How to Measure a 3D Printer's Production Capacity
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Basics
- This page aims to find and/or develop metrics for measuring how many parts a printer can produce per unit of time
- This will not be 100% accurate, but a general unit for comparing printers etc will be useful
- Also units such as print bed, and extrusion speed etc, may not tell the whole story
- Also perhaps develop a tool in the future (manual, or perhaps automatic) for converting specsheets of printers and printfarms into the value
- Main Use case of the final unit will be:
- Calculating "production speed" of machines and print farms
- Calculating total "machine time" is needed for a run of parts etc (like print time but more generalized) essentialy like labor hours for repairs in car repair bills etc?
Base Units
- Nozzle Size
- Maximum Quality Extrusion Speed
- Maximum Quality Printhead Speed
- Maximum Printhead Speed
- Maximum Printhead Acceleration
- 3D Printer Rigidity
- Breaking? of the motors (ie how fast can it "stop" or does it need a portion of "slow down/coast/break" space)
- Maximum Print Volume
- Number of Independant Printheads Per Machine
- Filament Width
- Print Cooling Rate
Proposed Final Units
- 3D Benchys Per Hour (Given that the benchy nearly tests everything, printing a quality one could be applied to nearly any type of print?)
- 10mm Cubes Per Hour (May be better for working with vary basic shapes (gears etc, just 2d stacks with little bridging/changes between layers etc and thus faster?)
- Lattice Cubes Per Hour (May be better for working with VERY complex shapes (Printing airless tires, art, etc)
Calculation Methods
Option A: Brute Force
- Print as many of the selected object at a "standard" infill etc, that can fit on the printers print bed, then optimize for print speed as much as possible While Still Retaining Build Quality
Option B: Manual Math
- Some number wizardry with the aforementioned "base units" and/or based off of experimentation witht the brute force tests
Option C: Computer Programs
- Once option b is completed we can make a script with a GUI for plugging in the values, perhaps deriving what can be to reduce thata complexity, then giving the various values
- An additional development would be a chrome extension, or libreoffice plugin? or something that can automatically do this for spreadsheets, and spec sheets