Recently placed my order for my ultimaker and I am eagerly and patiently awaiting the shipment in a few weeks.That said, I would like to make some constructive criticism of the company's online presence. It is sorely lacking. This forum for instance. Can't a moderator log in once a day for 15 minutes and clean out the spam?? Really. It makes the whole org look like a joke.
Hi Matt,
As a regular user of this forum, I think I actually see the spam removed regularly, but yes it is annoying to see it at all, and it would be awesome if some harder hurdles to join the forum would be implemented (i.e. mod approval before joining).
Before I step down from the soap box - I really am interested in whats going on at the company, and wish the crew great success. The first place to look is the website blog. As of today, the latest update there is from over a month ago. We really are interested in whats going on at Ultimaker (let us in on whatever you can). Your group of users are enthusiastic about your company and product. I sincerely hope and believe good things are going on there. What is going on with the jumbo ultimaker kit with the extra 'z' depth? What is down the pike with dual extrusion? In the large picture, what I am getting at is an issue of marketing and branding. I nearly bought from the competition for the doubts raised by the lackluster image being portrayed.
I have to say you got an extra tall soap box today...
What I think and understand, UM is a very young company, and just recently was able to make the jump from a fablab to a real company hiring more support & production staff... yes, things are not all ideal, and I bet things would have had been better if they would have gotten some nice US VC slush fund, but they haven't, and yet they do a pretty good job getting UMs out to people.
Give them some slack... things will get better...
But yes, a bit more support/info would be nice to get directly from the source, and not just from people "nearby" the project.
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mr_seeker 0
The ultimaker team is working on a way to get rid of the spam. I asked Erik (one of the founders) a couple of days ago about it on skype, and he told me that someone was already busy with it. Seems that the protection they put in is insufficient, or its not robotic spam but human spam (pay a guy a dollar an hour to fill in recaptcha stuff). Very hard to block those with the usual methods (you would have to resort to a person checking and approving every single person).
Like I said before, they are busy looking for someone to take the PR-section of Ultimaker. As of this moment, it looks like nobody has applied for this job. I know Erik does the online stuff (like the blog and rest) but he is quite a busy man, putting orders for components and calling china to make sure deadlines are met. All while trying to improve the ultimaker. He told me that because he is so busy, he has to ask other people to go to tv-shows to talk about 3d printers. Running a company is more than what the eye is actually seeing.
I heard that it was actually an experimental machine built for a fablab in holland. Custom order work. If you really want, I can call ultimaker and ask how much it would cost to produce another one.
The current ultimakers can be easily changed to support dual extrusion without any modifications to the machine. Just add a new extruder, change the software a bit and voila: Dual extrusion. However, there are some limitations to the current dual extrusion designs:
[*:2f7xjvpk]Dual "extrusion" is actually not "dual extrusion". Its having multiple print heads.
[*:2f7xjvpk]Multiple STL files are needed for printing. One for every color.
[*:2f7xjvpk]For every color change, you need to change the position of the print head.
[*:2f7xjvpk]You can only print with 1 printhead at a time.
[*:2f7xjvpk]Software is not supporting multiple colors at this moment.
These are also possibly the reason why ultimaker hasnt put dual extrusion in their product yet. Makerbot is making it look like its the future, but the BfB3000 does exactly the same thing as the makerbot is doing right now, and with a simple change in the design the ultimaker can do the same. You wouldnt even need to buy a completely new machine, just a new extruder with a stepper driver. However, it wouldnt make any sense to do this because the software simply doesnt support it. And its not just changing repG, its the STL files that dont support multiple colors. You would need to make 2 different files for 2 different colors, and if you want to change 1 simple thing, you would need to redo the complete design to make everything match. And lastly, you would need to calibrate the 2 extruders and align them perfectly. If they are not aligned perfectly, they will cause problems on the long run.
They are working pretty hard behind the scenes, making everything better and faster with every revision. However, you have to know that they are a company, not an university. Telling about the stuff they are doing in their labs can make them lose sales, because people would wait for a new revision before buying a kit. Lost sales = lost income. Considering that their company is less than a year old, having problems with lost sales can turn out bad for the company. Having an "open hardware" design structure, that can also pose a risk of people making clones. Unfortunately, I am an engineer, not a sales person.
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