The Trials And Tribulations Of SLA Printing A Portable Wii Handheld

November 28, 2021 by Lewin Day 9 Comments

The G-Boy kit revolutionized the subculture around building portable home consoles, allowing an entire Wii to be crammed into a form factor the size of a original Game Boy. [Chris Downing] is no stranger to the field, and sourced a G-Boy kit of his own to build it to the best of his abilities. (Video embedded after the break.)

However, he wanted to step up above the FDM-printed parts of the original kit. Thus, he contacted the kit developer Gman, who provided him with the 3D model files so he could attempt a higher-quality SLA print himself. [Downing] had some experience with SLA printing in the past with the Form 2, but found some unique challenges on this build with the Form 3.

The benefits of SLA printing are the finer detail and surface finish it delivers. This is particularly nice on things like enclosures and buttons which are handled regularly by the user. However, the standard resin that ships with the Form 3 had issues with warping, particularly on thin flat walls which make up the majority of the G-Boy case.

Other issues included the fact that the standard cured SLA resin is much harder to thread screws into than softer FDM plastic, something which frustrated assembly of the design. It’s also brittle, too, which leads to easy breakages.

As a fan of a properly finished product, [Downing] decided to sand and paint the enclosure regardless. Tragedy struck when the spray cans started to spit chunks due to being over a year old. However, it serendipitously turned into a win, producing an attractive granite stone-like finish which actually looks pretty good.

The G-Boy kit took Wii portable builds mainstream, and drew many new builders into the subculture. [Downing] may be a stalwart of the scene, but still learned new skills along the way of the build.

We can’t wait to see what happens next in the scene, though we’d suspect someone’s already out there chopping up a rare PlayStation 5 as we speak.

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Form 3 SLA Printer Teardown, Bunnie Style

January 21, 2020 by Donald Papp 15 Comments

[Bunnie Huang] has shared with all of us his utterly detailed teardown on the Form 3 SLA printer from Formlabs (on the left in the image above) and in it he says one of the first things he noticed when he opened it to look inside was a big empty space where he expected to see mirrors and optics. [Bunnie] had avoided any spoilers about the printer design and how it worked, so he was definitely intrigued.

Not only does the teardown reveal the kind of thoughtful design and construction that [Bunnie] has come to expect of Formlabs, but it reveals that the Form 3 has gone in an entirely new direction with how it works. Instead of a pair of galvanometers steering a laser beam across a build surface (as seen in the Form 1 and Form 2 printers) the new machine is now built around what Formlabs calls an LPU, or Light Processing Unit, which works in conjunction with a new build tank and flexible build surface. In short, the laser and optics are now housed in a skinny, enviromentally-sealed unit that slides left and right within the printer. A single galvo within steers the laser vertically, as the LPU itself moves horizontally. Payoffs from this method include things such as better laser resolution, the fact that the entire optical system is no longer required to sit directly underneath a vat of liquid resin, and that build sizes can be bigger. In addition, any peeling forces that a model is subjected to are lower thanks to the way the LPU works.

Details about exactly how the Form 3 works are available on Formlabs’ site and you can also see it in action from a practical perspective on Adam Savage’s Tested (video link), but the real joy here is the deeply interesting look at the components and assembly through the eyes of someone with [Bunnie]’s engineering experience. He offers insights from the perspective of function, supply, manufacture, and even points out a bit of NASA humor to be found inside the guts of the LPU.

[Bunnie] knows his hardware and he’s certainly no stranger to Formlabs’ work. His earlier Form 2 teardown was equally detailed as was his Form 1 teardown before that. His takeaway is that the Form 3 and how it works represents an evolutionary change from the earlier designs, one he admits he certainly didn’t see coming.