UV printers are used for direct to object printing, you likely own some stuff that has gone through the process. It’s especially popular for customized promotional items that would be otherwise difficult to print on, like flash drives, golf balls, etc.
Admittedly, I also don’t see much of a reason to buy this for my own use, but one could say the same about other hobbies like 3d printing.
Edit: fixed a typo and formatting
The thing is, running a simulation is a pretty inefficient way to do this. Until relatively recently, most printers lacked the computational bandwidth to run a simulation in parallel with active control (my ender 3 back in 2018 didn’t even have the capacity to enable all features if you wanted a leveling probe). Even now, you wouldn’t want to run this on the same hardware that’s actually controlling the machine, since the simulation would delay its ability to send control signals in real time. That’s why Klipper uses a secondary control board, it offloads the extra computation to ensure the primary controller only has to compute the bare minimum to operate with as minimal a delay as possible.
Also, a parallel simulation just isn’t necessarily the most efficient way to catch issues. Thermal control accuracy has been a focus in the printing community at least since Anet A8 printers were burning down people’s homes, and we’re pretty good at preventing thermal runway these days.
On the motor side, the accuracy issues are largely a result of an open loop control system- The steppers have no way of telling the controller that they moved the correct amount. Thus, a simulation wouldn’t help with positional accuracy since the board has no idea if a motor misses a step anyway. There are some mitigating tools like stallguard for load sending, but it’s not really the same thing.
I think this will ultimately fall into the same category as watching a simukated CAM toolpath before running CNC machining operations- it will catch the more obvious mistakes like unsupported surfaces, but won’t be useful at catching more subtle issues caused by specific idiosyncrasies of the machine or material.
The Bambu printers do some cool stuff with measuring resonance to detect lubrication and belt tension issues. This is theoretically possible on any machine that can do Klipper’s inout shaping, but requires a LOT of data to be useful (from what I understand), which is probably why we don’t see many printers on the market that can do that.
For thermals, Marlin (one of the popular printer firmwares) actually evaluates the control response of the heater and thermistor, rather than just looking at a specific temperature range. If the behavior is sufficiently different than what the system is tuned for (not heating up at the expected rate, difficulty maintaining temp, etc), it will throw a temp error and shut down before thermal runaway occurs. I would expect other modern firmwares (e.g. Klipper) do this as well, but I don’t have as much experience tinkering with them and don’t want to make definitive statements.
Unfortunately paypal tends to shoot first and ask questions never, so it affects more than just bad actors. For example, my mom had her account frozen after someone scammed her on an ebay sale- they returned the item for money back but sent an empty box. When she reported it, paypal froze ALL of her funds and defended the scammer. Years later, she’s still out a couple hundred bucks.
They’re also notorious for randomly freezing funds and leaving users with no records.
Aw man, not that their machines were really anything special, but my printing journey started with their rebadged wanhao duplicator i3. Monoprice printers somehow made even creality look expensive at the time!
Looks like this printer is a rebadged flashforge adventurer. Monoprice also sells a version. You might be able to find a version of the firmware from one of those companies and use it.
That’s cool as hell. My understanding is you have to have extremely high volume before uv makes financial sense. The previously-available commercial uv printers are extremely expensive, so the anker printer is only cheap by comparison. Hopefully we will see some more competition at this level that will continue to bring the price down towards something more affordable!