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Cool thinking! The linked printer can be seen as optimized for serialized throughput, whereas in the end the total amount of data transferred is what matters.

So parallelize!

Are there FDM printers with multiple nozzles extruding in the same plane? That seems like an obvious incremental step from regular single nozzle printers.

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I've got an unfinished 6 head printer that was intended to print 6 identical objects at a time.

Could also be used to accelerate the print of a single item by having different nozzles work at different parts of the design at once. Would need lots of updates to the slicer and solving some tricky optimization problems.

Autodesk's "Project Escher" was intended to do just that. The machine was built by Titan Robotics and uses Smoothieboards but the main issue is getting all the controllers to recognize where the other heads are in real time. Setting the CAM system to attempt to keep them all sync'ed doesn't always work as intended due to the way the firmware on the control board processes the incoming gcode.

https://www.engineering.com/3DPrinting/3DPrintingArticles/Ar...

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