Was a surprisingly successful printer for so modest the materials. Instead of filling the bucket with expensive resins, he floated the resin for printing on top of salt water — this trick stirred up quite a bit of interest. And he when I asked him what he was going to be doing with this printer next, he admitted that he has just been hired to start working for FormLabs — so he will be busy with less-homebrew solutions shortly! 😉
Will Ware: Homebrew stereolithographic printer:
…The past few weeks I have been spending way too much time trying to figure out how to build a stereolithographic printer of my own. I looked at a lot of things other people have done and started doodling some ideas. A few times I made or purchased parts for a particular approach and later realized that it wouldn’t work for some reason. But after a lot of tinkering, I finally produced the octahedron on the right.
My printer is pretty crude and is due for a lot of improvements in the days ahead. I had ordered a stepper motor controller board that didn’t work, so I needed to manually rotate the threaded rod that lowers the workpiece into the resin bath.
Hopefully this picture isn’t too confusing. A lot of this is stuff from the hardware store: a bucket, a lot of plywood, nuts and bolts, a piece of aluminum screen, a threaded rod, two straight rods. That black shape at the top held in place with a bungee cord is a pretty standard conference-room projector. When the thing is printing, the projector aims down into the bucket, which holds a quantity of resin floating on a much larger quantity of salt water. The ultraviolet light from the pattern projected onto the resin cures it in a particular shape, forming one layer of the product, and then the threaded rot rotates, moving the product down by one layer-height.
My silly little 3d printing bucket won a prize at @makerfaire! What a coincidence, that was on my bucket list! pic.twitter.com/jPkLqCkUEM
— Will Ware (@wware) September 21, 2014
https://twitter.com/wware/status/511843320839294976/
Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!
Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!
The Adafruit Learning System has dozens of great tools to get you well on your way to creating incredible works of engineering, interactive art, and design with your 3D printer! We also offer the LulzBot TAZ – Open source 3D Printer and the Printrbot Simple Metal 3D Printer in our store. If you’ve made a cool project that combines 3D printing and electronics, be sure to let us know, and we’ll feature it here!
So cool !
Well done Will!