Damn good idea. As for non repeatable results because of the way the mirrors are driven I believe it is repeatable as a similar technique is used in lasers in labs.
I’ve back one
Some very clever ideas in there. Is the banding in the printed parts inherent to the process, mechanical limitations due to lack of a rigid frame, or will they be able to smooth that out with software?
Yes I wondered about the “wobble”
I think if the surface the printer is on is stable it shouldn’t wobble, the mirror is not heavy, there isn’t much moving mass, but if you bump the table… start over.
I don’t think so much bump the table = start over, as much as you’re going to have an artifact in your print at that point. Water settles pretty quickly, and the viscosity of the photopolymer would probably make that settling even quicker.
I always figured you could use a sound card to control the motors of a 3D printer. It just figures in my mind that you could use one to control a set of mirrors.
I like the idea of suspending the photopolymer in salt water. Nice. You don’t need as much that way. Since when are photopolymers cheap though?
@NathanielStenzel since MakerJuice. $40 for a liter. 1 liter of water is 2.2lbs; or roughly 1kg. That’s about on-par with filament prices given similar densities.
How does 1L of maker juice compare to 1kg of filament?
Ok. I just looked it up. 1L is 1kg if it is water. I doubt filament is as dense as water. I would not doubt it if the makerjuice stuff was close to the density of water. That would mean that makerjuice is probably a little more expensive than filament for the same print based on that density difference and the amount of makerjuice trapped in the print.
@NathanielStenzel , you typically won’t have the photopolymer trapped in the print. As with all things, there are design expectations, and you would leave a hole so you could dump the excess out and re-use it.
@ThantiK remember bumping the table will not only slosh the water, but also cause the dreaded wobbles the has a large tub of water at the top that will encourage the tower to wobble once it starts. so if it is not still… and i mean perfectly still, you would end up loosing alot of print quality.
second i think i will wait for this one to get out into the wild to see what the community thinks before i buy.
+Peter van der Walt Actually, the Form1 and pretty much all SLA printers except the mUVe 3D use glavanometers. With the Form1 all of the data is sent via USB to “soundcard” hardware in the printer.
A good alternative to having a sound card drive galvos is the Laser Shark card which is intended to be used as a laser show card. However the LaserShark requires dedicated galvo driver boards That coupled with an arduino to control the steppers is being used on an open source project that can be found at http://pryntech.com The project has excellent potential if we can just get the all the softwares required bundled into a package that is compatible on more than just Linux.
The drip system of this printer is very interesting. In this case the drip system is telling the computer what the Z height is rather than the user defining it in software. The vertical resolution is then a function of drip rate and layer time. Meaning small area layers have a higher Z resolution than larger area layers.