matt keeter

2 Articles

Formlabs Form 1+ API Now Available On Github

July 21, 2016 by 3 Comments

Since 2014, the Form 1+ has been serving a faithful community of avid resin-oriented 3D printer enthusiasts. With an API now released publicly on Github, it’s time for the Form 1+ to introduce itself to a crew of eager hardware hackers.

Exposing an interface to the printer opens the door to a world of possibilities. With the custom version of PreForm that arrives with this release, a whopping 39 different properties are open for tuning, according to the post on Reddit. Combining these newly-accessible parameters with a sufficient number of hackers, odds are good that the community will be able to quickly converge on stable settings for 3rd party resins. (We’re most excited to see the Homebrew PCBs community start exposing their UV-sensitive PCBs with this hardware setup.)

Heads-up: poking around in this brave new world is almost certain to void your warranty, but if you’re eager to get SpacewΛr up-and-running, it might just be worth it.

Open Source SLA Printer Software Slices From The Browser

June 13, 2016 by 7 Comments

Resin-based SLA printers need a different slicing algorithm from “normal” melted-plastic printers. Following their latest hackathon, [Matt Keeter] and [Martin Galese] from Formlabs have polished off an open source slicer, and this one runs in your browser. It’s Javascript, so you can go test it out on their webpage.

Figuring out whether or not the voxel is inside or outside the model at every layer is harder for SLA printers, which have to take explicit account of the interior “empty” space inside the model. [Matt] and [Martin]’s software calculates this on the fly as the software is slicing. To do this, [Matt] devised a clever algorithm that leverages existing hardware to quickly accumulate the inside-or-out state of voxels during the slicing.

[Matt] is stranger to neither 3D mesh manipulation nor Hackaday. If you’re just getting started in this realm, have a look at Antimony, [Matt’s] otherworldly CAD software with a Python interface to get your feet wet with parametric 3D modeling.