Please explain to me why you think there is a fundamental engineering failure in the frame design - I'd like to see the data.
Just so you can get an idea of where I am coming from, I have a Prusa XL and a Voron 2.4 right next to each other.
The Prusa XL frame is very solid and it's also not a quad gantry. The lead screws take the weight of the bed. The Voron uses 20x20mm extrusions and the Prusa XL uses 30x30mm extrusions and it has stamped steel for additional rigidity and support. On the Voron, I've added titanium backers to reduce flex from thermal linear expansion. While the XL would technicall have thermal expansion, when enclosed, it will be much less from the much larger extrusions and additional support.
The toolheads on the XL on the other hand are heavy, they will likely be the larger issue with speed+quality. People also complain about the Stealthburner weight with TAP.
There are faster projects than the Voron just like there are faster printers than the XL. You have to weigh what you want. The toolchanger design, for me, works flawlessly and is so much better than the AMS, ERCF, MMS. More companies will clone it.
This is getting into first principles territory. The short version is that the gantry being on a cantilever and an open frame means it's going to act like a tuning fork under toolhead acceleration. Higher resonance limits toolhead acceleration before print quality nose dives.
I haven't seen any accelerometer graphs posted for an XL, but it doesn't take much more than opening up PrusaSlicer and finding maximum accels set to 3k to see the direct result of that. That's where the rest of the community was 4-5 years ago. There's a reason why Prusa has an entire blogpost making excuses for why their printers' performance numbers aren't up to snuff compared to modern designs (while also cherry picking comparative numbers)[1].
It's not my only complaint about the XL but it's the most obvious one. I haven't been impressed in general with the prints I've seen come off those machines.
You should also check out multi-color print times on the XL vs the ASM or any other solution.
I think what Bambu has done is incredible but these are different machines for different reasons. The XL has a massive print area compared to the Bambu printers and the toolhead design I prefer. I just gifted an x1-carbon to my mom for Christmas. I'm not a hater or Prusa shill but people are just spouting opinions without data or truly understanding the differences between the machines.
It's based on basic engineering principles. Prusa can't magic away physics and these are lessons the rest of the community learned years ago. E3D had to course correct on some of the same mistakes with their toolchanger. There are good reasons why nearly every other CoreXY design you're going to encounter uses a closed frame (and the best will use structural panels).
>I think what Bambu has done is incredible but these are different machines for different reasons.
Sure, it's got its niche. But the drawbacks will narrow that niche. Prusa's ever narrowing niche is kind of the focus of the OP.
> The XL has a massive print area
Which makes running slow compared to other designs more painful since print times are cubic with volume.
>just spouting opinions without data or truly understanding the differences between the machines.
If you showed me a square wheel, I can tell you it's not going to roll particularly smoothly without needing to perform extensive testing on that specific implementation of square wheel. I can do that because it's something that's been tried elsewhere and we already know the results.
This style of open frame has been tried before. We know Prusa didn't choose to use it because there's any sort of engineering advantage because Jo has explicitly told us why they're using it.
At one time I worked out 2 hours, 3-4 times a week with a majority of that being cardio. I then started having back problems and it hindered how I worked out until I didn't anymore. Over the years I put on weight and I sit all day for work.
I would never get very far with workouts because my back would flare up badly. In an effort to get back in shape and lose some weight I've been doing a 10 minute cardio workout 3-4 times a week.
It's helped tremendously and I've lost over 15 pounds. It's also prevented my back from really flaring up because I'm not over stressing it. I've even worked up to doing an additional 30-40 minute cardio workout once a week.
I'll never have the cardio I had years ago but I'm in much better shape than when I was doing nothing. It's also motivated me to start wearing my fitbit again and getting up and walking through my work campus once a day.
Yes it can help. What the naysayers don't realize is that many people are out of shape, have medical issues, etc. They also don't realize that even getting into a short rhythm of working out snowballs into other self-conscious health thoughts and activities.
I'm a long time reef keeper so I instantly jumped on this with the kickstarter campaign. Like many that bought this tank they were littered with issues and flaws in the design that sent the jellyfish to their death.
I consider my reefing keeping ability as advanced with a 220 gallon main display. This tank was also advertised for beginners. As someone who understands the ecosystem, how to mix the salt/water and test for common parameters I would highly discourage this tank and jellies to beginners.
BestBuy.com is looking for top Operations Engineering talent to continuously transform our infrastructure using leading open-source technologies. You will have the ability to help shape a best-in-class operations team. We focus on agile operations with a devops culture. You will have the ability to work at large web scale to support a multi-billion dollar ecommerce site.
Responsibilities
- Manage a multi-origin, zero-downtime, highly scalable web infrastucture.
- Build, scale, and secure www.bestbuy.com infrastructure, focusing specifically on a fully automated Linux environment
- Design, develop and improve automation and tools for systems management, including development of scripts for our fully automated environment with Opscode Chef
- Develop operational practice for technologies like Opscode Chef; multiple Public Cloud platforms; Basho Riak; Cassandra; Tomcat; Apache; Nginx; Sensu; Splunk; Graphite; Solr
- Focus on building solutions from scratch or using leading open-source technologies. Focus on quality solutions that may be open-sourced, like Opscode Chef cookbooks, via the Apache 2.0 license.
- Participate in a L2-L3 rotating 24/7 oncall schedule. Rougly one week out every six, schedule frequency may change by team size.
Just so you can get an idea of where I am coming from, I have a Prusa XL and a Voron 2.4 right next to each other.
The Prusa XL frame is very solid and it's also not a quad gantry. The lead screws take the weight of the bed. The Voron uses 20x20mm extrusions and the Prusa XL uses 30x30mm extrusions and it has stamped steel for additional rigidity and support. On the Voron, I've added titanium backers to reduce flex from thermal linear expansion. While the XL would technicall have thermal expansion, when enclosed, it will be much less from the much larger extrusions and additional support.
The toolheads on the XL on the other hand are heavy, they will likely be the larger issue with speed+quality. People also complain about the Stealthburner weight with TAP.
There are faster projects than the Voron just like there are faster printers than the XL. You have to weigh what you want. The toolchanger design, for me, works flawlessly and is so much better than the AMS, ERCF, MMS. More companies will clone it.