Why are 3D printers still stuck on stepper motors? Why haven't we transitioned to servo motors with encoder feedback for positioning?
Is it just too cost prohibitive for the consumer-level? We would be able to print a lot faster and more accurately if we had position feedback on the axes. Instead we just rely blindly on the stepper not skipping any steps when we tell it to move, hoping for the best.
Have you seen how fast printers with stepper motors can get? They print benchies in less than 3 minutes. The bottleneck is not the motion system, it's either the hot-end or the part cooling. Also stepper are super accurate and very flexible. Drivers are advanced and can tune for torque, speed, sound etc. Collision detection and skipped step detection is also a thing.
Honestly, there’s going to be a hard peak to how fast a 3D printer can go, because physics. Unless we start running prints in a vacuum and start tuning local gravity….
There will always be limits to how fast you can go. But as long as the average printer is not even close to whats doable there is room for improvement.
Tune up a coreXY like a Bambu or Voron, use all the latest features in marlin (like MPD thermal and linear advance.)(I assume other firmwares have similar.