The team sponsored and owned by the Dutch State has released an image of the engine dubbed "deep state" Hexastorm.
The engine is shown below;
A maxon motor drives an octagon prism. The festo tubes are to put air in the air bearing.
The copper element is for water cooling of the laser tubes. The above image is from 2017. The engine apparently hasn't changed since then. You can see they use a Spartan 6 FPGA chip.
As cool as the image is, they still have the following challenges;
- build a robot to mount the aspherical lenses ( they now have a crazy screw system)
- get circular spots
They assume special asperical lenses can be made which circularize laser beams.
I doubt it and even if it's possible this
would be so useful it is a business case in its own right. I would immediately buy these lenses.
Formlabs, Envisiontec (Desktop Metal) would probably buy these as well..
- they have to show their engine has a competitive advantage with respect to Hexastorm.
I am quite sure a lot of people will prefer not to deal with patent holders.
- achieve uniform exposure with all lasers and facets
This engine is for sure not able to do that. I tested it.
Hexastorm has the following fundamental advantages;
- their engine needs to be tilted, mine does not
- my engine is simpler as it uses a single laser bundle.
The original engine violates the KISS principle / Occam's razor.
- my engine is more cost effective, the price of the actuating unit with prism should be less than
35 euro's per laser.
Anyhow, great they put the image out there. I even saw, one of the original inventors Jacobus Jamar is back on the team.
I thought it was nice to share with the folks from Hackaday. As you now start to understand, how I "hacked" and "open sourced" a "deep state" technology.
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