Comment on The Most Printable 3D Printer Yet
nyan@lemmy.cafe 4 days ago
Interesting, but not terribly useful unless you have a separate, likely electronics-driven, machine to punch plastic sheets for it (or have a pre-existing sheet defining something you want to replicate a bazillion of). It’s an ingenious but very niche machine.
cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 3 days ago
Punch cards have been around for over 200 years. No electronics are needed to punch them. Some very complex patterns were created with the Jacquard loom without any computers. It just takes a massive amount of work to create the cards.
nyan@lemmy.cafe 3 days ago
All technically true, but how many man-hours would it take to calculate the set of holes necessary to print each layer of a non-trivial object (say, a Benchy) without electronic assistance? I’m sure it could be done, but most people couldn’t do it in a practical timeframe. Taking presliced gcode and translating it via an automatic or even a manual system should be doable, but you still need a computer to slice the model into gcode.
Jacquard looms are a whole other crottle of greeps. Each warp position gets either raised or lowered, so it’s in essence a binary model rather than full analog—conceptually much simpler than this printer, whose punch language is going to have to include slots for longer motor moves. I’d guess that, in the old days, Jacquard patterns were set up for manual punching by drawing up a diagram (which would look like a piece of black-and-white pixel art) and transferring the information one row at a time to the punch. That doesn’t seem like it would work for this printer.