RooBee One, An Open-source SLA/DLP 3D Printer

[Aldric Negrier] is no stranger to the 3D printing world. Having built a few already, he designed and built an SLA/DLP 3D printer, named RooBee One, sharing the plans on Instructables. He also published tons of other stuff, like a 3D Printed Syringe Pump Rack and a 3D Scanning Rig And DIY Turntable. It’s really worth while going through his whole Instructables repository.

This open-source 3D printer was inspired by the Cristelia – SLA/LCD 3d printer and the Vulcanus MAX 3D printer (that he designed). RooBee One has an aluminium frame and an adjustable print area of 80x60x200 mm, with up to 150x105x200mm build volume using an ACER DLP projector. In addition, a fan on top of the printer was added to extract the toxic vapours outside and away from the printer operator. The electronics are based on the Arduino MEGA with the RAMPS 1.4 shield and one NEMA 17 stepper motor. As for the Arduino Mega firmware, [Aldric] choose to use Repetier, which he usually uses in his other printers.

The SLA resin he used is the Standard Blend Resin from Fun to Do Resins. These resins tend to release toxic airborne particles, so extra care should be taken to ventilate the area while printing and also do a proper cleaning afterwards.

You can get a glimpse of the printer making a small gear come to life in the following video:

We’ve contacted [Aldric] and he says that if you are not willing/able to make one with the Instructable, RooBee One will soon be on sale in his shop at RepRapAlgarve for 599€.

 

24 thoughts on “RooBee One, An Open-source SLA/DLP 3D Printer

      1. For shit an giggles we took one to an EMC measurement. Guess what, it’s emissions are off the chart for any frequency. The pololu stepper drivers do not win any price on heat management. The AVR ADCs do not win any price except for noise and low resolution, and thus have some problems with temperature measurements.

        Fine for a prototype, not so fine for a product.

      2. No power supplies or regulators provided at all, relying only on the Arduino LDO.

        No decent FET gate drive, only logic-level drive direct from the microcontroller, which results in poor FET performance and increased power dissipation when driving high-power loads.

        No freewheeling protection for the FETs. (Good to have for everything, even for loads which are not expected to have very much inductance.)

        No indicator LEDs, which would be nice to indicate power to the various heater power rails and state of the open-drain outputs.

        TO220 FETs like it’s 1990 again.

        PPTCs which are terrible at any significant power handling level (both in terms of voltage and current).

        A forest of 0.1″ headers and DuPont-style housings throughout, with no keying, polarity protection or locking.

        Although replacement of the 8-bit dinosaur Arduino with a 32-bit equivalent may be possible, the system isn’t designed to support lower-voltage host interface levels.

        Little DIP stepper IC breakout boards with terrible thermal performance. These ICs are designed to have a sensible amount of copper pour area for heat dissipation out through the leadframe and thermal pad, which is even better if you have 2oz copper and plenty of thermal vias to increase thermal coupling between both layers. Obviously slapping a heatsink on top of the outside of the insulating epoxy package is a poor alternative to proper thermal design. The small area of this carrier board intrinsically results in poor thermal performance.

        There’s more than that but that’s a start.

      1. A whole bunch of 555s, zener diodes, and capacitors, if you want to meet the standards of Hackaday commenters.
        If you do it all with no resistors, you might even get a compliment on your efforts.

    1. RAMPS was replaced with RAMBo long ago, people just want RAMPS still even though RAMBo is superior in every way. Also there are tons of cheap chinese clones and most people don’t know any better, and thats how we got here.

  1. RAMPS sucks, as an engineer I agree, but as an economist, you cant help but be in awe of how it has been a key part of the total disruption of the once high and mighty 3-D printer market. Yes it sucks, but my Kossel has run O.K. with it for 1+ years now. Some respect is due. (PS: I own a Smoothieboard, but I have been too busy using my RAMPS Kossel to take it down and do the change over). Sometimes “good enough” is just that,. and lets not forget about cheap!

    PSS: Soooo happy to see the “big boys” of the 3D printer world fall. They charged too much for too long. The smell of their rotting corpses, especially that of Z-Corp / 3D systems makes me smile; F-U ZCcorp !!

    1. which is why Ultimachine created RAMBo as RAMPS successor and replacement but since most hobbyist are not professional engineers like us they just buy what they like and they don’t care.

  2. Biggest prob for DLP printers are not the steppers. Biggest prob is the projector. Currently there is no “cheap” one that can cure a resin but still project to tiny areas with everything in focus. Typically the field curvature at close focus ranges blurs everything outside the center. Viewsonic printers like the one from muve3d are kind of okay, but a better alternative would be nice.

  3. On the upside if your machine arrives with ramps in you can upgrade the firmware without worry.
    If you dont like it you can also get a re-arm and replace the arduino with a smoothie based board.

  4. Ramps is fine , it requires very little knowledge, is cheap and does the job. Add active cooling with a regular fan for the drivers and it works at a tenth of most boards. For only one stepper motor it is stupid to use anything else as there is no real needs of a resin printer except moving and turning a lamp on and off. The arduino is now also possible to buy as a certified PLC wich makes the platform even better to stay on as the programming now has industrial use.

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