I'm one of the engineers working on new products at Haddington. It's hard to understate how critical 3D printing was for our product development and our business strategy. We are still very much in-tune with our maker roots since the acquisition. To Ocado's cresit, they've done their utmost to give us both the freedom and support to continue developing products how we best see fit. We've been able to accomplish some amazing things in these last few years and I can't wait to be able to share what we've been working on. I think the maker community is going to love it. Thanks for the shoutout, awesome video! I'm going to share this with the rest of my team.
Just saw this video and I liked it a lot. I'd love to hear about the company's journey from the engineers' perspective, do you guys have any youtube videos?
I think you touched on a key point here. Prototyping. The off the machine finish of 3D printed, coupled with obvious weaknesses of the production techniques used, coupled with the fact that dirt and food particles easily get stuck in all those little groves. Makes it less suitable for everyday products that need to last and be safe to use .
@@botirlasorin And he responded rudely to another comment. I believe if you want a career in social media you should take the feedback to make your content better. I agree that the head movements were too much.
I personally think molds are superior to 3D print when quantity is concerned, and all models are refined and free from operational defects of the component. Bottom line 3D printing is another form of manufacturing which doesn't render others form obsolete rather used in combination with others can make for vastly better products in the end. A 3D printers strength is in prototyping and cost reduction, where as casting and molding has a speed and part strength advantage. Now if you'll excuse me my Ender 3 just finished a phone stand I've been working on. 😊
I would have to agree but as an additional point the other downside to 3d printing is the size of the operation that is needed to meet the same amount of parts an injection molder could pump out also the labor that goes into a print farm would be way more than any injection machine however prusa and mosaic is trying to aid the amount of labor that is needed
@@slant3d I'm starting to think from your responses you have little understanding of anything you talk about. You fail to give any actual explanation as to why you are right when people are critical of your statements. All you do is go "No you are wrong" with no further explanation.
@@star-jz5fk Guys running a business and knows he only grows that business if people believe that the method is not only viable but amazing and innovating.
One of the key factor of Injection molded part is the parts being isotropic. If you also measure your Flexural, Tensile and compression strength you will see that a printed part can be a third to half the strenth of your traditional molded parts. Although, you have to deal with mold complexities. Even with prototype resin molds (amazing process very fun too) you will have for small features to make minimally aluminum inserts. In this video we saw some very detailed feedback or position indicator for stepper motors which would probably need some aluminum inserts for prototyping the mold. Which drives the price up. The real advantage here is that they can build and make money rapidly and in a simple way. (+ flexibility)
Ha ha. well a profeesional persenter often move their head to not make the frame boring. But I agree he needs to dail it down a notch if its not intended to gives guys like us a reason to point it out creating more traffic. 😂😂
RIGHT??? This is bugging the F@#(#* out of me... and the bill of his hat just scooping up air and dumping it on his other side... I just imagined the air being dirt around him and his hat being the shovel... That made it more tollerable as I was laughing the whole time.... maybe time to lay off the edibles while watching youtube... haha
@@rabenklang7 that's why I said overall quality, of course 3d printing has some advantages, but when you sum up the pros and cons of each method, it becomes very clear which is the best
Geometry… I worked setting molds and repairing injection and blow molded parts. Years later got into 3D printing. I’ve since created many parts that are indistinguishable and equally strong and structurally sound. It’s all in the design and execution.
Dexter was a Kickstarter started to end robotic arm scarcity. It successfully raised $108,885. The people who funded this startup wanted this company to provide a service to the general public of providing robot arms to consumers. Haddington or Ocado doesn't provide any 3D printed arms to the public currently, and I doubt they ever will. So, this company stole money from people. And not only did they steal money, but they also didn't put anything in the contract to continue production to serve to the public, once Ocado claimed their buisness. This video shouldn't be celebrated as a postive thing, because there is nothing positive about building a 27 million company, and running.
Well they had stls for the low tier didnt they? So the design is out there with documentation for people to build they just need to source the components which are by design big standard parts.
How do you deal with size inaccuracies due to shrinkage and other factors? It's something I've noticed as a big problem trying to make my own parts, and at least for me it kinda limits my uses to prototype parts where I can alter them to make it fit if needed
you build the tolerances into your 3d modeling, after you've tuned your printer to make it as accurate as possible. For example, my ten+ year old i3 clone which cost me about 300 wayy before the ender series came out, is capable of producing parts that fit inside of a 0.2mm tolerance. I add this tolerance to my holes and some inner dimensions (slots, walls, etc) and then when the parts are doneprinting , they fit. Now imagine your printer is a Bambu Carbon X1, this tolerance would be reduced to 0.1mm or better, and post processing is almost elimnated entirely. Hope this makes sense.
You can tune your printer to be very good at that kind of thing. Granted, it requires a bit of studying and technical expertise. I can get mine to do dimensions within .15mm. It also helps to have an enclosure or even a heater with a temperature controller to make sure you don't have warping.
I use 0.005" as a typical tolerance for my Prusai3mk3. With a little bit of messing around with calibration I feel like this tolerance is very achievable. Buying decent filament helps too. When I first started 3d printing 6+ years ago, most filament had a ±.05 mm tolerance. Now its pretty standard to see ±.03mm which helps when calibrating and keeping things calibrated. I print mostly with PETG but you have to find what works best for you. Get that working well and go from there. Do you have a Makerbot? If so, throw that piece of shit in the garbage and buy literally anything else. If not, happy printing :)
Different materials have different shrinkage rates which you can find data for, for example pla has from 0.3-0.5% shrinkage, so if you use this value to compensate your dimensions that will get the part very close to the intended dimensions.
To answer your question at 5:40, there are many reasons. I'll name two: 1) Getting support from investors & business partners as you try to explain this model - it's very hard with limited case studies to back it up. Investors don't have trust in nontraditional manufacturing, so it is hard to find one who understands. As we look for support, we need more stories like this to help solve that problem. I've shared Prusa's Road to 10,000 printers video many times to help explain the concept. 2) There's a very limited number of engineers who have a Design-for-Additive experience, which is the difference between 3D printing a crummy toy and 3D printing a real product. The brilliant mechanical engineers get hired away by big companies, with great salaries. Really average mechanical engineers do not have experience or knowledge to successfully design for printing, since these methods are not well addressed in college curriculum. So, it's a very small population of folks who are both capable of doing the design and not taken by big companies. Once they arrive in the big company, they are tasked with much larger scale manufacturing tasks so they often become more brilliant at traditional methods, and the 3D printing or Design-for-3d printing experience is often outsourced. This concentrates the design experience in the niche where folks are actually building print farms. The biggest print farms once again are operated by big companies which probably have several legal barriers to the engineers gaining experience, leaving the company, and making a startup which leverages that experience in a novel product.
Wow! Thank you! I've been staring at this arm in my laboratory for a while. No one told me the story behind it. Might take a minute to mess with it now.
Great example of 3D printing accelerating product development>>product launch, which is not often discussed. Lots of focus goes on design modelling/prototyping, lots of focus is misplaced on "mass customization", but I saw through my work there is incredible value in accelerating the development/engineering/DFM process.
Very cool to see that 3D printing is used for product that have a big number of units. I also created a product with my stair climbing vacuum robot. But there are some things to do until I can bring it Ingo mass production 😢
"I don't really know." I do. The answer lies in ANY amazon Alexa stand product reviews, even though they clearly state it's 3d printed, the reviews are FULL of 1 star reviews saying variations of "The finish is awful, full of bumps, looks shoddy". People want smooth things, maybe it's just a matter of convention and people will adapt in the future, or it's simply human preference, since everything around us is smooth including people's skin. The robot arm has a very specific public who already know what to expect from a 3d print finish.
A week ago I made a 10$ robot arm. I just thought you just need a ball bearings for joinits other than that you just can print really everything. My first robot arm wasn't really good but it was better than I expected actually. And I also planning to upgrade the my robot arm to handle 0.2 kg. I am new in 3d printing but I really think 3d printing is better than I thought. Parts are strong and cheap the only down side is time but it's okay because when you prototyping something or developing something you generally doing stuff while 3d printer is printing which is very cool. Also it's very mobile you can take your printer to your home and print there not much work to do at all. I don't think you can mold something in your house easily
I think the issue with large scale 3D printing is the marketing. 3D printing has been marketed for so long as a hobby/toy maker that people don’t see it as a viable alternative. Mold making and the traditional manufacturing process seems like the the way the “big boy real companies do it”. In my mind it’s similar to when you sell a product with a cheap price and customers thing it’s not going to be good. But if you take the same product and raise the price it sell really well. The big guys use a mold that costs 50k but you’re telling me I can do it on a machine that costs $2000. It doesn’t seem real. 3D printing has a perception problem that it needs to get over.
I work with injection molding now as well as 3D printing. You have a big up front cost for the mold fees for injection molding, but after that, 3D printing can't yet match the speed or price of production with injection molding. You can slam out thousands of parts a day on a single injection molding machine, depending on the part. I do admittedly make relatively small parts, so my biggest cost for a single part's mold is like $3000, not $50000. What's so cool though is that 3D printing is a nearly perfect method for prototyping parts that will eventually be molded. Just today I was printing parts in ASA and TPU to simulate mechanical properties of their injection molded counterparts. They are anisotropic because of the FFF process, but you can still get really good tests out of them. I can't imagine what it must have been like to develop injection molded parts prior to 3D printers! What a nightmare of a process that must have been.
Much of this is about scale and cost to produce component that get integrated into a product. For context for hobby/commercial production we need to also consider the level of design skills and effort going into a component. Key to production level 3d-print manufacturing is the quality of design. With a product having dozen(s) of components, there is a huge cost savings to be had with 3d-printing (even with professional commercial design) until a certain scale of production is reached. Note molding and 3d-printing are not mutually exclusive. It's possible to design a product that uses both 3d-printed and molded components.
additive manufacturing is still not really taught in engineering schools (I graduated not so long ago) so I guess it doesn't comes to mind as often as molded plastics
I think it's just a matter of time, awareness, and customer acceptance. When relevant people will get to know the utility value of this method of production, they might turn toward it for what 3d has to offer as what happened in the case this robotic arm.
I'm surprised they wanted to go with FDM printing for high precision robot arms. I would think something like SLS or resin would provide much better strength on each axis. In my experience with FDM, layer adhesion tends to be the weak point. I'm not saying it's not good enough, just that when stressed the layer axis tends to be weaker than the other 2. Also, isn't SLS faster for larger batches of parts?
Because very few people have sls (or even resin) printers at home, compared to the number of people with FDM printers - their success came partly from selling the files for people to print at home...
@@DarkerEmpathyWhile part of their success might have come from selling the files for people to print their own, they also sold complete machines. It's not like the company selling them couldn't use SLS or resin printers to improve the quality of their complete arms.
Printing is an amazing process for prototyping. There's other detriment of this technology, but even strictly focusing on the cost alone - the threshold product quantity for molding/mass production of parts to be more profitable is pretty low. You reek the benefit of cheaper cost for simple parts made by mold, then you start to come up with ways to mold complicated parts.
I'm sure you've gone over this a million times before, but for order sizes around 5,000-10,000 would it be cheaper to utilize Slant3D's mega farm rather than injection molding?
That depends on a lot of factors. From base research I've done, I think 10k parts is usually the break-even point where your injection mold has finally paid for itself and the net cost has hit zero. That's absolute costs, not relative to 3d printing. You would have to get an estimate from Slant on what their costs would be.
PLA was probably dropped because it is prone to mechanical creep, which would probably lead to less stability and accuracy over time. CF nylon is better about that and tougher
So you're telling me that this concept was developed and could have been owned by the public, or at least a company that designed them for general purpose, and instead this fantastically capable machine... Packs groceries and nothing else. Modern IP law and practices are a bad joke. Imagine what we could do if a patent got you a million dollars and a pat on the back, and then your invention belonged to the public.
An automated print farm where they have a large number of printers probably won’t have any benefit from using something like Revo. Probably the only reason they change nozzles is due to wear and when you know what you are doing it doesn’t take long, plus if you use high wear nozzles you won’t have to change often. Revo is good for when you will be changing nozzle often, mainly for changing sizes but also for material (although E3D only has brass and one other material), a print farm is unlikely to be doing that.
I think it's just really costly for huge amounts of products, when the upfront cost doesn't matter that much and the cost per unit needs to cost way less, and every penny matters. but yea, I agree that 3d printing manufacturing certainly needs to be used more often especially for small-medium buissnesses.
I came down to the comments to say exactly this. I dont think I have ever seen someone bounce their head around so much while talking and it is incredibly distracting. It is as bad or worse than the people that move their hands around in random senseless motions while talking.
@@barbaraclements8068 I actually never understood my SO when she told me not to move my head so much(which is not even close to the extent as in the video) because it makes her dizzy for some reason , but here even I felt a bit dizzy
I also think it's distracting, but personally I don't believe it's being done on purpose. That being said, he has a great, clear speaking voice, and video of the speaking is unnecessary, where more action clips of the arm or printing process would be more appropriate.
for the production -> 3d printing takes much more time compared with the molds. inject the material in the mold and get the part ready, take just seconds
"Why 3d print isnt used for products?" "I don't really know" Well here till this point i believed what he said. He exactly knows as anyone who ever printed out something and suffered from various dimensional inaccuracies to layer adhesion and all sorts of first level problem not to mention QA. You exactly know, you just don't want to say it. 3D printing is for hobby/prototyping. Not for production.
You have no idea what you are talking about. A lot of manufacturing techniques have to deal with dimensional inaccuracies and shrinkage, you just need to compensate for that. Layer adhesion and first layer issues can be dealt with using well tuned printers, if you are having a lot of issues with those things then there is something wrong. 3D printing is more than capable of being used in production, have you not seen what it is capable of?
I think it is, but not the regular PLA printed with home 3d printers... at the company I work for we have some professional parts in carbon fiber which are great, you can't really tell its 3d printed.
ummm.... I think you'll find the 260-fold increase in valuation had very little to do with the ability to 3D print parts. It's more likely to be the motion control systems. Otherwise every other robot arm kickstarter would be killing it too. ah ok, I looked into it a bit, seems like they use encoders on the joints instead of the motors, so it doesn't matter if the construction is sloppy (within reason). That's what allows 3D printing to be a viable option.
Encoders aren’t used instead of motors it’s used with motors. It provides positional feedback because without it you can tell soemthing to go to point X but you don’t know if it actually got there.
@@JeronimoStilton14 I didn't say encoders are used *instead of* motors lol... I'm saying the encoders are *positioned at* the joints, not at the motors.
Fascinating concept but you really did not tell us much about the arm or your printing process. We would love you to nerd out and tell about the intricate geometries and advanced printing techniques that you discovered during this project. Deep dive soon please.
@@conorstewart2214 OK, that is useful to know too. I had assumed due to the relatively high price tag, that these were still quite specialist devices, which required specialised printers. Maybe you could do a deep dive into the arm and look at some of the innovative design futures that make it so inexpensive.
3 d printing is too slow compared to molding... and molding systems do not have near no motors or waste or spare products so its cheaper and faster on repeating non complex jobs... 3d is good for experimental and design changing printing. moldings stencil or casing design takes time but after that its just repeating ...
I have a developed a product that is 3d printed and its very complex it houses 1500w of scorching LEDs that want to melt the entire thing, but of course that will not happen thanks to modern day developments.
the manufacturing time does not scale. You need a set amount of time to manufacture an object, no matter if you prototype or produce. With molds you can pump out parts in minutes that take hours on a printer so long as they can be manufactured in an injection mold, plus the surface finish is usually much better. And depending on the object you can't even offset that over the footprint. Lets say you have an injection molding machine, that does 4 Parts every 5 minutes, that is 48 parts per hour. If you can fit 12 printers in the same space that print 2 of the same part in 1 hour, you get 24 parts per hour, less reliable, inferior surface finish and sometimes with more manual labor. If you have an evolving product, a prototype run or a small volume, go with printing. If you have a mass produced product that is out of development, go with injection molds. It is simple, really.
For a fair comparison, need to consider the lead time and setup time of both processes. With 3d-printing, lead and setup time is a matter of loading the print file and filament into a printer. With injection molded parts, a mold needs to be constructed. I expect lead time on a mold is days, or weeks. Would be interesting to see where the cross-over points are in terms of time to make 'xt' number of parts, and in cost for a 'yc' number of parts. The magnitude of the numbers (xt, yc) would interesting, even thought it's likely to vary widely based on size (volume) of a component.
@@slant3d I said large amounts for a reason. The break-even depends most likely on the part and also on the printer type (fdm vs resin) and it comes later than many people think, printers can be amazing. The cost for the injection machine and the lead time on the molds is big. I was thinking more about when the manufacturing is actively running. The volume thing still stands. An injection molding machine can make more parts per cubed foot and hour than printers can, there is no denying that.
It's funny, I've been working on the same project basically funding it myself working at a coffee shop part time and eating beans and rice. I should've thought to make a kickstarter to accelerate my process...
3d printing is great, but has limitations: - it is not worth in big (1000-10000) series, because injection molding is more cost effective - limited strength compare to the PA GF-50 injection molded part (specially in Z direction - layer adhesion) But the fundemantal reason: if tooling cost +( part cost x selled quantity ) < X percentage of the Printer investment + Printed part cost , Than injection molding, Else; 3d printing
I did watch the video. And it seems everyone is missing the point. Dexter was a Kickstarter started to end robotic arm scarcity. It successfully raised $108,885. The people who funded this startup wanted this company to provide a service to the general public of providing robot arms to consumers. So, this company stole money from people. And not only did they steal money, but they also didn't put anything in the contract to continue prodiction to serve to the public, once Ocado claimed their buisness. This video shouldn't be celebrated as a postive thing, because there is nothing positive of stealing people's money, and running.
Its also slow (minute/hours vs seconds) its not as precise, the finish off the printer in comparison to a injection molded part is horrible, its not anywhere as controlled in terms of homogeneity of the part.
3D printing sits in a middle ground of, not really too technologically hard to understand and use, and the other end of being able to produce such geometrically complicated parts that it's hard to know what to print. With a slow increase in more designers being frustrated with the upfront costs of traditional manufacturing, they are turning to additive on a gamble, then finding out it's better, and then reach the make or break point: do they continue with their company or did their first idealised concept not work? It'll get there... just needs government injection to form modular srevices and businesses to accommodate the materials recycling and recovery (not energy recovery), and the new industry of additive manufacturing. Standards do need to be in place and unfortunately they can become a cost barrier. Just needs some help to work.
Incorrect. 3D Printing can scale into the millions with good design and planning. Today if you are making fewer than 100,000 parts you easily save cost and time over traditional manufacturing.
Bro ... 3d printing is slow and does not work when robot joints generate heat. I understand you want to promote yr 3d printing business, but hey you over-selling with that annoying head movement. Maybe prototype with 3d parts and then machine mould the final designs.
Check Out Some of Our Favorite Products Here at Slant 3D: www.amazon.com/shop/slant3d
I'm one of the engineers working on new products at Haddington. It's hard to understate how critical 3D printing was for our product development and our business strategy. We are still very much in-tune with our maker roots since the acquisition. To Ocado's cresit, they've done their utmost to give us both the freedom and support to continue developing products how we best see fit. We've been able to accomplish some amazing things in these last few years and I can't wait to be able to share what we've been working on. I think the maker community is going to love it.
Thanks for the shoutout, awesome video! I'm going to share this with the rest of my team.
Just saw this video and I liked it a lot. I'd love to hear about the company's journey from the engineers' perspective, do you guys have any youtube videos?
you guys are fucked we are coming out with units at 500$ good luck you are going to need it
I Appreciate your great work. Are you still selling 3D files of the arm?
I think you touched on a key point here.
Prototyping. The off the machine finish of 3D printed, coupled with obvious weaknesses of the production techniques used, coupled with the fact that dirt and food particles easily get stuck in all those little groves. Makes it less suitable for everyday products that need to last and be safe to use .
The amount of your head movements is out of this world
@@botirlasorin And he responded rudely to another comment. I believe if you want a career in social media you should take the feedback to make your content better. I agree that the head movements were too much.
hahahahah I was about to say this too. I think its because of his voice control simialar to a singer
I personally think molds are superior to 3D print when quantity is concerned, and all models are refined and free from operational defects of the component. Bottom line 3D printing is another form of manufacturing which doesn't render others form obsolete rather used in combination with others can make for vastly better products in the end. A 3D printers strength is in prototyping and cost reduction, where as casting and molding has a speed and part strength advantage. Now if you'll excuse me my Ender 3 just finished a phone stand I've been working on. 😊
I would have to agree but as an additional point the other downside to 3d printing is the size of the operation that is needed to meet the same amount of parts an injection molder could pump out also the labor that goes into a print farm would be way more than any injection machine however prusa and mosaic is trying to aid the amount of labor that is needed
Labor is not a problem. The automation problem has been solved for years. And implemented in places like our Megafarm.
@@slant3d I'm starting to think from your responses you have little understanding of anything you talk about. You fail to give any actual explanation as to why you are right when people are critical of your statements.
All you do is go "No you are wrong" with no further explanation.
@@star-jz5fk Guys running a business and knows he only grows that business if people believe that the method is not only viable but amazing and innovating.
One of the key factor of Injection molded part is the parts being isotropic. If you also measure your Flexural, Tensile and compression strength you will see that a printed part can be a third to half the strenth of your traditional molded parts. Although, you have to deal with mold complexities. Even with prototype resin molds (amazing process very fun too) you will have for small features to make minimally aluminum inserts. In this video we saw some very detailed feedback or position indicator for stepper motors which would probably need some aluminum inserts for prototyping the mold. Which drives the price up. The real advantage here is that they can build and make money rapidly and in a simple way. (+ flexibility)
Hope this is not rude but I'd like to give a small criticism: you have very expressive head movements which are quite distracting.
@@egeatilla5308 not unusual for radio broadcasters. Probably his other gig.
King Charles has annoying head movements too
Bruh can't let his head be still for one sentence.
Especially if it's a printer that prints plastic instead of iron))
Ha ha. well a profeesional persenter often move their head to not make the frame boring. But I agree he needs to dail it down a notch if its not intended to gives guys like us a reason to point it out creating more traffic. 😂😂
Bruh can't say things that aren't degrading and considerate of others conditions
RIGHT??? This is bugging the F@#(#* out of me... and the bill of his hat just scooping up air and dumping it on his other side... I just imagined the air being dirt around him and his hat being the shovel... That made it more tollerable as I was laughing the whole time.... maybe time to lay off the edibles while watching youtube... haha
hahahahahahah hahahahah I think its because of his voice control simialar to a singer
I gennerally don't like "corporate" channels, but this one actually has interesting content. Well done 🙂
No 3d print beats the overall quality of something made on molding
that is very debatable
you can't mold every stukture
@@rabenklang7 that's why I said overall quality, of course 3d printing has some advantages, but when you sum up the pros and cons of each method, it becomes very clear which is the best
what's the accuracy of molding vs 3D print?, talking about error rate and size.
Geometry… I worked setting molds and repairing injection and blow molded parts. Years later got into 3D printing. I’ve since created many parts that are indistinguishable and equally strong and structurally sound. It’s all in the design and execution.
Really really good video, keep going like this ! I didn't know that such a good project existed. Thank you a lot for the content !
Glad you liked it!
This video is amazing you explain things in a very good way
Dexter was a Kickstarter started to end robotic arm scarcity. It successfully raised $108,885. The people who funded this startup wanted this company to provide a service to the general public of providing robot arms to consumers. Haddington or Ocado doesn't provide any 3D printed arms to the public currently, and I doubt they ever will.
So, this company stole money from people. And not only did they steal money, but they also didn't put anything in the contract to continue production to serve to the public, once Ocado claimed their buisness.
This video shouldn't be celebrated as a postive thing, because there is nothing positive about building a 27 million company, and running.
Every backer received the item they preordered.
Well they had stls for the low tier didnt they? So the design is out there with documentation for people to build they just need to source the components which are by design big standard parts.
Amazing video, thanks Slant3d
Glad you enjoyed it!
@@slant3dI would love to get my hands on the files, I bet you money somebody kept the open source projects going
How do you deal with size inaccuracies due to shrinkage and other factors? It's something I've noticed as a big problem trying to make my own parts, and at least for me it kinda limits my uses to prototype parts where I can alter them to make it fit if needed
you build the tolerances into your 3d modeling, after you've tuned your printer to make it as accurate as possible. For example, my ten+ year old i3 clone which cost me about 300 wayy before the ender series came out, is capable of producing parts that fit inside of a 0.2mm tolerance. I add this tolerance to my holes and some inner dimensions (slots, walls, etc) and then when the parts are doneprinting , they fit. Now imagine your printer is a Bambu Carbon X1, this tolerance would be reduced to 0.1mm or better, and post processing is almost elimnated entirely. Hope this makes sense.
You can tune your printer to be very good at that kind of thing. Granted, it requires a bit of studying and technical expertise. I can get mine to do dimensions within .15mm. It also helps to have an enclosure or even a heater with a temperature controller to make sure you don't have warping.
I use 0.005" as a typical tolerance for my Prusai3mk3. With a little bit of messing around with calibration I feel like this tolerance is very achievable. Buying decent filament helps too. When I first started 3d printing 6+ years ago, most filament had a ±.05 mm tolerance. Now its pretty standard to see ±.03mm which helps when calibrating and keeping things calibrated. I print mostly with PETG but you have to find what works best for you. Get that working well and go from there.
Do you have a Makerbot? If so, throw that piece of shit in the garbage and buy literally anything else. If not, happy printing :)
@@geometerfpv2804I don't know what the tolerances on my printer are. They're smaller than the slop on my digital calipers.
Different materials have different shrinkage rates which you can find data for, for example pla has from 0.3-0.5% shrinkage, so if you use this value to compensate your dimensions that will get the part very close to the intended dimensions.
To answer your question at 5:40, there are many reasons. I'll name two:
1) Getting support from investors & business partners as you try to explain this model - it's very hard with limited case studies to back it up. Investors don't have trust in nontraditional manufacturing, so it is hard to find one who understands. As we look for support, we need more stories like this to help solve that problem. I've shared Prusa's Road to 10,000 printers video many times to help explain the concept.
2) There's a very limited number of engineers who have a Design-for-Additive experience, which is the difference between 3D printing a crummy toy and 3D printing a real product. The brilliant mechanical engineers get hired away by big companies, with great salaries. Really average mechanical engineers do not have experience or knowledge to successfully design for printing, since these methods are not well addressed in college curriculum. So, it's a very small population of folks who are both capable of doing the design and not taken by big companies. Once they arrive in the big company, they are tasked with much larger scale manufacturing tasks so they often become more brilliant at traditional methods, and the 3D printing or Design-for-3d printing experience is often outsourced. This concentrates the design experience in the niche where folks are actually building print farms. The biggest print farms once again are operated by big companies which probably have several legal barriers to the engineers gaining experience, leaving the company, and making a startup which leverages that experience in a novel product.
I appreciate your comment thank you for the information
It is truly amazing what additive manufacturing allows when it comes to a production line and overall supply chain.
Wow! Thank you! I've been staring at this arm in my laboratory for a while. No one told me the story behind it. Might take a minute to mess with it now.
Great example of 3D printing accelerating product development>>product launch, which is not often discussed. Lots of focus goes on design modelling/prototyping, lots of focus is misplaced on "mass customization", but I saw through my work there is incredible value in accelerating the development/engineering/DFM process.
Very cool to see that 3D printing is used for product that have a big number of units. I also created a product with my stair climbing vacuum robot. But there are some things to do until I can bring it Ingo mass production 😢
Cool project. I would have much more time if your product would be available. I hate cleaning stairs!!
the way you move your head is hypnotizing
I find it highly disconcerting.
"I don't really know."
I do. The answer lies in ANY amazon Alexa stand product reviews, even though they clearly state it's 3d printed, the reviews are FULL of 1 star reviews saying variations of "The finish is awful, full of bumps, looks shoddy".
People want smooth things, maybe it's just a matter of convention and people will adapt in the future, or it's simply human preference, since everything around us is smooth including people's skin.
The robot arm has a very specific public who already know what to expect from a 3d print finish.
This should be a podcast
do you have a problem with your neck or head??? why does it move like that???
How about a link to the product of interest here, the robot? That's what I came here to watch!
"PLA is extremely rigid" - it's not, some manufacturers make stronger PLA but pure PLA isn't "extremely rigid".
These robots are just good enough to work at no further then a grocery store.
Congrats on hitting 17K subscribers.
🎉
A week ago I made a 10$ robot arm. I just thought you just need a ball bearings for joinits other than that you just can print really everything. My first robot arm wasn't really good but it was better than I expected actually. And I also planning to upgrade the my robot arm to handle 0.2 kg. I am new in 3d printing but I really think 3d printing is better than I thought. Parts are strong and cheap the only down side is time but it's okay because when you prototyping something or developing something you generally doing stuff while 3d printer is printing which is very cool. Also it's very mobile you can take your printer to your home and print there not much work to do at all. I don't think you can mold something in your house easily
I think the issue with large scale 3D printing is the marketing. 3D printing has been marketed for so long as a hobby/toy maker that people don’t see it as a viable alternative. Mold making and the traditional manufacturing process seems like the the way the “big boy real companies do it”. In my mind it’s similar to when you sell a product with a cheap price and customers thing it’s not going to be good. But if you take the same product and raise the price it sell really well. The big guys use a mold that costs 50k but you’re telling me I can do it on a machine that costs $2000. It doesn’t seem real. 3D printing has a perception problem that it needs to get over.
I work with injection molding now as well as 3D printing. You have a big up front cost for the mold fees for injection molding, but after that, 3D printing can't yet match the speed or price of production with injection molding. You can slam out thousands of parts a day on a single injection molding machine, depending on the part. I do admittedly make relatively small parts, so my biggest cost for a single part's mold is like $3000, not $50000. What's so cool though is that 3D printing is a nearly perfect method for prototyping parts that will eventually be molded. Just today I was printing parts in ASA and TPU to simulate mechanical properties of their injection molded counterparts. They are anisotropic because of the FFF process, but you can still get really good tests out of them. I can't imagine what it must have been like to develop injection molded parts prior to 3D printers! What a nightmare of a process that must have been.
Much of this is about scale and cost to produce component that get integrated into a product.
For context for hobby/commercial production we need to also consider the level of design skills and effort going into a component. Key to production level 3d-print manufacturing is the quality of design.
With a product having dozen(s) of components, there is a huge cost savings to be had with 3d-printing (even with professional commercial design) until a certain scale of production is reached.
Note molding and 3d-printing are not mutually exclusive. It's possible to design a product that uses both 3d-printed and molded components.
Very cool story , nice pick and place
Good video, valuable info, and the comments of your community... great. And i just arrived here by the algorithm recommendation.
Anyone know where i can buy the print files for this?
Why are you making such weird grimaces, and head movements all the time?
Because some people don't like to be boring ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (and also have ADHD)
@@jaqen_hgar why would that matter exactly?
additive manufacturing is still not really taught in engineering schools (I graduated not so long ago) so I guess it doesn't comes to mind as often as molded plastics
I think it's just a matter of time, awareness, and customer acceptance. When relevant people will get to know the utility value of this method of production, they might turn toward it for what 3d has to offer as what happened in the case this robotic arm.
Very true
So is there a way to buy this robot today
I'm surprised they wanted to go with FDM printing for high precision robot arms. I would think something like SLS or resin would provide much better strength on each axis. In my experience with FDM, layer adhesion tends to be the weak point. I'm not saying it's not good enough, just that when stressed the layer axis tends to be weaker than the other 2.
Also, isn't SLS faster for larger batches of parts?
Because very few people have sls (or even resin) printers at home, compared to the number of people with FDM printers - their success came partly from selling the files for people to print at home...
@@DarkerEmpathyWhile part of their success might have come from selling the files for people to print their own, they also sold complete machines. It's not like the company selling them couldn't use SLS or resin printers to improve the quality of their complete arms.
The engineering mind is slowly adapting to new resources; that's why.
i thought you was Rob McElhenney for a sec then lol awesome video bro 👍
Thanks!
Printing is an amazing process for prototyping. There's other detriment of this technology, but even strictly focusing on the cost alone - the threshold product quantity for molding/mass production of parts to be more profitable is pretty low. You reek the benefit of cheaper cost for simple parts made by mold, then you start to come up with ways to mold complicated parts.
Very cool. Excellent example of how 3d printing can work!
Absolutely!
I'm sure you've gone over this a million times before, but for order sizes around 5,000-10,000 would it be cheaper to utilize Slant3D's mega farm rather than injection molding?
That depends on a lot of factors. From base research I've done, I think 10k parts is usually the break-even point where your injection mold has finally paid for itself and the net cost has hit zero.
That's absolute costs, not relative to 3d printing. You would have to get an estimate from Slant on what their costs would be.
is it open source ?
damn that's one heck of an arm.
i need about 2 meter arms for a small 3d factory . would the cost go up to about 10 thousand
great video thank you
Haddington was making some cool products
Can I get the files and plans and make one myself?
lolol for future comments about his head movement, I'm 99% sure it's for his voice control similar to a singer
Good video!
PLA was probably dropped because it is prone to mechanical creep, which would probably lead to less stability and accuracy over time. CF nylon is better about that and tougher
They ever open source this thing?
So you're telling me that this concept was developed and could have been owned by the public, or at least a company that designed them for general purpose, and instead this fantastically capable machine... Packs groceries and nothing else.
Modern IP law and practices are a bad joke. Imagine what we could do if a patent got you a million dollars and a pat on the back, and then your invention belonged to the public.
"fpga supercomputer" lmao
'FPGA supercomputer'? You win the bullshit award for today.
3D printing is only now becoming mainstream. Most people still don’t trust it because they don’t understand it :)
Very true
I would love to know what printer you use and do you see any value in installing a hotend system like E3D's Revo system?
An automated print farm where they have a large number of printers probably won’t have any benefit from using something like Revo. Probably the only reason they change nozzles is due to wear and when you know what you are doing it doesn’t take long, plus if you use high wear nozzles you won’t have to change often. Revo is good for when you will be changing nozzle often, mainly for changing sizes but also for material (although E3D only has brass and one other material), a print farm is unlikely to be doing that.
I think it's just really costly for huge amounts of products, when the upfront cost doesn't matter that much and the cost per unit needs to cost way less, and every penny matters. but yea, I agree that 3d printing manufacturing certainly needs to be used more often especially for small-medium buissnesses.
can you not ... move your head around so much ??
I came down to the comments to say exactly this. I dont think I have ever seen someone bounce their head around so much while talking and it is incredibly distracting.
It is as bad or worse than the people that move their hands around in random senseless motions while talking.
@@barbaraclements8068 I actually never understood my SO when she told me not to move my head so much(which is not even close to the extent as in the video) because it makes her dizzy for some reason , but here even I felt a bit dizzy
@@andreimunteanu750 yea I had to stop watching his head, I can imagine it getting nauseating.
I also think it's distracting, but personally I don't believe it's being done on purpose. That being said, he has a great, clear speaking voice, and video of the speaking is unnecessary, where more action clips of the arm or printing process would be more appropriate.
for the production -> 3d printing takes much more time compared with the molds.
inject the material in the mold and get the part ready, take just seconds
"Why 3d print isnt used for products?"
"I don't really know"
Well here till this point i believed what he said. He exactly knows as anyone who ever printed out something and suffered from various dimensional inaccuracies to layer adhesion and all sorts of first level problem not to mention QA. You exactly know, you just don't want to say it. 3D printing is for hobby/prototyping. Not for production.
Very Incorrect
So it is with other forms of manufacturing. No form of manufacturing is easy-peasy. They all have their downsides and difficulties to deal with.
You have no idea what you are talking about. A lot of manufacturing techniques have to deal with dimensional inaccuracies and shrinkage, you just need to compensate for that. Layer adhesion and first layer issues can be dealt with using well tuned printers, if you are having a lot of issues with those things then there is something wrong. 3D printing is more than capable of being used in production, have you not seen what it is capable of?
I think it is, but not the regular PLA printed with home 3d printers... at the company I work for we have some professional parts in carbon fiber which are great, you can't really tell its 3d printed.
On a side note: Is that the hot guy from its always sunny in Philadelphia?
ummm.... I think you'll find the 260-fold increase in valuation had very little to do with the ability to 3D print parts. It's more likely to be the motion control systems. Otherwise every other robot arm kickstarter would be killing it too.
ah ok, I looked into it a bit, seems like they use encoders on the joints instead of the motors, so it doesn't matter if the construction is sloppy (within reason). That's what allows 3D printing to be a viable option.
Encoders aren’t used instead of motors it’s used with motors. It provides positional feedback because without it you can tell soemthing to go to point X but you don’t know if it actually got there.
@@JeronimoStilton14 I didn't say encoders are used *instead of* motors lol... I'm saying the encoders are *positioned at* the joints, not at the motors.
You could definitely put a 3d printer nozzle on that robot and make more robots.
hose arms can' t handle any weight, printer pulleys and belts?
While the technology is impressive , I belive Ocado was able to get an amazing team of very smart and talented people.
Wow. I thought 3D printing was supposed to make things cheaper.....but $26m for a robot arm is expensive.....
interesting video, thanks. Also, you should calm your head.
do you have arms ?
Fascinating concept but you really did not tell us much about the arm or your printing process. We would love you to nerd out and tell about the intricate geometries and advanced printing techniques that you discovered during this project. Deep dive soon please.
What advanced printing techniques? The parts were designed to be able to be printed at home by hobbyists.
@@conorstewart2214 OK, that is useful to know too. I had assumed due to the relatively high price tag, that these were still quite specialist devices, which required specialised printers. Maybe you could do a deep dive into the arm and look at some of the innovative design futures that make it so inexpensive.
3 d printing is too slow compared to molding... and molding systems do not have near no motors or waste or spare products so its cheaper and faster on repeating non complex jobs... 3d is good for experimental and design changing printing. moldings stencil or casing design takes time but after that its just repeating ...
Unfortunately that is not true
I have a developed a product that is 3d printed and its very complex it houses 1500w of scorching LEDs that want to melt the entire thing, but of course that will not happen thanks to modern day developments.
the manufacturing time does not scale. You need a set amount of time to manufacture an object, no matter if you prototype or produce. With molds you can pump out parts in minutes that take hours on a printer so long as they can be manufactured in an injection mold, plus the surface finish is usually much better. And depending on the object you can't even offset that over the footprint.
Lets say you have an injection molding machine, that does 4 Parts every 5 minutes, that is 48 parts per hour. If you can fit 12 printers in the same space that print 2 of the same part in 1 hour, you get 24 parts per hour, less reliable, inferior surface finish and sometimes with more manual labor.
If you have an evolving product, a prototype run or a small volume, go with printing. If you have a mass produced product that is out of development, go with injection molds. It is simple, really.
Now redo your math with 3000 machines like our megafarm
3D Printing is a better option than molding generally at least up to 100,000 parts.
For a fair comparison, need to consider the lead time and setup time of both processes. With 3d-printing, lead and setup time is a matter of loading the print file and filament into a printer. With injection molded parts, a mold needs to be constructed. I expect lead time on a mold is days, or weeks. Would be interesting to see where the cross-over points are in terms of time to make 'xt' number of parts, and in cost for a 'yc' number of parts. The magnitude of the numbers (xt, yc) would interesting, even thought it's likely to vary widely based on size (volume) of a component.
What about 3D printing a single complex part that would require 25 molds to put together? Oh... OHHHH! *lightbulb*
@@slant3d I said large amounts for a reason. The break-even depends most likely on the part and also on the printer type (fdm vs resin) and it comes later than many people think, printers can be amazing. The cost for the injection machine and the lead time on the molds is big. I was thinking more about when the manufacturing is actively running.
The volume thing still stands. An injection molding machine can make more parts per cubed foot and hour than printers can, there is no denying that.
It's not used more because, like with many things, people are too arrogant to accept it
It's funny, I've been working on the same project basically funding it myself working at a coffee shop part time and eating beans and rice. I should've thought to make a kickstarter to accelerate my process...
either his head joint is loose or he's a bot.
اعلان مخفي . لكن اذا اعتمدوا عليكم في صناعة الروبوتات سوف يصبحوا تحت رحمتكم .
3d printing is great, but has limitations:
- it is not worth in big (1000-10000) series, because injection molding is more cost effective
- limited strength compare to the PA GF-50 injection molded part (specially in Z direction - layer adhesion)
But the fundemantal reason:
if tooling cost +( part cost x selled quantity )
<
X percentage of the Printer investment + Printed part cost ,
Than injection molding,
Else; 3d printing
Very incorrect on all points
@@slant3d Very strong arguments!
Noticing a pattern with these answers to comments …
I'll print a single complex part that takes 25 injection mold parts to put together. See you later
Haddingtons website is straight up broken. Their page doesn't display squat.
Finish the video. They were aquired.
@@slant3d It's not on Ocado's website either mate. Just tell me where on the web this robot arm is being sold at. Please and thanks.
@@HaloWolf102 did you watch the video? They were acquired because Ocado wanted to use their arms that doesn’t mean they want to sell them.
I did watch the video. And it seems everyone is missing the point. Dexter was a Kickstarter started to end robotic arm scarcity. It successfully raised $108,885. The people who funded this startup wanted this company to provide a service to the general public of providing robot arms to consumers.
So, this company stole money from people. And not only did they steal money, but they also didn't put anything in the contract to continue prodiction to serve to the public, once Ocado claimed their buisness.
This video shouldn't be celebrated as a postive thing, because there is nothing positive of stealing people's money, and running.
@@HaloWolf102 I don't think they stole the money, they had only 112 backers, 41 of which wanted the robotic arm, the rest wanted t-shirts.
All due respect, but dude you gotta learn to talk without fidgeting your head so much. It's hard to watch
5:30 Durability maybe?
Its also slow (minute/hours vs seconds) its not as precise, the finish off the printer in comparison to a injection molded part is horrible, its not anywhere as controlled in terms of homogeneity of the part.
"fpga supercomputer"
Sorry man but I can't follow toute head you love too fast, I don't know how you manage not to have torticollis
Can you shake your head more when you talk? I think there is still room in the frame...
Head movement 3D
3D printing sits in a middle ground of, not really too technologically hard to understand and use, and the other end of being able to produce such geometrically complicated parts that it's hard to know what to print. With a slow increase in more designers being frustrated with the upfront costs of traditional manufacturing, they are turning to additive on a gamble, then finding out it's better, and then reach the make or break point: do they continue with their company or did their first idealised concept not work? It'll get there... just needs government injection to form modular srevices and businesses to accommodate the materials recycling and recovery (not energy recovery), and the new industry of additive manufacturing. Standards do need to be in place and unfortunately they can become a cost barrier. Just needs some help to work.
3D printing is so rate limited compared to injection molding/milling that scaling past the enterprise/lab space is very hard (QTY +1000/mo).
Incorrect. 3D Printing can scale into the millions with good design and planning. Today if you are making fewer than 100,000 parts you easily save cost and time over traditional manufacturing.
This guy is like a bobblehead, stop moving your head so much.
FPGA Supercomputer? This is the dumbest thing I have ever heard in my life and shows bro is just yapping.
Warpy, quickly abrading FDM-3D Printed parts for a supposedly high precision machine ? Only ok for the first prototypes…
Very incorrect.
you moving your head exterenky too much :)
Bro ... 3d printing is slow and does not work when robot joints generate heat. I understand you want to promote yr 3d printing business, but hey you over-selling with that annoying head movement. Maybe prototype with 3d parts and then machine mould the final designs.
Please stop moving your head, is annoying. And I rather see more images of the robot arm instead of you talking.
Tourette's?
You move your head WAY too much.