Revolution Infinity 3D Printer: Hands on

Back in August, I got my first look at the printer from Revolution Printers at the Seattle 3D Printing Expo. Founder, Warren Strome and I go back quite a while as he was one of the earlier members to join 3D604.org and we co-presented our printers at the Vancouver Island Maker Faire in 2012 as well as this past year in Vancouver.

Warren loaned me his latest creation, the Infinity 3D. As a former aviation engineer (he worked on helicopters), I fully expected a well built machine with lots of little details…and that assumption was right.

Everything from the handful of 3D printed parts (including a nice cable guide cover) to the massive enclosure (almost too big) was well thought out. It has one of the most accessible print areas (215mm x 215mm x 230mm) I’ve used with great lighting to photograph or simply watch the action.

The all metal extruder (single head in the unit I had, with dualhead coming soon) can support temperatures up to 300C so this machine, combined with the heated build plate and removable doors on the enclosure (for a heated chamber) can print with just about every kind of filament on the market.

Due to the all metal design, it also heats up very quickly but the heat is well managed at the nozzle and I never had any heat travel up.

This is a GoPro Wrench I printed with the Carbon Fibre PLA I recently wrote about:

The onboard display gives you plenty of feedback as to what the machine is doing:

The Infinity 3D comes bundled with Matter Control to use as the primary slicing tool along with some machine specific presets. This was my first time using it and I was quite impressed – it even supports Makerbot output (which I have yet to try). It has a ton of interesting features like SMS/Email support to alert you when your print is done. It’s also cross platform and 100% free to use.

You can choose the slicing engine underneth as well so if you have issues with one slicer, you can try another when preparing your model. Matter Control has it’s own slicing engine as well as Slic3r and Cura are supported. All of them seemed to work ridiculously fast.

I shot a timelapse of the Infinity 3D printing the sharktopus:

Things I liked:

• really well engineered and solid printer
• Matter Control software is surprisingly robust compared to other slicers out there
• the all metal extruder can handle just about any kind of filament out there
• heated bed and removable enclosure doors make it a very versatile machine
• easy filament swapping thanks to the single knob ‘door’ on the extruder to release the filament
• print quality was exceptional using the presets

Things I didn’t like:

• the enclosure is enormous – you’ll need a lot of room for it
• the spool holder on the unit I had needed work as it kept making a clunk sound when the spool would unwind while printing – Warren has already revised the holder based on my feedback
• the SD card slot is a little tricky to load the card into
• bed leveling is a pain but once it’s done, I didn’t have to make any adjustments in the couple of weeks I had the printer
• Z-height adjustment is tucked away behind motors so awkward to get at

So who is this printer meant for? I’d definitely consider this machine to be more in the prosumer space given it’s price and size. It’s a very versatile machine that can print with just about any material. It’s also capable of printing very large objects over long periods of time. So this machine is meant for those that may already be familiar with 3D printing and want to move up to a larger machine or want to be able to print with more than one or two types of filament.

Finally, it’s worth noting that this is the third commercially available 3D printer that has come from a member of 3D604.org and that makes me very proud…they are all very different designs but very capable machines.

That’s kind of cool.