Andy,
Since you cherry picked several good ideas from other designs, I'm curious about your opinion on the spherical ball setup used on the SpiderBot effector plate. Instead of 6 spherical magnets, they used only three spherical steel balls, with rods from two neighboring risers both sharing a ball at the effector end. They embedded cylindrical magnets into the rods themselves, and it appears that the (tapered) rod end caps are printed cups. Assuming that the two rod ends never collide on the same ball at any point in the effector's possible motion range, the only pitfall that I can see would be if the magnets in the two rods somehow tried to stick to each other, or possibly their fields interacted to weaken their combined grip. Based on your experiences so far with the different magnets that you've tried, do you think that this is a viable option to decrease the parts count...especially for folks who want to have a collection of different quick-swap hot ends?????
Since you cherry picked several good ideas from other designs, I'm curious about your opinion on the spherical ball setup used on the SpiderBot effector plate. Instead of 6 spherical magnets, they used only three spherical steel balls, with rods from two neighboring risers both sharing a ball at the effector end. They embedded cylindrical magnets into the rods themselves, and it appears that the (tapered) rod end caps are printed cups. Assuming that the two rod ends never collide on the same ball at any point in the effector's possible motion range, the only pitfall that I can see would be if the magnets in the two rods somehow tried to stick to each other, or possibly their fields interacted to weaken their combined grip. Based on your experiences so far with the different magnets that you've tried, do you think that this is a viable option to decrease the parts count...especially for folks who want to have a collection of different quick-swap hot ends?????