Kentstrapper announced a massive new FFF system, the Mille.
You may not have heard of Kentstrapper, but they are one of the older 3D printer manufacturers. Based in Italy and launched way back in 2011, the company has produced professional-grade 3D printers for many years. We last posted about them back in 2023, when they announced the ZeroHS, a high-speed version of their earlier Zero system.
Now they’ve announced Mille, a large, enclosed FFF system with a massive build volume of 1000 x 1000 x 1000 mm.
The enclosure permits the Mille to contain heat, and that it does: the chamber is actively heated to 60C, and the huge print surface can be heated up to 120C.
Note that the build area is so huge that it would be a waste to heat up the entire plate if you’re printing something small, so Kentstrapper designed the system to include six heating zones that can be independently set.
The print surface is a magnetically attached spring steel plate, as you’d expect to see on much smaller systems. However, here the 3D printer is so large that they’ve decided to have two separate plates, arranged side by side, that can be lifted when jobs complete.
For extrusion, the Mille includes a high-flow Mantis extruder. High flow is really important on large-volume 3D printers because huge prints often make use of larger diameter nozzles (here up to 1.4mm) to reduce print durations.
Mille is a dual extruder with two independent toolheads. This is a feature seen on a few other professional machines, but here Kentstrapper has introduced a new feature: continuity mode. The idea is that when a toolhead fails, the other toolhead can take over and complete the job, if it has access to the same material.
Kentstrapper said the Mille supports a wide range of FFF materials, including PLA, PETG, ASA, ASA-CF, ABS, TPU, Nylon GF, Nylon CF, PPS-CF, ESD-safe materials, and UL 94 V-0 certified materials. The heated chamber is the key to several of these engineering materials.
In addition to the hardware, Kentstrapper has included several intriguing software and networking features that I haven’t seen on other systems.
First, they use a secure tunnel to connect the machine to their cloud. Normally, 3D printers simply connect over the internet, potentially exposing their network traffic to the bad guys. However, the Mille uses Cloudflare’s Zero Trust infrastructure to establish a secure tunnel between the machine and the cloud, with absolutely no opportunity for data exposure.
They also use a Telegram bot to perform communications about printer status. Other systems tend to require the use of a specific proprietary app, but here you can just use Telegram, which many people already use.
Finally, they’ve introduced “Clara”, an AI bot that can handle technical enquiries. The bot has been trained on “real support tickets”, and therefore should be able to answer most of the common questions operators might have.
The Mille looks like quite an interesting system. It’s priced at €40,000 (US$46,000) and available now.
Via Kentstrapper
