SainSmart to Launch Infinite-Z Belt Printer with Wi-Fi
Called the Infi-20, the new machine takes a lot of cues from Creality's 3DPrintMill and adds a few tricks of its own.
Do you remember where you were when the Cold Belt War turned hot? Family, friends, colleagues, and, eh, maybe acquaintances, all divided along party lines. Are they the future of desktop 3D printing? Niche machines with limited use? Who can tell? Not us.
But we can tell you a bunch of bits about the new SainSmart Infi-20, which has popped up for preorder on the company’s website sometime in the last week or so.
The general concept of the Infi-20 is that of the Creality 3DPrintMill – a 3D printer with CoreXY kinematics, the X/Y- gantry is canted 45 degrees and where what would traditionally be a static print bed is instead a taut belt of nylon fabric. This belt gives the printer its “infinite Z” and provides a rolling print bed for continuous series printing or the printing of loooong objects.
On the flip side, you only have 200 x 170 mm to print within for the X- and Y- axes. In this regard, the Infi-20 and 3DPrintMill are identical, but a few features on the Infi-20 set them apart.
For one thing, SainSmart seems to be trying to simplify the fussy bed (or rather, belt) leveling that can come with belt printers. While technically unspectacular, a welcome feature here is a baked-in leveling print routine that gives you a staggered line to live calibrate against, fiddling the knobs and adjusting your offsets as you eyeball a clean line snaking its way down the belt.
Another prominent feature of the SainSmart Infi-20 is its Wi-Fi connectivity. It appears that you’ll be able to call up the ESP3D web interface, in addition to app-based OctoPrint companions such as Polymer on iOS and OctoRemote on Android. The benefit of this is pretty clear – remote control and online printing can bring great convenience to your printer use. How well it works in practice, we’ll have to wait and see.
A roller attachment is on the cards here, too, for easier handling of longer-than-the-belt prints. (Let’s start an unofficial competition here – who can set up the most Iron Man-like stack of objects to support an infinite Z print.)
You can find more details of the Infi-20, which has a pre-order price of $749 (add $50 for the roller), over on the SainSmart website. We’ll be bringing our hands-on experiences with the printer soon. Until then.
License: The text of "SainSmart to Launch Infinite-Z Belt Printer with Wi-Fi" by All3DP is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.