I agree , Polar printers seems to be perfectly suited for such tasks , barely any movement from the toolhead , just spin the heatbed and voila ! vases printed in no time
It would be super fun to watch but I don't think it's actually going to be faster in any way. Speed printing limits are pretty much always flow and cooling related, motion isn't the bottleneck.
Volumetric limits of the hotend are already what slow down the top printers. It's probably not very different in speed, but it'll be a ton quieter and it won't vibrate. So surface defects on tall prints would almost completely disappear.
It would appear that if not rotating the turntable then any polar printer is also optionally a traditional x-y-z printer, and that at an advanced implementation level it should be possible to dynamically switch between the two states for potentially smoother curves auto-magically in any print.
There are robot arms with more than 6 DoF which use all their joints at once to get maximum strength and acceleration at any time. Here you could decompose cartesian movements into cartesian + polar in a way that minimizes acceleration of any one axis.
@@jerrymk6846 the traditional polar printer resolution problems could be done away if the bed moved or if it was a rotating bed and it was a traditional cartesian setup on top of it. would be easier to code a slicer for than adding an extra axis for non planar printing anyway.
I'm a mechanical engineer really interested in 3D printing and polar printers. I just don't have the experience with coding the firmware/slicer/gcode-editor. I do have a very clean looking design ready for a polar printer that works even more like a record player, where the cantilever arm rotates around the Z-axis to go from center to edge of the bed (instead of having a linear guide movement on the arm). If you are interested in this project and maybe even joining efforts let me know! I have designed and built printers in the past (mainly the Dutchy3D printer), but never with complex firmware/movement but I love the idea
The ultimate Vase printer indeed! Cudo's for taking this on. Love to see these out of the box ideas come to work these things move the whole community forward eventually.
This is quite neat, but what I'd find more interesting is a cylindrical printer that's set up more like a lathe: instead of printing flat 2D layers and running into the singularity problem again and again, you'd start out with a thin axle in the center and print cylindrical layers outwards. This would give opportunities that are truely beyond what XYZ printers can do, including radially protruding features without supports and favourable mechanical properties because there's no single direction in which the layers would delaminate.
It would be situationally useful but generality is kind of the whole selling point of 3D-printing. The generality is lost by needing supports in places that a cartesian printer doesn't. It also adds an additional consumed recourse (the central axis) which of course isn't a deal-breaker but is kind of inconvenient. Maybe the central axis can be printed with a cartesian printer? You could kind of combine the idea with a traditional printer though. This would result in a 4 degree of freedom printer with variable printing 'planes' ( '' because can be non planar surfaces) which is something that is very interesting and is being research.
@@thomasandriessen1046 a 3D printer may be an extremely versatile tool, but still just a tool. Different tools are needed for different jobs. A "latheprinter" could do some of the things that a cartesian printer can't do (or can't do well). Sure, ideal would be a 5-axis printer that can print every detail from any orientation, but it would also be much more complicated on both the hardware and software side. Whereas a latheprinter could be made for a similar price as an ordinary bedslinger and controlled with a patched version of a standard open source slicer. For the central axis, yes, preparing that with a cartesian printer would probably be the best option. As altenatives that don't require another printer, one could print on metal rods that can be heated to detach the print, or cylinders made from a water-soluble material. Both would of course leave prominent holes in the result.
You COULD also just extend the one dimension of the print head to go from negative x across the center point to positive x. The slicer would then have to decide what distance is shorter: rotating the table 180 degrees or going straight across and continue with a 180 degree rotated base plate. Maybe with some tolerance in the very middle, where any point within radius y is just seen as "center", where you only move the print head in and out - while rotating the base in the direction, where the the print head will head towards after leaving the "center" again.
That's looking awesome! I know we've got some kind of "polar" kinematics in Marlin as a feature -for a polar plotter- but I don't believe they can apply to a turntable bed without a few tweaks. We'll have to get on that as we see more turntable printers appearing in the wild. Inspiring stuff. Keep up the great work!
I made a polar fork about 4 or 5 years ago with Marlin 2.x. I think Bill Steele did the first polar on Marlin 1.x. I had not thought of doing a python post though, that's cool!
David .. i`m into 3D Printing ..and whilst i have absolutely no idea what you are talking about in this video , i totally admire your a) dedication and b) how clever you are to try and sort this ... consider yourself a genius sir .. 🙂
I think that the turntable belt needs to be a little tighter. If you know someone who needs a capstone project in software engineering, the pattern for the faces should resemble a spider web. That way, the printer doesn't have to stop and spin as the line crosses the origin. By the way, printers like these would be really useful for printing gears, wheels, pulleys, and other round objects.
Printing to the center is always going to be a problem with these. Even if you get it to repeatably zero exactly at the axis rotation when printing the first layer, doing it throughout the whole print requires the z axis to be perfectly perpendicular to the axis of rotation, and also have no twist. Basically, instead of incremental precision determining how big the discontinuity is, you have several large parts worth of tolerance stackup determining how big the discontinuity is. To do this reliably you'd need something as accurate and rigid as a metal lathe.
Mate, you're an absolute legend. Love the way you just got stuck in and had a go at working on this. The results are pretty cool. Looking forward to seeing how this develops further!
@@Lucas_van_Hout I guess the Z axis could be relatively slow, but the other one would have to be fairly fast. Would be really interesting to see. Maybe there's a manufacturer out there that would be willing to make purpose-built steppers.
My asymptote of interest is close to zero for getting into 3D printing myself, but your drive to manifest the idea that's been bugging you is addicting to watch in action. 'TOTALLY been there before. I subscribed. 'Looking forward to seeing how you refine this and learn to use it as a tool.
Very cool and useful! The rotational axis makes a significantly smaller footprint in the Y direction. An interesting proposition for portable printers. Makes the whole setup much saner and simpler than for example the Positron 3D. Way to go!
Vase mode prints comes to mind , Polar printers with a high flow nozzle would easily beat any other printer with a high flow nozzle , since Polars will barely move the toolhead and make the bed spin fast , thus achieving vase mode prints really fast , you can focus on flow only , as the acceleration of the toolhead wouldn't need to move fast (and only in 2 axis). In conparison , other types of printer would need to have both a high flow nozzle and a fast toolhead
David I have owned 4 sculptor printers. And one of their biggest issues is that once you come near center the decimals need to be soo small and precis and also because there is so little movement in the center the temperature need to be controlled fast because else it will just melt the center.
This is fascinating, I was recently playing around with defining vases using SDFs (signed distance fields) and triangulating them, however I found myself mostly defining them in terms of a cylinder with varying radius. It occurred to me that this printer could potentially be very well suited to this - define your vase by a function of z and theta that returns the radius at that point, and simply set the position of the r axis (if that's the right terminology) to this value. I might work on creating such an "equation slicer"
"belt grinding" is just a lack of tension on the belt. Putting in more tension will solve it. The motor sounds like it can cope fine so it wont have issues.
Using 9999 walls is one option, but iirc the "Concentric" top/bottom pattern generates a spiral which should print even nicer with the spinning bed. At least that's what I remember from using Cura before I switched over to Prusa. I haven't tested other patterns on Prusa, so I couldn't tell you about that one.
I think it's called polar just as a traditional continuation from the CNC lathes' coordinate systems being polar. There, you have your Z distance along the axis of rotation, more means further from the chuck; your X distance from the axis of rotation, can be + or -, depending if your tool is coming from the bottom or from the top; also expressed as double the actual distance, to mean diameter; and your C - the angle the chuck is at, 0-360 with precision being determined by how precise your lathe is. Some super precise Swiss machines can do 4+ digits of angle precision after the dot. A lot of machines also have the Y - the movement of the tool forwards-backwards relative to the operator; perpendicular to the XZ plane of regular movements. This is especially useful if you attach a spindle with a mill as your tool, so you can machine flat rather than round surfaces on your part. This mess of a coordinate system is still referred to as "polar" by most ppl. Just becayse in CNC mills it's different and the main focus is the XYZ of the spindle like on a cartesian 3D printer, rather than the XZ movement in relation to the spinning part in the chuck. Yeah, I used to be a CNC operator, why do you ask? 😁
I'm glad to hear that someone else liked the Ender 2 Pro. It's been my only printer for a few years now. Dead simple, easy maintenance, great little machine.
I would say instead of having a slicer that passes thru the 'singularity' going back and forth, you need a slicer that can start in the center, and print spirally like a record player out to the edge of the layer, then fill in the spots it needs to. No need to slow it down. Wtih the vase, it could just keep going! But that is a slicer code problem. Like you mentioned with your python post gcode fix, you need a dedicated slicer mode for polar printers.
Genius. FWIW, under the sheets, most of the slicers are pretty much crunching their calculations through post-processing scripts. There's an entire mechanism in Cura to farm out calculations to an external program.
I'm glad there are people smart enough so we don't have to do all the math with 3D printers etc. just slicers do everything for us. Dealing with angular momentum and everything seems like a whole another level of nightmare. I kind of want to see a delta printer with spinning bed now. I feel like that combination could get you both sharp lines and super smooth curves
I'd love a video of a deeper dive into the mechanical design of the printer if you're up for it! This kind of project is on my list as well, has been for a few months, and I've been slowly collecting notes on how to make the most rigid rotating bed as possible
What if... You print a + at the center, this would show you where the printer thinks the center is, and you can calibrate to that. It's what we do with lasers, center finding things in wood working, etc. Every extra line you put down should cross the same center when aligned. So, plan to make a *, and pause after every line to see if it crossed the center. If it's off, it'll make a circle in the center, if it's centered, it'll make a star.
I built one from scratch a few years back. Printed fine away from center, but like yours it totallly freaked out around 0,0. Gave up on it and rebuilt it as a cantilever cartesian instead. Was a fun project though 😊
I would suggest modifying the printer so that its singularity is not at the limit of the X-axis's movement, but rather at the middle of its range of motion. That way you can print with speed and efficiency - something that is necessary for a rotating bed to go from a gimmick to an irreplaceable feature. A line is an extremely simple and common feature. Having to stop the head, rotate the bed 180 degrees, then proceed with the remainder of the line can only introduce complications, especially with print quality. Not to mention, the heat of the nozzle may end up deforming the print on nearby extrusions. I was very surprised to not see you modify the printer to fix this. I would suggest some of the following points: -Find a creative way to utilize the tangential speed, that can really make the rotating bed stand out among all other options. Imagine a printer that does not increase the print time on objects with wider dimensions - you could theoretically print a 100mm circle in the same exact duration as a 10mm circle so long as your extruder can keep up. Also, I would make the rotation of the bed quicker, otherwise that will end up bottle-necking the print speed in most if not all scenarios, especially if you stick with the current X-axis setup. -Ensure the printer is capable of very accurately finding the singularity. Any offset from the singularity will directly translate into a wider contour than desired. For cylindrical objects, that will result in a dimension with an excess in diameter double the offset from the singularity. It would also make a plus sign look like someone cut a square out of the center of it. -As others have mentioned, it might make sense to make the bed direct-drive or at least to use a gear. Very cool video to watch overall!
i've made a corexy machine recently, and i'm planning another printer. i've thought about polar printers before, but not enough until this video. will definitely take this into consideration.
Excellent example of dedication and problem-solving! The strength of this printer is obviously in printing anything that is basically a cylinder. Vases are a fantastic demonstration of the complexities available. I was curious what the pure round output of something like this would be, for, say, spacer rings or even air-hockey pucks and round coasters. The benefit of something like this would be it being able to print things like helmets, headbands, etc. Are you going to be doing more videos using this unique design?
Awesome! So cool to see polar living on! I too dove down this rabbit hole without realizing thay others beat me to it! Bill Steele has a lot of firsts in the 3dp community, smart guy! I love the puthon post processor, super clever!
I built a polar diamond drag engraver using RepRap firmware. The firmware does the conversion from cartesian to polar coordinates on the fly so there's no need to mess with slicers etc. Might be worth looking at. Keep up the good work.
Watching your video has gotten me very interested in a polar printer, less for the idea of smooth vase mode and more for what it can do for bed size. As bed size increases the gantry above needs to be increased in size to span the entire bed with most other designs. But with a polar printer you can just rotate the bed to the other side, letting you have half the gantry above it. And since you're not slinging the bed you probably can go a little faster than a bed slinger, though probably not as fast as a core xy or a delta printer but I prefer direct drive extruders anyways so already would be limited to that middle ground anyways if I swapped to a polar printer. Back to increasing printer size, after a certain point you'd probably want to make the cantilevered arm have some additional support. My first thought was an additional upright 90 degrees out from the main arm but that is additional weight that might exacerbate any drooping at the far end of the arm so my second thought is increasing the height of the upright and then using a cable runner out to the far end of the arm. That would allow for a relatively large format printer without having as much of a large overhead gantry, leading to more space being able to be used for the bed.
I wonder why you even need to go over center and force the printer to do the 180° turn? As I understand it, if you have a circle that rotates around itself and a point (nozzle) that can go in a straight line from center to the edge, you basically can move to any point of the bed by this two moves. Meaning that there's no reason in going beyond the centre, so your X axis can actually be about the same length as a circle radius, so when the nozzle reaches the centre it will be an endstop. And when printing something in the middle just start in the centre and spiral outwards. It's like a key feature of the printer, so why do you even need to use lines or zigzag pattern? I mean if you really need to, print that object closer to the edge, but when printing from the centre use concentric pattern. I know that may not be as simple as it sounds since it's still has a cubic coordinate system rather than cylindrical based on centrepoint, radius and angles, but at least to me it's making much more sense
Noticed the reaction at 0:37 and immediately paused the video to smash that like button. Then I realized you're starting out on this new hobby of yours, which made me instantly hit the subscribe button. I'm definitely going to enjoy watching the rest of this video and looking forward to future content you upload! Keep at it and with that authenticity my dude and best of luck! :)
Very cool! I am tempted to make one of these... Thank you for the instructubales on how to do so! Have you seen Nathan Builds Robots video about the Quadrupolar Express? Maybe there is something to learn there about how he tackled the origin point issue!
Commendable, polar printers offer certain huge advantages over existing cartesian XY printers. Greatly reduces ghosting (ringing) in prints and allows tighter tolerances with less wearable components in the Y axis.
Such a printer could be used for some round object. Most of square printers doesn't do well with circles. This system allows to print threads, pipes, cups, whatever circle-based and this is quite cool. You don't actually need to use it for non-round things.
Love it! Polar printers are super neat, maybe not super practical but very cool none the less. I imagine you could get some sick time lapses with it by taking each timelapse and a slightly different rotation so the print rotates throughout the timelapse and ends with a full timelapse spin showcasing the whole print.
One of the huge benefits of these polar printers is cost compared to quality, since the base motor doesn't need to have as much positional accuracy which is more expensive to integrate than constant rotational speed. And the up and down motors and belts can have extra money put into them. (This is all assumptions that are probably correct in some way)
To make a straight line through the centre you don't need any rotation at all, if you allow radius to go negative. In that case, there's an ambiguity of the same point represented by two possible coordinate sets, one with positive radius and positive angle, another one with negative radius and negative angle. For every cartesian X/Y pair, couldn't you just build two sets of polar coordinates, one with positive angle and one with negative angle, and check which one requires less rotation - and output that one? Based on the actual state, the printer could have a full axis motion (negative radius allowed) and stay in the 180 degree rotated mode if that's where it's directed by the closest movement. In that case, you'll never have sharp 180 rotations, and in fact, you'll never get more than 90 degrees at a time.
armchair engineering has driven quite a bit of the development of polar cooridinates in klipper. they have a polar printer design that is pretty rugged.
Epic project! You should look into the sculpto2! I know some people that literally live by those printers and refuse to use anything else! lol.. Such neat machines! Great work! You made it look simple.. I bet it was anything but that! haha Great job! I look forward to your future projects!
the crash without that correction script probably occurs because the software has trouble doing inverse kinematics of the printer as the jacobian of the print head relative to the structure printed isn't invertible anymore :)
Damn I’ve literally been working on one these myself albeit VERY slowly. I started on it because I figured this could be an amazing answer to hot end changing. As the hot end runs along only one axis you could easily have multiple hot ends on the same rail (well, 3) with ‘pockets’ either side of the rail out of the way of the circular build plate that the 2 hot ends not in use can sit in. That way you can have 3 materials primed and ready to go without any need for a literal tool head change while the circular bed design stops the weight of triple hot ends affecting the acceleration. Idk might work anyway 😂
very helpful!! The 3D printing community makes me feel like nothing is impossible to make no matter how crazy (I'm not saying this is crazy, although your determination is, in a good way)
i kind of digging the Idea, i made some trellis or moss poles on my printers, they are more or less cilindrical, they would probably benefit a lot from a machine like this.
Its a specalized vase mode printer. I'm sure there is a use case for this, and it could be a printer can be made to do both bed slinging and then be modified to do polar. EDIT: Thought of a use case: ball bearing raceways. Also, there is no reason why you can't do a bed that can be converted from linear to polar with a few easy transformative steps. I think you're on to something.
Next steps would be to add back the Y axis movement, and to give the print head a way to tilt around the X axis. That is going to allow printing sides of things from bottom to top and all kinds of other cool capabilities that are simply not possible with simple cartesians.
Nice project! Have you seen Nathan Builds Robots polar printer? I am now curious as to how he solved the singularity problem! Would love to see some more prints that utilise polar printing goodness!
Polar printers are really interesting for 5 axis machines. Because you can print 90° onto existing walls. However, it would be best to use a specialty slicer for it instead of translating Cartesian. Unfortunately those are difficult to come by and are mostly experimental lacking most of the features we're expecting from run of the mill slicers these days.
Maybe clay and ceramic printing could be a use case: 1. Clay printers need a constant flow rate (there is no stop&go), which can be much higher than FDM printers. 2. So 3d-clay printers can only print in vase mode.
There is a need for a 4d printer, which has yours x+z coordinates, with y positionment plus the r polar rotation. I'd be curious if you could actually mount the plate on more rotation axis.
Could you also solve the singularity problem by inducing a deliberate mechanical 'error'? I'm thinking that if the center of rotation was inside the mechanical limit of the gantry reach by 3~5mm that the pause while rotating situation could be reduced to a slower arc. The Y dimensions would still have to be perfectly aligned, and may require some robust means of adjustment.
I think there is an option in cura that allows you to change the pattern of the layers to be concentric circles and not zig zag lines. Otherwise I love this machine it's pretty much a 3D printing lathe 👍👍
great project!, wouldn't it be easier to extend the x axis so that it can move through the whole diameter of the bed, avoiding a singularity? or does this kills the purpose of the challenge?
I was looking for one of those you made for a long time (Well 5 years?) and another idea to add to it ... Clay printed to make perfect Vase Mode Vases or even printing chocolates, go on make one I be happy.
LOL the "my pins are fucked but it must be something more complicated than that" got me when adding a second toolhead to my ender 3. Just a thought: why not extend your x gantry or make the bed smaller so that the print head can go fully across the diameter instead of needing to rotate halfway at the singularity point? Also, reducing the weight of the bed may help with jerk. There's a printer named the Stinger that is a crazy Cartesian bedslinger with a CF bed. Is there a concentric bottom and top layer option in slicers? Maybe that can help? I have no idea if these things will work, im just interested in the desigm lol.
The thing I want to see with this is speedrunning vase mode prints
I agree , Polar printers seems to be perfectly suited for such tasks , barely any movement from the toolhead , just spin the heatbed and voila ! vases printed in no time
Do this to a voron
It would be super fun to watch but I don't think it's actually going to be faster in any way. Speed printing limits are pretty much always flow and cooling related, motion isn't the bottleneck.
@@CaZa3D "On engineering never worry about if you should, leave that to politicians. Just do it."
Volumetric limits of the hotend are already what slow down the top printers. It's probably not very different in speed, but it'll be a ton quieter and it won't vibrate. So surface defects on tall prints would almost completely disappear.
I'm blown away by how you commit to projects so well
It would appear that if not rotating the turntable then any polar printer is also optionally a traditional x-y-z printer, and that at an advanced implementation level it should be possible to dynamically switch between the two states for potentially smoother curves auto-magically in any print.
The Y on the polar printer is gone, it’s not just adding a rotary table on the existing Y. At least for his design.
There are robot arms with more than 6 DoF which use all their joints at once to get maximum strength and acceleration at any time.
Here you could decompose cartesian movements into cartesian + polar in a way that minimizes acceleration of any one axis.
Isn't the Y axis removed?? I don't think it has Y without rotating
@@jerrymk6846 the traditional polar printer resolution problems could be done away if the bed moved or if it was a rotating bed and it was a traditional cartesian setup on top of it. would be easier to code a slicer for than adding an extra axis for non planar printing anyway.
@@lasskinn474 I'm just talking about the OP's case. I have no interest in polar axes as the bottleneck for consumer printers is still the hotend flow.
I'm a mechanical engineer really interested in 3D printing and polar printers. I just don't have the experience with coding the firmware/slicer/gcode-editor. I do have a very clean looking design ready for a polar printer that works even more like a record player, where the cantilever arm rotates around the Z-axis to go from center to edge of the bed (instead of having a linear guide movement on the arm). If you are interested in this project and maybe even joining efforts let me know! I have designed and built printers in the past (mainly the Dutchy3D printer), but never with complex firmware/movement but I love the idea
Sounds hard to do the kinematics
The ultimate Vase printer indeed!
Cudo's for taking this on. Love to see these out of the box ideas come to work these things move the whole community forward eventually.
Now I want to see a print that makes it spin very fast, maybe you can start a "fastest 10 cm cylinder" challenge.
Anyway earned yourself a sub 👍
This is quite neat, but what I'd find more interesting is a cylindrical printer that's set up more like a lathe: instead of printing flat 2D layers and running into the singularity problem again and again, you'd start out with a thin axle in the center and print cylindrical layers outwards. This would give opportunities that are truely beyond what XYZ printers can do, including radially protruding features without supports and favourable mechanical properties because there's no single direction in which the layers would delaminate.
I suspect the difficulty is the extruded molten plastic is still semi-fluid and would start to move once you started rotating the horizontal axis.
Someone has actually done this. Don’t remember who, but I’ve seen it on TH-cam. He printed springs and stuff
@@codaromathey have ftm printers that print upside down so I dont see that being an issue
It would be situationally useful but generality is kind of the whole selling point of 3D-printing. The generality is lost by needing supports in places that a cartesian printer doesn't. It also adds an additional consumed recourse (the central axis) which of course isn't a deal-breaker but is kind of inconvenient. Maybe the central axis can be printed with a cartesian printer?
You could kind of combine the idea with a traditional printer though. This would result in a 4 degree of freedom printer with variable printing 'planes' ( '' because can be non planar surfaces) which is something that is very interesting and is being research.
@@thomasandriessen1046 a 3D printer may be an extremely versatile tool, but still just a tool. Different tools are needed for different jobs. A "latheprinter" could do some of the things that a cartesian printer can't do (or can't do well).
Sure, ideal would be a 5-axis printer that can print every detail from any orientation, but it would also be much more complicated on both the hardware and software side. Whereas a latheprinter could be made for a similar price as an ordinary bedslinger and controlled with a patched version of a standard open source slicer.
For the central axis, yes, preparing that with a cartesian printer would probably be the best option. As altenatives that don't require another printer, one could print on metal rods that can be heated to detach the print, or cylinders made from a water-soluble material. Both would of course leave prominent holes in the result.
Ugh..... I was intrigued passively, but you got me. I Subscribed for the cyl-ender pun, you clever stranger.
You COULD also just extend the one dimension of the print head to go from negative x across the center point to positive x. The slicer would then have to decide what distance is shorter: rotating the table 180 degrees or going straight across and continue with a 180 degree rotated base plate. Maybe with some tolerance in the very middle, where any point within radius y is just seen as "center", where you only move the print head in and out - while rotating the base in the direction, where the the print head will head towards after leaving the "center" again.
The fact that the polar coordinate system supports negative radii makes this easier
That's looking awesome! I know we've got some kind of "polar" kinematics in Marlin as a feature -for a polar plotter- but I don't believe they can apply to a turntable bed without a few tweaks. We'll have to get on that as we see more turntable printers appearing in the wild. Inspiring stuff. Keep up the great work!
I made a polar fork about 4 or 5 years ago with Marlin 2.x. I think Bill Steele did the first polar on Marlin 1.x. I had not thought of doing a python post though, that's cool!
David .. i`m into 3D Printing ..and whilst i have absolutely no idea what you are talking about in this video , i totally admire your a) dedication and b) how clever you are to try and sort this ... consider yourself a genius sir .. 🙂
I think that the turntable belt needs to be a little tighter.
If you know someone who needs a capstone project in software engineering, the pattern for the faces should resemble a spider web. That way, the printer doesn't have to stop and spin as the line crosses the origin.
By the way, printers like these would be really useful for printing gears, wheels, pulleys, and other round objects.
Printing to the center is always going to be a problem with these. Even if you get it to repeatably zero exactly at the axis rotation when printing the first layer, doing it throughout the whole print requires the z axis to be perfectly perpendicular to the axis of rotation, and also have no twist.
Basically, instead of incremental precision determining how big the discontinuity is, you have several large parts worth of tolerance stackup determining how big the discontinuity is.
To do this reliably you'd need something as accurate and rigid as a metal lathe.
I see you've perfected the art of the spiral
Replace plastic filament with crepe batter
Mate, you're an absolute legend. Love the way you just got stuck in and had a go at working on this. The results are pretty cool.
Looking forward to seeing how this develops further!
One benefit I noticed is that this opens up the possibility to eliminate a belt and use gears instead, which makes maintenance a lot easier.
Better yet: direct drive.
@@Lucas_van_Hout That would be cool. I wonder if there are precise enough steppers to accomplish that while maintaining quality in the outer areas?
@ I don’t know, but if the other two axis also were screw drive, you could make an really reliable printer.
@@Lucas_van_Hout I guess the Z axis could be relatively slow, but the other one would have to be fairly fast. Would be really interesting to see. Maybe there's a manufacturer out there that would be willing to make purpose-built steppers.
@ this one seems to move at an adequate speed: th-cam.com/users/shortsX0q1uIOqcIk?si=BtJ4HmeI-ovTuh2z
My asymptote of interest is close to zero for getting into 3D printing myself, but your drive to manifest the idea that's been bugging you is addicting to watch in action. 'TOTALLY been there before. I subscribed. 'Looking forward to seeing how you refine this and learn to use it as a tool.
Very cool and useful! The rotational axis makes a significantly smaller footprint in the Y direction. An interesting proposition for portable printers. Makes the whole setup much saner and simpler than for example the Positron 3D. Way to go!
Bro possesses intelligence and ability to see it through that I can only strive to have. Great project man.
What a cool project. Now we just need to figure out the best usage and advantages of this type of bed
Vase mode prints comes to mind , Polar printers with a high flow nozzle would easily beat any other printer with a high flow nozzle , since Polars will barely move the toolhead and make the bed spin fast , thus achieving vase mode prints really fast , you can focus on flow only , as the acceleration of the toolhead wouldn't need to move fast (and only in 2 axis). In conparison , other types of printer would need to have both a high flow nozzle and a fast toolhead
David I have owned 4 sculptor printers. And one of their biggest issues is that once you come near center the decimals need to be soo small and precis and also because there is so little movement in the center the temperature need to be controlled fast because else it will just melt the center.
This is fascinating, I was recently playing around with defining vases using SDFs (signed distance fields) and triangulating them, however I found myself mostly defining them in terms of a cylinder with varying radius. It occurred to me that this printer could potentially be very well suited to this - define your vase by a function of z and theta that returns the radius at that point, and simply set the position of the r axis (if that's the right terminology) to this value. I might work on creating such an "equation slicer"
Well done. Very interesting.
i have wanted a polar printer for two decades now.
specifically for gears and sprockets.
should really help with tooth profiles.
BTW: the origin in polar coordinates (r=0, what you called the "singularity") is called the "pole" (hence "polar")
"belt grinding" is just a lack of tension on the belt. Putting in more tension will solve it. The motor sounds like it can cope fine so it wont have issues.
Using 9999 walls is one option, but iirc the "Concentric" top/bottom pattern generates a spiral which should print even nicer with the spinning bed. At least that's what I remember from using Cura before I switched over to Prusa. I haven't tested other patterns on Prusa, so I couldn't tell you about that one.
Concentric makes individual circles. For a spiral you are looking for Archimedes spiral.
Cool concept and execution. Would be interesting to see you design and build this type of printer from the ground up.
I think it's called polar just as a traditional continuation from the CNC lathes' coordinate systems being polar. There, you have your Z distance along the axis of rotation, more means further from the chuck; your X distance from the axis of rotation, can be + or -, depending if your tool is coming from the bottom or from the top; also expressed as double the actual distance, to mean diameter; and your C - the angle the chuck is at, 0-360 with precision being determined by how precise your lathe is. Some super precise Swiss machines can do 4+ digits of angle precision after the dot.
A lot of machines also have the Y - the movement of the tool forwards-backwards relative to the operator; perpendicular to the XZ plane of regular movements. This is especially useful if you attach a spindle with a mill as your tool, so you can machine flat rather than round surfaces on your part.
This mess of a coordinate system is still referred to as "polar" by most ppl. Just becayse in CNC mills it's different and the main focus is the XYZ of the spindle like on a cartesian 3D printer, rather than the XZ movement in relation to the spinning part in the chuck.
Yeah, I used to be a CNC operator, why do you ask? 😁
In CNC lathes, the centre problem is solved by allowing you to go into the negatives from the positives, and vice versa, of your X coordinate
I'm glad to hear that someone else liked the Ender 2 Pro.
It's been my only printer for a few years now.
Dead simple, easy maintenance, great little machine.
I would say instead of having a slicer that passes thru the 'singularity' going back and forth, you need a slicer that can start in the center, and print spirally like a record player out to the edge of the layer, then fill in the spots it needs to. No need to slow it down. Wtih the vase, it could just keep going! But that is a slicer code problem. Like you mentioned with your python post gcode fix, you need a dedicated slicer mode for polar printers.
Genius. FWIW, under the sheets, most of the slicers are pretty much crunching their calculations through post-processing scripts. There's an entire mechanism in Cura to farm out calculations to an external program.
I'm glad there are people smart enough so we don't have to do all the math with 3D printers etc. just slicers do everything for us. Dealing with angular momentum and everything seems like a whole another level of nightmare.
I kind of want to see a delta printer with spinning bed now. I feel like that combination could get you both sharp lines and super smooth curves
I'd love a video of a deeper dive into the mechanical design of the printer if you're up for it! This kind of project is on my list as well, has been for a few months, and I've been slowly collecting notes on how to make the most rigid rotating bed as possible
This is awesome. I don't know why but I absolutely love the rotary cartesian/polar interpolation movement.
What if... You print a + at the center, this would show you where the printer thinks the center is, and you can calibrate to that. It's what we do with lasers, center finding things in wood working, etc.
Every extra line you put down should cross the same center when aligned. So, plan to make a *, and pause after every line to see if it crossed the center. If it's off, it'll make a circle in the center, if it's centered, it'll make a star.
I am in love with this guy enthusiasm. He shines talking about all this stuff. Really glad for him ^__^
I built one from scratch a few years back. Printed fine away from center, but like yours it totallly freaked out around 0,0. Gave up on it and rebuilt it as a cantilever cartesian instead. Was a fun project though 😊
I would suggest modifying the printer so that its singularity is not at the limit of the X-axis's movement, but rather at the middle of its range of motion. That way you can print with speed and efficiency - something that is necessary for a rotating bed to go from a gimmick to an irreplaceable feature. A line is an extremely simple and common feature. Having to stop the head, rotate the bed 180 degrees, then proceed with the remainder of the line can only introduce complications, especially with print quality. Not to mention, the heat of the nozzle may end up deforming the print on nearby extrusions.
I was very surprised to not see you modify the printer to fix this.
I would suggest some of the following points:
-Find a creative way to utilize the tangential speed, that can really make the rotating bed stand out among all other options. Imagine a printer that does not increase the print time on objects with wider dimensions - you could theoretically print a 100mm circle in the same exact duration as a 10mm circle so long as your extruder can keep up. Also, I would make the rotation of the bed quicker, otherwise that will end up bottle-necking the print speed in most if not all scenarios, especially if you stick with the current X-axis setup.
-Ensure the printer is capable of very accurately finding the singularity. Any offset from the singularity will directly translate into a wider contour than desired. For cylindrical objects, that will result in a dimension with an excess in diameter double the offset from the singularity. It would also make a plus sign look like someone cut a square out of the center of it.
-As others have mentioned, it might make sense to make the bed direct-drive or at least to use a gear.
Very cool video to watch overall!
Thanks for providing the files i will definitely check that out.
i've made a corexy machine recently, and i'm planning another printer. i've thought about polar printers before, but not enough until this video. will definitely take this into consideration.
Excellent example of dedication and problem-solving! The strength of this printer is obviously in printing anything that is basically a cylinder. Vases are a fantastic demonstration of the complexities available. I was curious what the pure round output of something like this would be, for, say, spacer rings or even air-hockey pucks and round coasters. The benefit of something like this would be it being able to print things like helmets, headbands, etc. Are you going to be doing more videos using this unique design?
Very professional video. I was expecting at least couple dozen thousands views due to quality and topic and was shocked to see only 2000
Awesome! So cool to see polar living on! I too dove down this rabbit hole without realizing thay others beat me to it! Bill Steele has a lot of firsts in the 3dp community, smart guy! I love the puthon post processor, super clever!
I built a polar diamond drag engraver using RepRap firmware. The firmware does the conversion from cartesian to polar coordinates on the fly so there's no need to mess with slicers etc. Might be worth looking at. Keep up the good work.
Watching your video has gotten me very interested in a polar printer, less for the idea of smooth vase mode and more for what it can do for bed size. As bed size increases the gantry above needs to be increased in size to span the entire bed with most other designs. But with a polar printer you can just rotate the bed to the other side, letting you have half the gantry above it. And since you're not slinging the bed you probably can go a little faster than a bed slinger, though probably not as fast as a core xy or a delta printer but I prefer direct drive extruders anyways so already would be limited to that middle ground anyways if I swapped to a polar printer.
Back to increasing printer size, after a certain point you'd probably want to make the cantilevered arm have some additional support. My first thought was an additional upright 90 degrees out from the main arm but that is additional weight that might exacerbate any drooping at the far end of the arm so my second thought is increasing the height of the upright and then using a cable runner out to the far end of the arm. That would allow for a relatively large format printer without having as much of a large overhead gantry, leading to more space being able to be used for the bed.
If this channel doesn't get huge I have no faith in youtube left. Only 888 subs is criminal for this level of content
I wonder why you even need to go over center and force the printer to do the 180° turn? As I understand it, if you have a circle that rotates around itself and a point (nozzle) that can go in a straight line from center to the edge, you basically can move to any point of the bed by this two moves. Meaning that there's no reason in going beyond the centre, so your X axis can actually be about the same length as a circle radius, so when the nozzle reaches the centre it will be an endstop.
And when printing something in the middle just start in the centre and spiral outwards. It's like a key feature of the printer, so why do you even need to use lines or zigzag pattern? I mean if you really need to, print that object closer to the edge, but when printing from the centre use concentric pattern.
I know that may not be as simple as it sounds since it's still has a cubic coordinate system rather than cylindrical based on centrepoint, radius and angles, but at least to me it's making much more sense
Nice job! I was wondering if something like this would work - glad to see someone made it happen.
Noticed the reaction at 0:37 and immediately paused the video to smash that like button. Then I realized you're starting out on this new hobby of yours, which made me instantly hit the subscribe button.
I'm definitely going to enjoy watching the rest of this video and looking forward to future content you upload! Keep at it and with that authenticity my dude and best of luck! :)
Very cool! I am tempted to make one of these... Thank you for the instructubales on how to do so!
Have you seen Nathan Builds Robots video about the Quadrupolar Express? Maybe there is something to learn there about how he tackled the origin point issue!
Commendable, polar printers offer certain huge advantages over existing cartesian XY printers. Greatly reduces ghosting (ringing) in prints and allows tighter tolerances with less wearable components in the Y axis.
Such a printer could be used for some round object. Most of square printers doesn't do well with circles. This system allows to print threads, pipes, cups, whatever circle-based and this is quite cool. You don't actually need to use it for non-round things.
Try concentric patterns for bottom and top layers.
Love it! Polar printers are super neat, maybe not super practical but very cool none the less. I imagine you could get some sick time lapses with it by taking each timelapse and a slightly different rotation so the print rotates throughout the timelapse and ends with a full timelapse spin showcasing the whole print.
Exactly what I was expecting to see when I read the title. Awesome video!
I have an ender 2 pro that i quite enjoy. Good cheap little workhorse for the price back then. I hope they keep the line alive.
One of the huge benefits of these polar printers is cost compared to quality, since the base motor doesn't need to have as much positional accuracy which is more expensive to integrate than constant rotational speed. And the up and down motors and belts can have extra money put into them. (This is all assumptions that are probably correct in some way)
To make a straight line through the centre you don't need any rotation at all, if you allow radius to go negative. In that case, there's an ambiguity of the same point represented by two possible coordinate sets, one with positive radius and positive angle, another one with negative radius and negative angle.
For every cartesian X/Y pair, couldn't you just build two sets of polar coordinates, one with positive angle and one with negative angle, and check which one requires less rotation - and output that one? Based on the actual state, the printer could have a full axis motion (negative radius allowed) and stay in the 180 degree rotated mode if that's where it's directed by the closest movement. In that case, you'll never have sharp 180 rotations, and in fact, you'll never get more than 90 degrees at a time.
The turn table could be almost 2 times longer than the radius travel. You could do massive print on that small printer.
Very cool project! I hope some slicer developers take an interest in this project.
armchair engineering has driven quite a bit of the development of polar cooridinates in klipper. they have a polar printer design that is pretty rugged.
Epic project!
You should look into the sculpto2! I know some people that literally live by those printers and refuse to use anything else! lol.. Such neat machines! Great work! You made it look simple.. I bet it was anything but that! haha
Great job! I look forward to your future projects!
the crash without that correction script probably occurs because the software has trouble doing inverse kinematics of the printer as the jacobian of the print head relative to the structure printed isn't invertible anymore :)
This should be a special type of printer. How we have the lathe to the mill, we can have this to normal printers
I love it. What an awesome project and build! Hope to see a lot more
Damn I’ve literally been working on one these myself albeit VERY slowly. I started on it because I figured this could be an amazing answer to hot end changing. As the hot end runs along only one axis you could easily have multiple hot ends on the same rail (well, 3) with ‘pockets’ either side of the rail out of the way of the circular build plate that the 2 hot ends not in use can sit in. That way you can have 3 materials primed and ready to go without any need for a literal tool head change while the circular bed design stops the weight of triple hot ends affecting the acceleration. Idk might work anyway 😂
very helpful!! The 3D printing community makes me feel like nothing is impossible to make no matter how crazy (I'm not saying this is crazy, although your determination is, in a good way)
Very cool. Im curious to see what polar printers could potentially do for speedprinting.
You could print 1 sided records with a spiral groove and see how good you can get it to sound (on a cheap sacrificial stylus)
i kind of digging the Idea, i made some trellis or moss poles on my printers, they are more or less cilindrical, they would probably benefit a lot from a machine like this.
Its a specalized vase mode printer. I'm sure there is a use case for this, and it could be a printer can be made to do both bed slinging and then be modified to do polar. EDIT: Thought of a use case: ball bearing raceways. Also, there is no reason why you can't do a bed that can be converted from linear to polar with a few easy transformative steps. I think you're on to something.
Next steps would be to add back the Y axis movement, and to give the print head a way to tilt around the X axis. That is going to allow printing sides of things from bottom to top and all kinds of other cool capabilities that are simply not possible with simple cartesians.
Nice project! Have you seen Nathan Builds Robots polar printer? I am now curious as to how he solved the singularity problem! Would love to see some more prints that utilise polar printing goodness!
A quick comment
The term polar coordinate system only makes sense in 2D not in 3D
In 3D it's either cylindrical or spherical
Great video!😊
Polar printers are really interesting for 5 axis machines.
Because you can print 90° onto existing walls.
However, it would be best to use a specialty slicer for it instead of translating Cartesian.
Unfortunately those are difficult to come by and are mostly experimental lacking most of the features we're expecting from run of the mill slicers these days.
Damn dude. Impressive work and presentation! Loved the rename as well! “CylEnder”! Classic! 😂 Subscribed!
This is straight up an innovation in 3D printing tech!
Ok I did not know polar was a thing 😂
Well done. The juice box was a nice touch. 😂
This is awesome, but wondering why it’s still printing rectilinear for cylyndrical objects?
Wild. I started printing my polar system, wich started off as an ender 2 pro just hours before this video came out
For what it’s worth, I know orca slicer has a concentric solid infill setting that would be much faster than this for top and bottom surfaces
What a great project! And is it me or are you getting more relaxed talking to a camera? I really enjoy your videos.
Maybe clay and ceramic printing could be a use case:
1. Clay printers need a constant flow rate (there is no stop&go), which can be much higher than FDM printers.
2. So 3d-clay printers can only print in vase mode.
Fantastic. Wouldnt it solve lots of problems, though, if the gantry spanned all the diameter of the turntable/bed?
There is a need for a 4d printer, which has yours x+z coordinates, with y positionment plus the r polar rotation.
I'd be curious if you could actually mount the plate on more rotation axis.
Could you also solve the singularity problem by inducing a deliberate mechanical 'error'? I'm thinking that if the center of rotation was inside the mechanical limit of the gantry reach by 3~5mm that the pause while rotating situation could be reduced to a slower arc. The Y dimensions would still have to be perfectly aligned, and may require some robust means of adjustment.
i like your project!, P.S., Cura has a 'concentric' bottom layer pattern, no need to set 999 walls
I think there is an option in cura that allows you to change the pattern of the layers to be concentric circles and not zig zag lines. Otherwise I love this machine it's pretty much a 3D printing lathe 👍👍
I guess it would be cool to combine the advantages of both printers.
great project!, wouldn't it be easier to extend the x axis so that it can move through the whole diameter of the bed, avoiding a singularity? or does this kills the purpose of the challenge?
instantly subscribed! this dude needs more subs for this amazing video quality!
I was looking for one of those you made for a long time (Well 5 years?) and another idea to add to it ... Clay printed to make perfect Vase Mode Vases or even printing chocolates, go on make one I be happy.
unrelated but the wooden slating is amzing
LOL the "my pins are fucked but it must be something more complicated than that" got me when adding a second toolhead to my ender 3. Just a thought: why not extend your x gantry or make the bed smaller so that the print head can go fully across the diameter instead of needing to rotate halfway at the singularity point?
Also, reducing the weight of the bed may help with jerk. There's a printer named the Stinger that is a crazy Cartesian bedslinger with a CF bed. Is there a concentric bottom and top layer option in slicers? Maybe that can help? I have no idea if these things will work, im just interested in the desigm lol.
If you could go negative in your radius you would get away from the radius issue.
Reprap handles this far better than klipper.
about to think what to do with my old ENDER3 .ok i'm with you let's try multi hot end
hopefully oneday the algorithm will pick u up