Introducing Ulendo
An adage in manufacturing goes,
You can have it fast, good, or cheap; pick any two.
We think we’ve created something that will get you all three. Through years of research, we’ve created a software algorithm called Ulendo that decreases the printing time of 3D printers by half. FDM 3D printers were already (reasonably) cheap and good — at least good enough for the applications that we need them for — and now we’ve added fast! We can’t adequately describe in words how good it feels when you’re able to complete a 14-hour print in less than 7 hours!
Naturally, your next question is: how does it work? In technical terms, what we’re doing is called feedforward tracking control. We experimentally obtain a mathematical model of a certain type of 3D printer (e.g., Taz 6, Ultimaker S5, etc.) — which we call a calibration map — and we put that map into Ulendo to design a controller. The controller’s job is to compensate for vibrations of the 3D printer using information from the calibration map. More details can be found in the white paper about Ulendo on our website.
Without Ulendo, we can’t command our printers to run at high speeds because its vibration compromises the part quality. But since Ulendo knows how the printer is going to vibrate, it can account for that by slightly changing the commanded motions, while maintaining high quality at the much higher speeds.
Pretty cool, right? It’s even better because we’ve made Ulendo run on a Raspberry Pi (RasPi). You can download it onto an off-the-shelf RasPi, connect it to your printer via the USB port, and run the algorithm on all your prints!
About Us
We’re a group of mechanical/controls engineers at the University of Michigan. We were originally applying these kinds of algorithms to large CNC machines, but, in 2016, we had a kid come in from Stanford University who was really into 3D printers. We figured we’d let him play around with some printers for the summer, trying one of our algorithms, and it worked really well! That kid is now at Michigan pursing his Ph.D. and we’ve been working on refining Ulendo and making it available to everyone. As part of that refinement, we’re looking for people to test a beta version of Ulendo. If you’re interested in trying out the beta version and have a LulzBot Taz 6 3D printer, please visit our website and sign up to apply for the free trial! We are limiting participation to only owners of the popular and reliable Taz 6 for this initial trial phase.
Ultimately, our goal is to make this the new standard for 3D printing. There’s no reason to spend 14 hours doing something that could be done in 7. To do this, we’ll need to continue developing Ulendo and we’re hoping to get feedback from the 3D printing community. We ask that the community be patient with us as Ulendo develops, but we are excited about this step!
Please leave comments with your thoughts or email us at info@ulendo.io.
