so i’ve got this little angle figure, andwhat’s better than one of these cheesy decoration pieces? you guessed it - two of them! but, when it comes to consumer 2d desktopinkjet printers, it’s pretty clear that the “all in one†class of devices haswon by a far stretch, combining printing,
types of 3d printing technology, scanning, copying and faxing documents intoa single, convenient package. there’s not been a real equivalent in the3d world yet - but that’s exactly what aio robotics announced with their zeus machineon kickstarter in 2013, which smashed through their funding goal on the first day and thengot funded with pretty much the same amount
of pledges they had after that one day. three years later, we now have a matured versionof that same design, and judging by how many users go out of their way to create an amazonaccount just to give their praise for the zeus, it looks like their concept is workingout pretty well with the current iteration of their machine. there’s a lot to talk about, so let’sget right into it. and copy a few of these angels in the process. so even on the first look, you’ll noticethat the zeus is quite different from what’s currently the standard approach to 3d printing.
it’s a design that reminds me of the crazy5-axis industrial cnc mills from someone like dmg mori, but scaled down. the entire construction is sheet metal, similarto how those 2d inkjet printers are built, there’s a door on the left side to housethe filament spool and this large, sliding acrylic portal to the machine’s actual buildand scan volume. the zeus is quite heavy, but it’s easy tolug around with the built-in handles on the bottom. on the front, there’s a really comfortablysized 7†capacitive touchscreen with two usb host ports and on the back, there’sa kensington lock cutout, an usb slave and
ethernet port, a power switch and the powerinput jack, which unfortunately is rather loose and not a locking type like the ultimaker’s,it doesn’t quite slide out on its own, but i did manage to pull it out in a heartbeatonce, thinking it was the usb cord. most of this hooks up to the built-in single-boardcomputer, which is packed into the bottom of the filament compartment. the usb port actually doesn’t go anywhere,and the power input goes through the custom-made control board, which uses an arduino-compatibleatmega chip and seems to run a customized version of marlin. however there’s no attribution given orsource code published.
still, if you ever wanted to, you could simplyhook up the control board to your own computer and use it without the built-in software,but that’s what makes the aio zeus special in the first place. as you boot up the zeus, it starts a full-blowninstall of lubuntu and then goes on to load the aio robotics interface, which presentsyou with four options: print, scan, search and apps. gone is the fax functionality that used tobe part of the original announcement, but i don’t think that’s going to be missedmuch, since it would have required a zeus machine on either end and relied on the built-inscanning only.
now, the print menu takes you through exactlywhat you’d expect it to do - it lets you print 3d files, be it from the onboard storage,from previous scans or from usb thumb drives you connect to the machine. you get previews of the files, pick one, sliceit right on the machine itself and then print it. you can do basic scaling or rotating on theparts, and insert pauses at certain heights of your prints, either to swap in a differentfilament color, or to insert parts like nuts or magnets into your print. and that workflow for 3d printing actuallyworks pretty well.
the slicer, which is a version of slic3r underneath,again with no attribution given, has just its most important settings exposed in thesimple wizard, but you can always dig in and adjust more, which i quite liked. due to the limited hardware, neither the 3dpreviews nor the slicing process are particularly fast, actually, you could say it’s painfullyslow, with most of my slicing jobs running between 15 seconds for something really simpleand 15 minutes or more for something a bit larger. it would have been nice to see an option toautomatically start the print job once the slicing is done, since you’re just waitingon that process to click two more buttons.
let’s move on to the scanning part of thesoftware, the other big menu point, you place your object on the zeus’ build table, selecta scan diameter to minimize ghost features that might be picked up from the background,pick how many sides the part should be scanned from and hit go. if you want to change the scan height, youhave to recalibrate the entire scanner unit, which takes quite a while, so i rarely didthat. what also takes an enormous amount of timeis the scanning itself and the post-processing the software goes through afterwards, whichmight actually be based on the meshlab. an eight-sided scan, which is the highestcoverage you can select, takes about 45 minutes
to complete, and then roughly another 45 minutesto post-process. once that’s done, you can head back to theprint menu, and print a copy of your heavenly scan, or use an undocumented feature to copythe entire package of raw and processed scan files to a usb drive, which allows you tothen post-process them however you like on a computer with your own software. also, you can upload and download files througha simple file browser if you connect the zeus to your network with the included usb wifistick or through the traditional ethernet jack. these next two points in the main menu alsouse the internet connectivity, but feel a
bit lackluster, with the first one being asearch function to find printable models on thingiverse or myminifactory. while it just didn’t seem to find that onedesign i actually wanted to print, which was featured on the thingiverse front page, onceyou do pick a file, the print process is straightforward. again, the interface for this is slow andtakes a while to load results and previews for your searches. and the last option in the main menu, “appsâ€is currently only home to one app that gives you a few pages of tips, but the idea is tohave more and eventually also third-party apps in here, for example thingiverse-customizer-likeoptions, generators for various 3d files or
an e-nable prosthetic hand print assistant. while the software overall is really comfortableto use if you don’t mind the long processing times, i did have a few issues with how undercookedit felt. on the very first bootup, the aio softwarefailed to load and i had to start it manually from the linux desktop, it also crashed afew times during use, but thankfully never while scanning or printing. it also routinely refused to let me startanother scan or print process after completing one, so i found myself rebooting the entireprinter many times, and it often failed to start up again during that reboot.
on the upside, though, the system is not faroff from being a totally standard computer just integrated into the machine, so if youever feel like replacing at least the 3d printer part of the software, you could just as easilyrun a full cura, pronterface or octoprint install on here. both the username and password for the defaultuser are just aio, so you’re pretty free to do whatever you like with the system. i also did some digging to see how much theaio software phones home, but i don’t think anyone will actually care about that in theage of the facebook. hardware-wise, this all runs on an odroid-xu4,which does have a fan that you can occasionally
hear spinning up, but it’s barely noticeable. by the way, you can also connect a mouse,keyboard and whatever else you desire to the front usb ports, and they work just fine,even within the touchscreen-optimized aio software. on the topic of the touchscreen, it does havegood viewing angles, but it’s a bit too recessed to comfortably see and use especiallythe top edge at a normal stance. alright, scanning. so the zeus uses a laser + camera approach,so with the laser slightly offset from the camera’s position, it can reconstruct thesurface by looking at how far the laser line
is offset at any given point. but instead of rotating your scanned object,like many other simple scanners do, it actually pans the laser itself over your object, thenrotates the platform, scans again, and so on. so instead of one continuous scan, it getsfour to eight individual ones that it then stitches together. according to aio robotics, this gives farbetter resolution than just rotating the table, but in the scans i did, it performed onlyslightly better than conventional laser line scanners, giving you good dimensional accuracyoverall, but you end up with a fairly mushy
and low-detail scan, maybe picking up featuresaround 1 to 2mm in size, which is far off from the advertised 150âµm resolution. even the sample scan they provide on theirwebsite, which looks much better than anything this machine ever produced, only comes withroughly 300âµm triangles, so i’m not sure where that 150âµm resolution is coming from. you also get visible seams, apparently wherethe areas from each individual scan meet, and extra geometry based on what seems tobe guesswork anywhere the scanner didn’t perfectly reach. the large scanning area of 9 inches in diameteris noice, but unfortunately it’s not very
tall at 4.4 inches max. that’s 23 by 11 cm for anyone not from theus. anything that’s even remotely glossy willthrow the scanner off, even if it’s just, like slightly metallic or shiny, it reallyneeds to be completely matte, so you do have to give those objects a good wipe-down withthe included powder brush. also, it works best with white objects, anythingthat’s darker or, worst case, glossy black won’t get picked up at all. aio sorta see this quality of scanning usefulfor schools or pre-schools where you’d copy something like clay or play-doh models, andfor that it’s probably well-suited when
it comes to what sort of detail reproductionyou get, but the issue of turnaround time still stands, where even with a compact part,a single scan, slice and print process can easily take over two or three hours, whichmay be slightly impractical for copying the work of more than one student. for anything other than the simplest of objects,i honestely don’t see much use in the 3d scanner part of this machine, but that seemsto be a common problem with this laser-plus-camera types of setup. so while the white xbox 360 controller looksdecent around the sides, with details like the data port and battery release picked up,the top shows some issues just from aligning
those individual scans and the bottom is prettymuch gone. there’s these extra bulbs around the handlesand obviously mostly guessed geometry on the the angel scan and print has a few issueswith the more constricted areas and, as expected, do lack detail overall. for 3d printing the scanned models, you willneed to enable all the extra helper features around your actual print, so whenever it cameto “copying†something, i enabled raft, brim and support material, as the scannedfiles would often end up in mid-air with no contact and no adhesion to the bed. and those features obviously mean extra materialuse, print time, and effort for cleanup afterwards.
but you can of course also use the aio zeusas a pure 3d printer. and it does fairly well, even though thereare a few questionable design decisions like the clothespin “belt tensionersâ€. it obviously uses the same area for printingas it does for scanning, and even the same build platform, which is not heated and requiresyou to lay down a fresh layer of gluestick before each print for optimum adhesion, andsomething like a sheet of buildtak would probably have prevented the ever-present slight amountof warp that i was seeing with more massive prints. the bed is locked down during a print to keepit from sliding around, and it uses a mechanically
retracted probe to measure the bed and tocompensate for any alignment issues, which seemed to work well. though the machine doesn’t care if the bedis actually in there, it finishes the probing cycle and tries to start printing either way. for the toolhead, you get a quick-swappablehybrid metal hotend, which you can get replacements for at $149 or in the convenient makerbot-stylethree pack, though really, these shouldn’t ever need to be replaced unless you reallyabuse them. i got a spare toolhead with the review machine,which i needed, since the stock one seemed to be misaligned in such a way that the filamentwould end up with a considerable kink after
each print, which meant removing, cuttingand reinserting the filament each time. the hotend doesn’t seem to be super special,with this enormously long thermistor package sticking out the side, and there were a fewoccasion where the reported temperature dropped from the set 197â°c to less than 190â°, havingthe machine stop mid-print. the official solution from customer supportwas to simply turn off that safety feature, and basically have the machine ignore faultslike this. uhm, yeah. on the topic of filament, you’re only goingto be printing pla with this machine, maybe a pet if you really want, and the 500g plaspools from aio robotics at a reasonable $13
each actually printed well, but so did otherplas i tried, only having to adjust the temperatures and hitting print. the filament path is… interesting, passingfrom the filament chamber through a teflon tube over into the build chamber and thenbeing left to itself before it enters the extruder, which, i mean, it works, but it’snot super elegant. on the extruder itself, you’re also goingto find a filament odometer, which can detect if the filament runs out or stops feeding,but that functionality is disabled by default, even though it would be quite quite useful. some other things that are not put to useare these two switches that detect when the
filament door or the main door are being opened. that smoked black acrylic hatch is supposedto stay open during prints to allow fresh air in and stay closed during scans to blockout ambient light. you do have to slide it up in the exact rightway or it’s going to jam. with the door open, 3d printing ends up quitenoisy with not only the motors and their vibrations being very audible, but also the sheet metalparts rattling around. one of the prints does look like the printermight have skipped a step, but the resonance torture test doesn’t seem to be able toreproduce it. so overall, print quality is decent, and asa 3d printer, the zeus does a much better
job than as a scanner. the quality doesn’t quite live up to thegold standards, as there’s some visible ringing due to the soft tensioning of thebelts, as well as room for improvement with part cooling and overhangs. so, let’s recap before we turn this intoan unwatchable 30-minute beast of a video. does the aio robotics zeus deliver on beinga user-friendly 3d all-in-one machine? sorta. i really like the interface and how streamlinedit makes the scanning and printing process. however, i wish they focused a bit more onmaking it stable and reliable, but of course,
that’s something future software updatesmight improve. the internet connectivity also feel a bitunderutilized at the moment. as just a 3d printer, it works well, but issomewhat limited in material choices and part geometries due to the unheated bed and slightlysketchy way of adhering parts with gluestick. also, i’d like to see things like the under-temperatureissues fixed instead of just ignored and better use being made of the integrated sensors thatare currently mostly disabled. now, the scanning part, to me, feels likea commitment on aio’s side that they couldn’t fulfil to the level they originally wanted. sure, it scans, it’s easy to use, but thescan results were all but usable for me.
maybe if you’re really only wanting to scansuper-simply play-doh parts, it could be pretty useful for you, but for anything that requiresan accurate reproduction of the geometry or has details you want scanned, forget aboutusing this or even any other scanner that uses the same principle. so is it worth its price tag of currentlya bit over $2000? i’m not sure. if the scanning part seems useful to you,maybe. or if you’re looking for that super-simpleuser experience in a 3d printer. for me personally, i feel like there are toomany rough corners and unfinished bits to
truly be able to universally recommend it,but i’m certainly interested in seeing what aio robotics come up with next. alright, that’s that! if you enjoyed the review, hit that sharebutton and give it a thumbs up, if you, like really adored it, subscribe, so you don’tmiss out on any of the reviews, guides and livestreams that go up on this channel. if you appreciate what i’m doing here, thereare a few way to directly support this channel:
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