Wasp Delta 20 40 Turbo 3D Printer – May be the Fastest FFF 3D Printer in the World

At the 3D Print Hub show in Milan, WASP says they plan to unveil their Delta WASP 20 40 Turbo 3D printer. That’s big news on a couple of fronts: the Italian group WASP, has plans to 3D print homes in third world countries using native soils as print material, and to fund that initiative they say their latest printer can print at a startling 600 millimeters per second, and travel at 1,000mm/sec.

For the home printing project, WASP built a nearly 20-foot tall 3D printer which uses clay made from local soils.  Their latest printer may even overshadow this feat.

The company says that they were faced with a desire for speedier printing from their delta-based line of printers, so they’ve employed a powerful electronic board and processor – and modified the firmware – to update a re-designed PCB board capable of 82 million operation per second.

“In the open source world, we didn’t find more powerful boards,” says Massimo Moretti, the founder of the WASP project. “All the firmware was for Arduino Mega. This has forced us to do our own ‘discovery and development,’ and we’ll share our knowledge in the open source community.”

Moretti says that, whereas the WASP 20 40 was capable of 250-300 mm/s, the work done to realize the Turbo version of this machine has upped the print speed to 600 mm/s while still maintaining the precision of the previous model.

“While we were projecting and building the BigDelta printer, we bumped in a huge problem that we never met before: the control board (Arduino Mega) didn’t afford the amount of data that are necessary to move the motor’s axes,” Moretti says. “A Delta printer executes 200 square roots per millimeter for each axis – and we have three axes, plus the extruder. We noticed that Delta configuration needs a huge amount of data to work, and it was for this reason that our BigDelta, several meters tall, was printing jerky and the display update was late.”

Moretti says the solution came via Dennis Patella and his collaborators.

“Dennis is a real innovator, he disassembled the Marlin program and recomposed it for our purpose,” he says.

According to Moretti, the lessons learned from the Big Delta printer provided a solution to improve WASP’s smaller printers. The DeltaWASP 20 40 manages several millions data opertions per second, and the green rubber bands which distinguish its suspended extruder may well have made it “one of the fastest printers in the world.”

WASP plans to roll out the Delta Turbo in Milan on March 5-7 and if the speeds are as they say, this may in fact be the fastest known consumer FFF 3D printer on the market.  Previous 3D printers we have covered have approached 500mm/s making the DeltaWASP 20 40 Turbo twice as fast as the fastest known machine that’s currently on the market.  Rapid print speed is one of the more desirable attributes that a 3d printer can have, as one of the major downfalls of 3D printing is the time that’s required for even some of the smaller projects.  There is little doubt that this printer will be a major hit if in fact the speeds they advertise are accurate.

What do you think of the speed claims made by the members of the Italian WASP project for their Delta WASP 20 40 Turbo printer? Let us know in the WASP Delta 20 40 Turbo forum thread on 3DPB.com.