What is the Peachy Printer?

The Peachy Printer is currently up on Kickstarter. See: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/...printer-and-sc

It's affordable, small, lightweight, and unique. It's a 3D printer in a class all its own!

You know how everyone and their Grandmother has a paper printer? Well, wouldn't it be cool if everyone and their Grandmother had a 3D printer? It definitely would, but this isn't a reality for 2 reasons:
- 3D Printers still quite expensive.
- They aren't very simple. Good luck teaching your Grandma how to use one!
The first goal of this project is simple, but bold…
We want to lower the cost and difficulty of 3D Printing to a point where it's accessible to the masses. We want the 3D Printer to become a household item. We want 3D printing to become a common part of life. We want you to have the choice: Should I buy it or should I make it?
With a Peachy Printer (scanner) on your desk, you can choose to make it. This is the world's most affordable 3D printer!
And our second goal...
We want to run our business on a set of specific moral principles, some of these are:
- Using Freedom Respecting and Open Source software and hardware. We will NEVER close our source! We will never betray our community!
- Being outspoken and informative about the political and ethical ramifications of 3D printing technology.
- Informing customers of safe practices when using our product and providing proper safety equipment.
As you've seen from watching our main video, we've already got this little printer working pretty good. Every object in that video, and pictured below was done with the pre-production prototype featured in the "How it Works" video below!


We know we can make the Peachy do better which brings us to our reasons for using crowd-sourced funding:
- We need money to invest in improving the product, specifically the software end.
- We need to make high volume orders of our parts to keep costs low.
How does the Peachy Printer work?
Below is a detailed video explaining how the Peachy Printer works through explanation and demonstration!



https://www.youtube.com/watch?featur...;v=80HsW4HmUes

The peachy printer is a Photolithographic printer. That means it uses a controlled beam of light to cure light sensitive resin into hard objects. The peachy moves a laser beam along the X and Y axes to create the shape of the object, while using a drip system to control the level of the resin on the Z axis which determines the height of the object.
The object you want to print must first become a 3D model in Blender. The software we wrote as an add on to blender takes the data from that 3D model and translates it into an audio waveform. It then plays the audio file out to the printer through the headphone jack in your computer. This waveform drives a pair of electro magnetic mirrors. The higher the volume, the higher the voltage, the more the mirrors move. The purpose of these mirrors is to reflect and control the path of the laser beam. By using the audio waveform generated from the 3D model data to drive the mirrors, we are able to get the laser beam to draw out the shape of the object. That's takes care of the X and Y axes.
Now let's talk about the drip system that creates movement on the Z axis. The salt water in the top container syphons down to a drip feed. The rate of this drip feed is controlled by a valve. As each drip leaves the feed, it passes through two contact points creating an electrical connection that is detected by your computers microphone jack. The drip continues to fall into the bottom container where it causes the resin floating atop it to rise. The software listens to the microphone level, counting each drip that falls and calculates the resultant level of the resin. This allows the software to send the layer that corresponds with the current Z-level of the resin. This process continues until the print is complete!

MORE DETAILS at: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/...printer-and-sc

Thanks for sharing.