Cool! From HP! The robot only costs $1,500 but a two pack of extra sharpies for it costs $48,000. Before you can use it, you must install 5 petabytes of HP drivers.
replies(9):
The industrial printers for example, especially the PageWide Web Press line are impressive. The T1100 is a huge beast.
Then there are the life science products that can do precision dispensing of fluids for life sciences and drug discovery. Some of them also do individual single live cell dispensing.
https://www.dustyrobotics.com/compare/fieldprinter-vs-sitepr...
(2) The key to this using quality materials. You’ve got to use good coated paper (which is relatively expensive.). You can mostly trust OEM ink although I found low-end EcoTank printers use ink that fades in six months although the higher end models like the ET-8550 are better. Look at forums and you will find many versions of “I was trying to print borderless and all I got was this inksplosion” and the common denominator is third party inks. There could be testing of third party inks that proves they are comparable to or even superior too the OEM links but as it is there is no testing because… they target a consumer who doesn’t care.
If you give it a big job, it freezes halfway and just spins its wheels as fast as it can until you unplug it.
It refuses to paint yellow lines when it's out of blue paint.
It asks you for feedback after doing any and every job.
It doesn't have good Linux support.
It has no off button. The only modes are printing, standby at half power, or unplugged.
When you want to just print a small blue square on the floor, it makes xxxjuukkktsssssruuuuukkkttt sounds for 5 minutes, pauses for another 2, zooms at max speed to the location on the floor, pauses for 10 seconds, and begins doing the actual job it was designed to do, but does it in a shade of blueish brown.
This one called Dusty
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pq2ZG19hGg
Oh nice someone else mentioned it
What if the plumber missed a drain or supply by an inch? Guessing the robot doesn't adjust its outline. I.e. if a sewer stub is wrong by a few inches, the wall needs to be moved to fit the toilet, or the slab needs to be busted up and the sewer line relocated.
I suppose if it gets some of this wrong, it'll be obvious, and a human can correct it.
We had to make so many compromises and wastages as a result. Bathrooms now smaller if we want to keep other rooms the same, bathtubs couldn't fit, aw man.
Then when the house went up to 2nd and 3rd levels, the staircase was narrow and wasn't connecting between the levels. That alone delayed us by 3 months as we had to get the architect to build a 3D model of the affected area so we could figure it out. We have to hoist furniture up through balconies as it can't fit through the stairs.
I think having some machinery that minimises human error would be very helpful.
It can correct course due to deviations in floor surface or obstructions pretty well.
## How it works
### CAD preparation
1. You need a 2D CAD file. If you have a 3D model, convert it into a 2D .dxf CAD file.
2. Insert additional printing information and instructions and use the HP Plug-in to get a robot-ready file.
3. Save the 2D .dxf CAD file into the cloud. Maintain version control and share revisions with field operators.
### Site Preparations
1. Clear layout area as for manual layout. No need for a broom-swept floor.
2. Make sure that control points used for Robotic Total Station setup are accurately marked. The layout is as accurate as the control points.
### Solution setup
1. Set up the Robotic Total Station and shoot the control points.
2. Lock the Robotic Total Station to the robot tracking prism.
3. Connect the Robotic Total Station wirelessly to HP SitePrint through the user interface (tablet, phone, laptop, etc.).
### Job execution
1. Open the CAD file on the control panel, select the print area, and submit the job.
2. Maintain a line of sight between the robot tracking prism and the Robotic Total Station.
3. Choose between different inks for different types of layouts.
4. The robot avoids collisions with obstacles.
5. HP SitePrint is robust enough to work on rough and bumpy surfaces.
### End-to-End management
1. HP SitePrint cloud allows sharing of the latest CAD files with all stakeholders, so you can monitor job progress from the office and manage accounting reports.Places where high precision matters and services aren’t connected to the endpoint at the slab. That’s not most construction because progressive refinement is how most things are built.
For example a pipe might not be in the location shown on plan for many reasons ranging from simple human error to a delta between the plan location when the pipe was layed and the time the robot got its data…keep in mind that when the pipe went in there was only dirt, not anything to accept ink.
Doesn't sound like a lot, but you're losing a foot and a half across a dimension of a house. That's very easily into the "Bathtub doesn't fit" territory.
>PCL reduces cost by 86% on interior curved lines layout at Vancouver airport
for random bits of complicated-shape fashion in a giant flat open area, I can see how it could almost immediately pay for itself.
that said... at that point it's probably competing with "we put a projector on the ceiling for a day, and went over the lines with chalk". which is quite cheap.
When you found out the builders did that, what you should have done is stopped the work and have them correct their mistake on their own dime. This is an unforgivable mistake and a team of professional should never make something like that.
Obviously I am not in your shoes, but this is insane to me. Any supervisor or consultant or surveyor visiting the site should've caught that.
It draws on the floor for construction projects? Why?
Either there's no building or there's a building. If there's no building, then where does it draw on? If the building is already there, then what's the drawing for?
With a lot of commercial buildings it is up to the tenant to install the interior walls, as everyone will have slightly different requirements. The Twin Towers were a great example of this: all of the structural support was done in the exterior walls and the center core, so you had a huge empty space you could fill in however you wanted.
The robot draws on the bare concrete floor, so all the carpenters, plumbers, electricians, and hvac technicians will install their stuff in the right place. Turns out having to rework your plans because someone installed a big expensive pipe in the wrong place is a huge hassle...
[0]: https://as1.ftcdn.net/jpg/09/64/72/08/1000_F_964720843_sLWAm...
I had a landscaper screw up just about everything they could building a retaining wall, and they couldn't even get me an extra bag of grass seed after the fact.
It's almost certainly not the layout guy's job to decide that the bathroom can be 3" larger than it was and the lobby 3" smaller.
I deal with this relatively often in a machining context - People complain that they'd rather just make simple parts on the Bridgeport manual mill rather than a CNC, because they can adjust on the fly with the manual mill but have to get the CAD changed so that CAM can adapt to the modifications. But when they make it manually, and a year later we need to ship out a replacement part or develop an ECO... if you did it by updating the CAD then the replacement part will fit. If you just freehanded it, the part will not fit.
The average home user probably wants to print a set of 10 holiday pictures once a year. This means that every time they want to print those ink cartridges will be dried out and have clogged print heads - so they have to buy an expensive set of new cartridges to replace their barely-used ones.
It is why laser printing is so often suggested for home users: you can let a printer rot for several years and still reliably print a couple of dozen pages when you finally need it again. The downside is that they do a rather poor job at printing photos so now there are even fewer reasons to use it, and you only need it once every couple of years to print out a contract to sign or something.
I've personally given up on owning printers. They don't make the rock-solid HP / Brother workhorses anymore, and I can't be bothered to deal with all the proprietary "smart" crap they are pushing these days. If I want something printed, I'll just go to the local library.
My wife and I concluded that we got what we paid for, and you're right that in hindsight we should have taken legal action against the contractor. I don't know how breaking down the whole exterior of a house to fix it down to the foundation would feel though. At some point we thought of selling the partially completed structure.
This story also seems a litle off unless the contractor didn't allow inspection. It'd be found in 10 seconds with a single usage of a tape measure.
I also had measurements issues and a contractor that tried to force it to me. I just said I will not pay until it's fixed. The next week everything was fixed.
My hunch?
Seen these things before.
I doubt it has been DRMd to hell yet, and I doubt they upgraded to show PC LOAD LETTER at all times, but why did they add this to their portfolio?
Landing page sez “How HP SitePrint works: Use the HP plugin to get a robot-ready file … Save the 2D .dxf file into the cloud”. FAQ agrees, under “How do I control the robotic layout solution?” https://www.hp.com/us-en/printers/site-print/layout-robot/fa...
If HP cloud is the only way, is there a Privacy Policy for this? Would HP store the DXF beyond the time the layout gets uploaded and the robot finishes printing? Are they storing data from other sensors? Data from RTS? If they are storing anything, are they also selling them, or selling conclusions drawn from them?
The bathrooms have slightly smaller tubs, though we scratched one of the larger tubs while trying to fit it in, and the supplier wouldn't accept it. It's still in our garage lol.
We were building on a contract where we paid for material at cost, and the contractor made their fee on the labour. They were inexperienced, I'd obviously never use them nor recommend them. We made them pay for most of the damages that we could quantify, and for things like crooked walls/non-90° corners we couldn't really do much.
To an untrained eye, the house is not bad, but we know where all the mistakes are.
When I got a 'free' inkjet printer I realized I couldn't just make 10 anime prints and come back six monhths later and make 10 more so I committed to print something every day which I did for maybe 2.5 years and it turned out to be quite an adventure. To feed that machine I got serious about taking photographs, when that sucked up all my time I fell out of the printing habit!
See https://www.behance.net/gallery/232344867/Life-is-Better-Wit...
The foundation is normally 500-600mm wide.
Another funny story is that we have a concrete column in the living room that was meant to be 250mm x 250mm. The subcontractor decided to box it in and pour it before we came to inspect. He made it 450mm x 450mm.
So we have this giant concrete thing in the passage.
If some of it wasn't as embarrassing, I'd blog about it with photos.
I had responsibility (working with consultants who did this for a living) to work with the project manager, and architect/GC. All of the datacenters (back when companies put data-centers in their buildings), IDFs, MDFs. The MDF in particular was complex as it combined the floors IDF + the buildings MDF/telco connections, punchdowns, and a massive Nortel Option51c set of cabinets. We carefully laid out the room - measuring the minimal possible distance for cable techs to get in between the racks. Everything was designed down to the 1/4" in the room.
I showed up (mostly randomly) with a tape measure during construction - internal walls were up - and they were off by almost 14" - which would have made the internals almost unusable for their original purpose. They had to tear down their framing, pull everything out - thankfully before any electrics/racks/hvac had been put in place.
Having something like this would have greatly reduced that possibility. Bet they end up on every site (if they aren't already).
The foundation would be a pain in the ass but ultimately, as others have stated, that's kind of not your problem.
But at that point it's back to engineering to figure out what to do (leave the pipe where it is and adjust around it _or_ move the pipe - possibly cutting concrete and perhaps untensioning/retensioning post-tensioned cables at substantial delay/cost) or move the piece of equipment that the penetration is serving.
One nice thing about automation like this is that the "as built" plans are more likely to be accurate because the only way to get "the computer" and "the robot" to stop squawking is to change the plans they are operating off of.
If this can't handle dirt surfaces, future generations/models probably will if there's demand. Perhaps such models would use spray paint/stencils or driving pins into the ground for marking purposes (or something more practical - I'm a software guy and this sounds like a hardware problem!).
My experience is with small residential builds but I would hope on large projects the location of each "unmovable" pipe/conduit etc that will end up penetrating a slab is already carefully verified before the next step is taken (such as placing concrete). Hopefully this is done with a total station rather than guys with chalk lines and tape measures. But a solution like this could reduce manual checking mistakes (of course, it's less likely to result in an experienced subcontractor noticing that the plan must be wrong because there's no reason for a conduit for 1KV electrical cables to come up 2cm away from a toilet trap in a multi-stall public bathroom - GIGO).
I can very well imagine how they can build in massive amounts of new enshitification methods to make you pay even more.
I imagine soon they could implement something like this...
"Robot error, you've reached wear & tear limit on your left wheel: 1 mile. Please buy a new wheel from HP shop, Price: $2999"
"Robot error, looks like your new wheel is not compatible with your old right wheel. Please buy a new right wheel..."
"Robot error, you've reached recharge limit of 50 cycles, on your internal robot battery..."
It sounds like HP is continuing to go the subscription route to use one of these “printers”.
Randomly, it'll run a head cleaning cycle that involves spraying large amounts of paint into the neighbour's driveway before cleaning itself on their lawn.
Then some time in the late 90s/early 2000s they let the bean counters at it, and they've become the poster child of terrible product design optimised to extract the maximum revenue at all costs from customers.
I honestly don't care how revolutionary or awesome a product is - if it's from HP I'm staying away, and would recommend everyone else to do so. The company deserves to die.
Just need to add that after being on for a day you get a blue screen with some hex numbers on it.
If it's been on for less than a day, you have to power cycle it for it to connect to apple devices.
Finally if you power cycle it, it complains about being power cycled incorrectly and does nothing for 10 minutes.
My experience is as an architect.
The CAD file isn’t the building no matter how much everyone might wish it were.
Even if the plans were the building odds of everybody using the same plan revision all the time is just about zero.
And most of the time, nobody is gonna pay for a super accurate as-built BIM. Because the point of the exercise is a certificate of occupancy.
So the house is now [50cm | half a metre | 20 inches] shorter length overall in "both" commonly rectangular dimensions.
Take any room in your house and remove that much from it and tell me it doesn't detract from the room....
We don't pour concrete underneath covers very often. They need it to be perfectly broom, swept and clean. They also need to cover over it just in case to moisture humidity gets down. Once it prints it does stay.
Dusty is a little bit better. The benefit is HP works off of Trimble so if you're in that ecosystem.
Trimble changed their business model so they've increased their profits but they haven't gained any more clients. Essentially they've learned how to double how much they make off of everyone.
You can shoot control off some of these generic models now that cost like four grand and they work just as good. That's less than Trimble subscription cost. I can only imagine the hp bundle coming soon.
So make the sponge replaceable, but only with a field maintenance call-out. The sponge unit will have an NFC chip in it that if it's removed will lock the unit out until a Technician access code is entered to restore the unit.
We can sell it as a whole periodic maintenance thing - give the service guy a can of air-duster and a roll of paper towel to wipe the thing off.
(I feel dirty even writing this because I'm sure someone is taking notes and thinking these are great ideas)
Another commenter explained that this is actually about drywalls that are installed after the fact, which makes much more sense now.
