how do you integrate the real world environment into the design process, and then what kind of things can you print out in the world? That's how this printer was born.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday November 13, @03:39PM
A few years ago there was a wood CNC carver that had the same idea, instead of removing and clamping a wood door to a large table machine, you clamp this overgrown router thing to an architectural object and it'll carve away.
Its more portable if you take it to a job site (I am not a job site kind of guy) and it takes less labor to remove/install but creates more labor with cleanup and having to haul a pretty large and heavy fancy dust extractor onsite.
Anyway I wonder if that CNC wood carver inspired the idea of 3-printing in the finished location.
The obvious use for this would be elaborate, perhaps weird, baseboards around the perimeter of a room. I'm not sure why I would want that, but it could do that. Perhaps if it 3-d printed plenum-safe plastic it could print HVAC air duct registers in place.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 13, @04:16PM (2 children)
The pages on Valetudo make fun reading, I liked this one in particular,
https://valetudo.cloud/pages/general/why-not-valetudo.html [valetudo.cloud]
It starts out like this:
I like the description "opinionated software" - maybe this will catch on?
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday November 13, @04:41PM
I think it is a defense strategy against subversive entryism. Probably a good idea for software projects in general, for obvious reasons.
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Wednesday November 13, @05:15PM
I dearly hope not. The entire project reads as the project leader being very passive-aggressive and stand-offish. It actually put me off Valetudo which is a shame because the main reason I never bought a robot cleaner is because of the cloud connected nonsense. I specifically want something local-only, so Valetudo sounds pretty much ideal for my needs.
I take solace in the fact the project is open source and seems mature, so if things ever manage to irritate me enough I can fork it and make the changes I want. As a result I may well look to buy one of their supported robots to root and make use of this project despite my current misgivings. However the last thing I would want to see is for this kind of attitude to "catch on" in the open source world.
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Wednesday November 13, @06:57PM (1 child)
I'd expect a 3D printer to make a mess when printing on a carpet: hot PLA draped along shag-pile doesn't feel like a good combination to me.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Wednesday November 13, @07:30PM
There's a lot of issues in terms of inconsistent bed adhesion that can happen if the floor isn't consistent from build to build and folks often times use gluesticks to help it stick well enough to print. On top of that, it's often times helpful to bend the print surface to help get the print removed.
This is just a bad idea in most situations. Modern 3d printers oftentimes come with things like heated beds to help ensure that the temperature is ideal for the print, bed levelers to ensure that the appropriate amount of force down is applied and ultimately you get a lot more irregularities in a floor which means it may not be possible to properly level the bed at all if it's irregular.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Thursday November 14, @01:58AM
Can't all 3d-printers do that? You just have to push out and make a level base. So it could be a lot of extra material.
Perhaps not great on all surfaces, they might stain and leave marks. Hope it doesn't bond with the floor. Stone, concrete ok. Linoleum or plastic carpeting? Less sure. But different material absorbs heat differently. FDM printers can get fairly hot. Warpage?