Ulendo Technologies, Inc. announces the release of Ulendo Calibration-as-a-ServiceTM, an automated tool that eliminates the guesswork from vibration compensation tuning of 3D printers. This is a “first of its kind” hosted software solution that automatically calibrates an FFF 3D printer to improve its speed and quality.
When paired with a compatible firmware, Ulendo’s software allows the printer to be operated at more than twice the speed of stock firmware while minimizing the impact on quality. It replaces the current time-consuming, manual and error-prone processes that involve printing and measuring parts or manually entering numbers into equations.
Users can connect to Ulendo’s Calibration-as-a-ServiceTM with any print management system, but the solution comes with a pre-made OctoPrint plugin. The OctoPrint plugin offers a simple push button solution which gathers data from an accelerometer attached to the printer. Ulendo Calibration-as-a-ServiceTM then runs thousands of simulations on the collected data and generates the ideal parameters for your machine. The service then automatically verifies the performance of the loaded solution to validate that the targeted vibration behavior is being effectively addressed.
Ulendo Calibration-as-a-ServiceTM is designed to help 3D printer manufacturers and contract manufacturers with large fleets of machines improve the productivity of their machines by allowing them to reliably take advantage of the new vibration compensation abilities within the open-source Marlin firmware when using compatible 32-bit architecture. The software can be scheduled to recalibrate the printer automatically on a schedule/frequency desired for the printer.
Additionally, the company plans to continue perfecting the motion control algorithms that power its vibration compensation technique as well as features such as extrusion control and predictive maintenance in future versions of the software.
Ulendo is offering Calibration-as-a-Service to
- Manufacturers of Marlin-based FFF 3D printers
- Contract manufacturers that have a significant investment in Marlin-based FFF 3D printers
This ground-breaking software innovation allows FFF printer manufacturers to provide their end users with increased performance by shipping new units of a printer model with a subscription to Ulendo Calibration-as-a-ServiceTM included. Manufacturers can also offer the software to their existing customers as an upgrade for previously purchased printers. In addition to improving brand loyalty, the 3D printer manufacturer gives the user a reason not to discard what some industry analysts have been calling “junk printers” in light of the introduction of “high-speed” printers.
In 2024, the company will expand the software to work with other firmware platforms beyond Marlin and will ultimately offer the hosted software to individual 3D printer end users.
The benefits of Ulendo Calibration-as-a-ServiceTM include:
- Automated calibration which can be either manually initiated or automatically scheduled
- Calibration results in seconds
- Unlimited number of calibrations for a specific printer
- Supports common machine designs (e.g., Cartesian, Bed Slinger, CoreXY)
Ulendo Calibration-as-a-ServiceTM for Marlin-based FFF printers is offered on a subscription basis starting at $275 a year. Each subscription is tied to a specific printer and allows an unlimited number of calibrations to be performed on that specific printer.
The product offering is just one of Ulendo’s responses to the industry’s need for high speed without sacrificing quality. Some of the manufacturers of recently introduced “high-speed” FFF printers have been implementing improvements in their mechanical design, including adopting different designs, lightweighting their printers and adding single board computers to augment their machine control systems. Other manufacturers have opted for the stiffening approach by adding solid aluminum gantries and high powered servo motors resulting in heavier, more expensive machines that require more energy to operate. Yet others are adopting “input shaping” as a solution. But the quality issues inherent with input shaping render it unacceptable for high-precision, high-volume part applications. For more details about quality issues with input shaping, refer to Ulendo’s article "When Input Shaping Isn't Enough...."
Furthermore, a 3D printer manufacturer can stay on Marlin firmware platform instead of migrating to Klipper firmware in order to leverage their input shaping feature. This also means saving months, if not years, of engineering effort implementing vibration compensation features into their printers.
Ulendo Technologies, Inc. has been at the forefront of the transformation to software-driven vibration compensation in FFF 3D printing. The importance of software driven vibration compensation as a tool for boosting FFF 3D printing speeds was originally popularized by research at the University of Michigan led by the founder of Ulendo Technologies, Inc., Professor Chinedum Okwudire, in 2017. As the 3D printing community grappled with how to introduce vibration compensation to open-source firmware, in early 2020 he encouraged members of the community on a public online forum to explore input shaping as a simpler alternative to the more-advanced FBS (filtered B -splines) approach that he had used in his 2017 research.