The past two days I have a brain-worm / project idea of building a 3D printer via a wall-mounted 6DOF parallel robot driven by 8 linear drives (i.e. the typical z-axis spindles) mounted in parallel on the wall.

+ That would make the robot over-determined and should avoid any singularities but add extra stiffness
+ Should be able to retract very near the wall when not in use
+ Uses mostly the same building blocks 8 times instead of different mounting methods per axis
+ Able to print in arbitrary 3D paths
- Slicers will not support this out-of-the-box
- I heard there is a thing called "inverse kinematics" and allegedly I need to understand that, OTOH I feel it should be simple to intersect the strut-length induced spheres with the linear drives and that should answer all practical questions.
- Doing this as my first ever CAD project seems a bit overambitious, speaking from the outside perspective.
- I have never built a 3D printer before
- I have never built a robot before
- I have never driven a stepper motor before

Any input/suggestions welcome.

Usable workspace is a lot smaller than I imagined, maybe there are better ways to put those linear drives?

In any case, shoutout to the authors of WeBots, awesome software.

Repository (much undocumented): https://gitli.stratum0.org/Drahflow/parallelprinter

Drahflow / ParallelPrinter · GitLab

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So, I ordered a Nema23 stepper, somehow imagining it to be a smidgen bigger than the "normal" steppers. Turns out it's actually 1.2kg and looks extremely eager to turn just about anything.
tfw I assemble the first axle for real and realize the back-wall is pretty much EUR-pallet sized (leaving just 5cm on each side to add the necessary stabilization to keep the print-bed at 90 degree angle).
Apropos, I solved the "usable workspace" problem (via better axle positioning). I still have to decide on the precise dimensions I like best, but to give an estimate, 350x700x450mm + 100x700x1200mm seems doable (i.e. these two cuboids are fully reachable, the actual shape is more like an hour-glass).
Muahaha. I just found an error in how I did the stepper timing calculations. The sound has markedly changed from "working machinery" to "RUN PUNY HUMAN!"

o_O Nema23 steppers running at 2400 RPM sound like extremely serious business.

(With load attached, maximum is down to a saner 800 RPM.)