Project Escher more heads working simultaneously to minimize the time required for printing

Print times are certainly one of the critical points of the current filament printers, especially when the size of the pieces you are important or when there are many pieces printed on the same plate. Among Rates of extrusion of the extruder and travel time you can easily break through the roof of the tens of hours for especially large molded parts with high resolution and quality. For the production of pieces in series (then all equal) Italian company, the Tuscan i3D, he proposes his Sixer, able to print six equal pieces simultaneously on the same plate, thanks to the presence on the six print heads machine.

Now by Autodesk arrives a project, which always exploiting the presence of more printheads, pointing instead to minimize the time required for the production augmentation of large pieces. Autodesk is a software house and is not planning to build a new printer, but with its Escher Project aims to make available the software and technology to control a new generation of 3D printers in which individual extruders are able to work so simultaneously in the same piece.

The project is not limited to 3D printing, but wants to create the management software of manufacturing machines with different production technologies, enabling what is defined by one of Autodesk technicians as 'collaborative production' in which different tools are able to working simultaneously on the same piece. Autodesk sees the future machines like small orchestras made up of different instruments and is trying to create with its software the conductor who is able to direct them in unison.