@Sam_Jacoby I understand the need to keep things proprietary but it is very clear to me that Formlabs needs to work on being more discriminating about what is really secret sauce. There were a number of people on the old thread who had ever reason to be jaded about the form 1+ lasers but got a confidence boost in your product after I told them the back story on the form1 failures. Giving users things like the autopsy reports on their returned printers should be standard operating procedure. There is so much to making any modern product that a lot of information is just not that secret. (By the way doing testing for the 1st 1K/Hrs or a thermally accelerated version of that is standard fair for anyone using diode lasers in things more expensive than laser pointers)
I posted the laser printer scanning assembly where as I said this is a solved problem. The printer industry has not only solved it, they solved it in a commodity product where the cost of the solution has to be much lower per unit than anything in the Form 1+. The printing industry is also not the only group to do this. No secret sauce there.
The secret sauce is not in how the printer’s basic operation works or the design of the circuit boards. All of that some competitor could just duplicate. The secret sauce is in how you squeeze the finest tolerance on things like the laser of the cheapest components. Too be really good at that is about more than design it is about process control and statistics on things like the quality of the lasers delivered. That optimization for cost is where your secrets are for the hardware. I understand if this policy is not changed but understand that the value of an R&D area on the forum is wasted if the dialog is purely one way. With no meaningful feedback and info the users might as well be doing their own open source printer.
I am not asking for anyone there to make a new product. Just fix a design oversight in the original. If we are wrong about this spatial filter and the collimator then so be it. The way things look right now it if I send my printer back a guaranteed solution is not really available to my case. As far as I can tell I will get a changed laser which might or might not have a better profile. I want to help put a fix in and then know the outcome.
Sorry I just assumed from all the posts on the forum that you were the admin. Thank you very much for doing it by default. Your management owes you big time for dealing with us.
PS: I will reprise my laser printer post as a new thread. I don’t know what you are expecting to happen but anything is worth a throw at this point.