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Young Teen Reveals Modular 3D Printed 10 Times Faster than Normal – Video

The Orb uses an altogether new type of print code
  The ORB 3D Printer
The problem with 3D printers is that they're really, really slow at constructing an item once ordered. True, some are faster than others, but that's usually because they use thicker layer sizes and, thus, sacrifice detail level.
A 15-year-old young man named Thomas Suarez may have just solved this problem for us, and he did it both at the software level and the hardware side.

Back in July 2014, he said he would launch a 3D printer that can print at ten times the normal speed.

Now he's finally introduced the printer, which he calls the ORB, and he seems to have delivered on his bold claim.

The ORB 3D printer

What he did was design the ORB with a modular setup, which allows rapid switching of components and customization. A spinning disc like that of a recording player acts as the build plate.

The platform is the one rotating here, instead of just the extruder doing it. This allows for the tenfold increase in speed compared to conventional FFF/FDM technologies out there.

A new heating process is also in play, stacking several heating elements on one another with just a small air gap between them.

All in all, the ORB 3D printer can extrude large quantities of molten plastic with a short time frame. More than that, it can use enhanced filaments containing specks of metal, further increasing the speed of melting and extrusion.

At the heart of everything is the ORB Print Code, a code which is human-readable and, thus, understood by anyone and everyone. For something that looks like a fishbowl, the new printer is certainly impressive.

The code transmits instructions in parallel to all printer modules available at a given time. You could say that the printer works on a sort of group effort, a small scale version of a hive mind really.

Finally, the spherical shape and transparent outer case provides a 360-degree view of the object being printed at all times.

Availability and pricing

The ORB 3D printer will be sold by Thomas Suarez' company, CarrotCorp, and will be launched in a crowdfunding campaign at some point in the coming weeks. That means that earliest shipments probably won't come before May or June, perhaps even later. Also, the price will stay unknown until the campaign begins, and won't be the final, higher retail figures.

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