Resin Printing Hack Chat

October 11, 2021 by Dan Maloney 6 Comments

Join us on Wednesday, October 13 at noon Pacific for the Resin Printing Hack Chat with Andrew Sink!

At its heart, 3D printing is such a simple idea that it’s a wonder nobody thought of it sooner. Granted, fused deposition modeling does go back to the 80s, and the relatively recent explosion in cheap, mass-market FDM printers has more to do with cheap components than anything else. But really, at the end of the day, commodity 3D printers are really not much more than glorified hot-glue guns, and while they’re still a foundational technology of the maker movement, they’ve gotten a bit dull.

So it’s natural that we in this community would look for other ways to push the 3D printing envelope, and stereolithography has become the new hotness. And with good reason — messy though it may be, the ability to gradually pull a model from a tank of goo by selective photopolymerization looks magical, and the fine level of detail resin printers are capable of is just as enchanting. So too are the prices of resin printers, which are quickly becoming competitive with commodity FDM printers.

If there’s a resin printer in your future, then you’ll want to swing by the Hack Chat when Andrew Sink visits us. Andrew has been doing a lot of 3D printing stuff in general, and resin printing in particular, over on his YouTube channel lately. We’ve featured a couple of his tricks and hacks for getting the most from a resin printer, and he’ll be sharing some of what he has learned lately. Join us as we discuss the ins and outs of resin printing, what’s involved in taking the dive, and the pros and cons of SLA versus FDM.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, October 13 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you tied up, we have a handy time zone converter.

Lots of parts printed at once with a resin printer

Making The Most Of Your Resin Printer Investment

October 6, 2021 by Dan Maloney 21 Comments

To the extent that we think of 3D printers as production machines, we tend to imagine huge banks of FDM machines slowly but surely cranking out parts. These printer farms are a sensible way to turn a slow process into a high-volume operation, but it turns out there’s a way to do the same thing with only one printer — as long as you think small.

This one comes to us by way of [Andrew Sink], who recently showed us a neat trick for adding a dash of color to resin printed parts. As with that tip, this one centers around his Elegoo resin printer, which is capable of intricately detailed prints but like any additive process, takes quite a bit of time to finish a print. Luckily, though, the printer uses the MSLA, or masked stereolithography, process, which exposes the entire resin tank to ultraviolet light in one exposure. That means that, unlike FDM printers, it takes no more time to print a dozen models than it does to print one. The upshot of this is that however many models can fit on the MSLA print platform can be printed in the same amount of time it takes to print the part with the most layers. In [Andrew]’s case, 22 identical figurine models were printed in the same three hours it took to print just one copy.

It seems obvious, but sometimes the simplest tips are the best. And the next step is obvious, especially as MSLA printer prices fall: a resin printer farm, with each printer working on dozens of small parts at a time. Such a setup might rival injection molding in terms of throughput, and would likely be far cheaper as far as tooling goes. Continue reading “Making The Most Of Your Resin Printer Investment” →

Sunshine In A Bag

October 3, 2020 by Brian McEvoy 7 Comments

Ultraviolet (UV) curing lamps are crucial if you have a resin 3D printer or work with UV adhesives. Some folks line an old Amazon shipping box with foil and drop a spotlight somewhere inside. Other folks toss their work under the all-natural light source, Sol. Both options have portability and reliability problems, but [AudreyObscura] has it covered with a reflective mat lined with UV strip lights. This HackadayPrize2020 finalist exemplifies the ideal that good ideas are often simple, and this has a remarkably short bill of materials.

Foil bubble insulation is the medium because it provides structure and reflectivity, but it doesn’t cooperate with the LED strip’s adhesive. [AudreyObscura] demonstrates that masking tape as an interfacing layer makes everyone play nicely. A fine example of an experienced maker, their design covers bundling wires and insulating connections to keep everything tidy and isolated. With different arrangements, this can form a tunnel lit from above, a chimney lit from the walls, or you can drape it over some scaffolding.

If you need something a little less portable for your own shop you might consider a mirror-filled chamber. One nice touch to add is a turntable to help make sure the entire part is cured without any missing areas.

Continue reading “Sunshine In A Bag” →

Entry-Level SLA Printer Gets Upgrades, Prints Better

February 18, 2019 by Dan Maloney 12 Comments

Fused-deposition modeling (FDM) printers have the lion’s share of the 3D-printing market, with cheap, easy-to-use printers slurping up thousands of kilos of filament every year. So where’s the challenge with 3D-printing anymore? Is there any room left to tinker? [Physics Anonymous] thinks so, and has started working on what might be the next big challenge in additive manufacturing for the hobbyist: hacking cheap stereolithography (SLA) printers. To wit, this teardown of and improvements to an Anycubic Photon printer.

The Photon, available for as little as $450, has a lot going for it in the simplicity department. There’s no need to worry about filament and extruder issues, since the print is built up a layer at a time by photopolymerization of a liquid resin. And with but a single moving part – the build platform that rises up gradually from the resin tank on a stepper-driven lead screw – SLA printers don’t suffer from the accumulated errors of three separate axes. But, Anycubic made some design compromises in the motion control area to meet their price point for the Photon, leaving a perfect target for upgrades. [Physics Anonymous] added quality linear bearings to each side of the OEM vertical column and machined a carrier for the build platform. The result is better vertical positioning accuracy and decreased slop. It’s a simple fix that greatly improves print quality, with almost invisible layers.

Sadly, the Photon suffered a major, unrelated injury to its LCD screen, but it looks like [PA] will be able to recover from that. We hope so, because we find SLA printing very intriguing and would like to dive right in. But maybe we should start small first.

Continue reading “Entry-Level SLA Printer Gets Upgrades, Prints Better” →

The State Of 3D Printing At MRRF

April 5, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 17 Comments

Only a few days ago, a significant proportion of the Hackaday crew was leaving Goshen, Indiana after the fourth annual Midwest RepRap Festival. We go to a lot of events every year, and even when you include DEF CON, security conferences, ham swap meets, and Maker Faires, MRRF is still one of the best. The event itself is an odd mix of people rallying under a banner of open source hardware and dorks dorking around with 3D printer. It’s very casual, but you’re guaranteed to learn something from the hundreds of attendees.

Hundreds of people made the trek out to Goshen this year, and a lot of them brought a 3D printer. Most of these printers aren’t the kind you can buy at a Home Depot or from Amazon. These are customized machines that push the envelope of what consumer 3D printing technology. If you want to know what 3D printing will be like in two or three years, you only need to come to MRRF. It’s an incubator of great ideas, and a peek at what the future of 3D printing holds.

Continue reading “The State Of 3D Printing At MRRF” →

Hackaday Links: March 28, 2016

March 28, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 15 Comments

[Tom] sent this in to be filed under the ‘not a hack’ category, but it’s actually very interesting. It’s the User’s Guide for the Falcon 9 rocket. It includes all the data necessary to put your payload on a Falcon 9 and send it into space. It’s a freakin’ datasheet for a rocket.

A year ago in Japan (and last week worldwide), Nintendo released Pokkén Tournament, a Pokemon fighting game. This game has a new controller, the Pokkén Tournament Pro Pad. There were a few cost-cutting measures in the production of this game pad, and it looks like this controller was supposed to have force feedback and LEDs. If any Pokemon fans want to take this controller apart and install some LEDs and motors just to see what happens, there’s a Hackaday write up in it for you.

There are a lot of options for slicing 3D objects for filament-based 3D printers. Cura, Slic3r, and MatterControl are easily capable of handing all the slicing needs you’ll ever have for a filament 3D printer. For sterolithography (resin) printers, the options for slicing are limited. [skarab] just put together a new slicer for SLA that runs entirely in JavaScript. If anyone wants to turn a Raspi or BeagleBone into a network controller for a resin printer, here’s your starting point. [skarab] will be working on smoothieboard integration soon.

The STM32F4 is an extremely capable ARM microcontroller. It can do VGA at relatively high resolutions, emulate a Game Boy cartridge, and can serve as the engine control unit in a 1996 Ford Aspire. There’s a lot of computing power here, but only one true litmus test: the STM32F4 can run Doom. [floppes] built this implementation of Doom on the STM32F429 Discovery board to run off of an external USB memory stick. The frame rate is at least as good as what it was back in 1993.

The Oculus Rift has just come to pass, but one lucky consumer got his early. The first person to preorder the Rift, [Ross Martin] of Anchorage, Alaska, got his facehugger directly from [Palmer Luckey] in a PR stunt on Saturday afternoon. Guess what [Ross] is doing with his Rift?

Are Your 3D Prints Toxic?

November 11, 2015 by Dan Maloney 78 Comments

With the rising popularity and increasing availability of 3D printers, it was inevitable that someone would start looking into the potential environmental impact presented by them. And now we have two researchers from the University of California Riverside sounding the alarm that certain plastics are toxic to zebrafish embryos (abstract only; full paper behind a paywall).

As is often the case with science, this discovery was serendipitous. Graduate student [Shirin Mesbah Oskui] was using 3D printed tools to study zebrafish embryos, a widely used model organism in developmental biology, but she found the tools were killing her critters. She investigated further and found that prints from both a Stratasys Dimension Elite FDM printer and from a Formlabs Form 1+ stereolithography printer were “measurably toxic” to developing zebrafish embryos. The resin-based SLA printed parts were far worse for the fish than the fused ABS prints – 100% of embryos exposed to the Form 1+ prints were dead within seven days, and the few that survived that long showed developmental abnormalities before they died. Interestingly, the paper also describes a UV-curing process that reduces the toxicity of the SLA prints, which the university is patenting.

Of course what’s toxic to zebrafish is not necessarily a problem for school kids, as the video below seems to intimate. Still, this is an interesting paper that points to an area that clearly needs more investigation.

Continue reading “Are Your 3D Prints Toxic?” →