A new type of nozzle gives us the opportunity to rethink how we approach pathplanning. With a variable opening and 360° orientation capabilities, we are offered a new set of both possibilities and challenges.
Our nozzle can cover a lot more ground in a single stroke compared to a single point nozzle. Our software makes sure it does.
As the path becomes wider, we can instantly increase the width of our stroke.
The orientation capability allows us to cleanly print bends and corners.
Our software tries to minimize the magnitude of the accelerations that might come with these sudden changes, in order to provide the best possible print quality.
Our algorithms detect areas in the object where more detail is required. This results in more precise paths.
In order to assure smoothness of motion, the algorithms also try to maintain a constant speed, but slow down when necesarry to preserve detail.
The user can choose how to configure the width of the walls for holes and perimeter. Since there is no penalty in build speed for thicker walls, the result is more freedom for the designer.
Our software anticipates a direction change by orienting the nozzle ahead of time. Doing this makes sharp corners possible without slowing down.
When a certain desired wall thickness cannot be fulfilled (e.g. because some regions in the layer are simply too narrow), a second pass fills up to the required thickness where it is possible.
Complex geometry can often be printed in a single stroke, such as a hexagon with an inner circle contour. Our algorithms aim to get the most benefit out of the width of our nozzles.
Solid infill at 10mm stroke width is almost as fast as traditional printers do perimeters.
There is little time required to fill large areas. So thicker bottom and top layers, or fully solid pieces are still printed in short timeframes.
3D printing software is typically composed of 2 stages: slicing the 3D model into 2D layers and then planning the movement of the tool head in this 2D space for every layer.
Our planning system is called Scylax -after ancient Greek explorer Scylax of Caryanda. It is fully cloud-based and allows easy integration into existing open or proprietary client softwares.
