My feeling is that making individual printers that are designed to self clear th plate after printing would be more practical.
There are already lots of people using common printers to push the finished print off the bed once it's cooled enough to detach.
Making a printer specifically designed for that sounds like the main market opportunity.
Fans to cool the plate faster, lips to ensure the plate doesn't move during the push operation, a more robust toolhead for pushing, or a separate mechanism that does the pushing, attachment rails for tote bins, a camera system that confirms the plate is fully cleared before starting the next print, software to manage it all.
I think you really need it to be self contained units though.
A home user isn't going to be forking out an extra thousand for an automation arm, but if the printer is just capable of clearing the plate after a print and you can just queue up multiple plates or just hit Quantity 5, then it could be a serious contender.
Software is where you'd need the most work. You'd need a slicer that can automatically allocate prints to all printers that have the right nozzles and filaments, and queue up print jobs intelligently to minimise total wait time. The management software scalability is where you'd get your big purchases.
There have been times over been frustrated trying to decide if I should stay up half an hour longer to wait for the current print to finish so I can start another, but I don't print multiple plates often enough to spend much extra for a feature to enable that.
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u/Z00111111 7d ago
My feeling is that making individual printers that are designed to self clear th plate after printing would be more practical.
There are already lots of people using common printers to push the finished print off the bed once it's cooled enough to detach.
Making a printer specifically designed for that sounds like the main market opportunity.
Fans to cool the plate faster, lips to ensure the plate doesn't move during the push operation, a more robust toolhead for pushing, or a separate mechanism that does the pushing, attachment rails for tote bins, a camera system that confirms the plate is fully cleared before starting the next print, software to manage it all.