Mount and Reservoir Discussion

[Anuvin]

The print bed is custom because the peachy uses a laser to print. See the video on the home page of http://www.peachyprinter.com . At 00:12-00:15 into the video, you can see the complete printer, a 4 inch plastic contraption with a circuit board and the lasers and mirrors and whatnot. This little printer can be mounted to whatever you choose. It shoots the laser into a pool of resin that floats on top of saline. These are the reservoirs we are discussing, the upper reservoir being full of saline, connected to the bottom reservoir, which contains the print bed. The print bed is any surface you choose that resin will stick to, but is currently 1/4 inch steel mesh, raised away from the lower res with risers of some kind, bolts or bits of hose, whatever will work. At :30-:36 you can see the same printer set up with three different reservoir sizes. If you look carefully, you can also see the saline solution with resin on top. The saline drips into the lower res and the drips are counted by the printer, this, along with some calibration, is how the printer knows what the z axis height is. Feel free to ask more questions if this doesn't explain.

[rylangrayston]

Also this video is a bit out of date but most of the info is still helpfull. The one thing that is different is that instead of using your sound card we now ship you a circuit board that is essentially a custom "USB sound card" AKA ( dual Chanel DAC output).

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

[Anuvin]

Just got the separatory funnel I mentioned on the last page. Here is a picture of my setup:



For those who might consider a set up like this, you can save yourself a good bit of coin on a stand using a barbell weight and a metal dowel. If you have a tap and die kit, you might have everything you need around the house. Take a barbell weight of sufficient size (25 pounds, in my case), drill a hole slightly smaller than your dowel, tap the hole and the dowel, and now you have a heavy duty stand.

If you need even more room to mount clamps to, like for multiple reservoirs or printers, you could by a lab frame, but they cost a ton. With two barbell weights, some 7/16 dowels from a hardware store, and some bar clamps, you can save yourself around $950.

[MemorianX]

Another way to separate the resin and the salt water is to hack to together a separation funnel which could easily be done from a soda bottle where the buttom has been cut off and a hose that can be clamped shut mounted on the other end

[MistahBradley]

The print bed is custom because the peachy uses a laser to print. See the video on the home page of http://www.peachyprinter.com . At 00:12-00:15 into the video, you can see the complete printer, a 4 inch plastic contraption with a circuit board and the lasers and mirrors and whatnot. This little printer can be mounted to whatever you choose. It shoots the laser into a pool of resin that floats on top of saline. These are the reservoirs we are discussing, the upper reservoir being full of saline, connected to the bottom reservoir, which contains the print bed. The print bed is any surface you choose that resin will stick to, but is currently 1/4 inch steel mesh, raised away from the lower res with risers of some kind, bolts or bits of hose, whatever will work. At :30-:36 you can see the same printer set up with three different reservoir sizes. If you look carefully, you can also see the saline solution with resin on top. The saline drips into the lower res and the drips are counted by the printer, this, along with some calibration, is how the printer knows what the z axis height is. Feel free to ask more questions if this doesn't explain.

Thanks for the reply, and excuse my late response. Your explanation makes sense because it pertains to the setup in the video (all of it makes sense, honestly), but what I'm having trouble understanding is how someone can make the Peachy Printer work in a build area such as this: http://www.globalindustrial.com/g/st...all-containers

It's the first post on this thread. That's what I'm not understanding :/ if that makes more sense to you, haha.

[Anuvin]

Good question, but the answer may be simpler than you realize. The peachy really can print in any size reservoir. You could use a reservoir as small as a cup of water, or as large as a swimming pool. Here is a picture of my old setup:


You can see that the reservoirs are card storage boxes for baseball cards. You could use those, or a 2 liter bottle, or a laboratory beaker, or a bathtub, or any other thing that will contain water and has nominally straight sides. It can be cylindrical, rectangular, octagonal, whatever! That is one of the best things about the peachy printer. There is no upper limit or lower limit on print bed size. Very cool feature that you can't get with any other printer.

This is a pretty sophisticated thing, so don't feel bad if this doesn't quite answer your question. Soon, there will be a lot of backers who have the same questions, just as I did when I started researching the Peachy printer. So please ask if this is still not the info you were looking for!

[Toasterboy]

So, been a while since I have posted. The pressure sensors I ordered turned out to be smaller than expected and just too tiny to successfully solder, so I haven't worked on the project for a while. I just ordered a different (much more expensive) pressure sensor that should be easier to deal with (it's much larger and comes more or less assembled with leads large enough to solder or alligator clip to easily). Will post updates again when I have a chance to play with it.

The results I had before show that the basic idea with using pump and injector will work, and I think that will be useful when attempting to scale up to much larger print reservoirs... just have to regulate the pressure so the tubing doesn't explode on me. With pressure regulated, the fluid delivery for each pulse should be extremely consistent, and programmable. Whether it's cost effective or worthwhile to do it this way remains to be seen though. =) As discussed before, to really scale up the printer design, i.e. to print something the size of a car, would probably need a more powerful laser to keep the print times more reasonable and probably some tweaks to the angular control, in addition to the precision drip control. But basically feasible.

It's pretty clear that the basic design of the Peachy printer would easily be able to print car size objects given enough time, and/or scaling up to a larger version of the same basic mechanism. It could really revolutionize rapid prototyping and manufacturing, in addition to the stated goals of making 3D printing accessible to everyone.

I'm so excited that the Peachy printer is going to start shipping soon!

[MistahBradley]

Good question, but the answer may be simpler than you realize. The peachy really can print in any size reservoir. You could use a reservoir as small as a cup of water, or as large as a swimming pool. Here is a picture of my old setup: ...
... So please ask if this is still not the info you were looking for!

Thanks again. Would you have an image of a setup of a pool sized printer? Seriously, I can understand setting it up for something like a small cardboard box, but anything bigger than 2x2x2 ft is difficult to understand. Especially since I've never seen one in person before :/

[Toasterboy]

The "print head" for Peachy is basically a laser which is deflected by mirrors controlled by electromagnets. The print volume is then basically a pyramid or cone below whatever height the print head is mounted at, so the higher it is mounted, the greater the surface area of the print vat can be.

As far as I know, larger print configurations have not actually been tried yet, but from the discussion we know that the Peachy team has focused engineering effort for the 1.0 printer on small print reservoir scenarios (as they should). There will be challenges in getting larger prints to work well. Theoretically, the 1.0 printer should be able to print to large areas if it is for example mounted on the ceiling in your garage (depending on the height of the garage ceiling). However, print times for a large vat will be prohibitive, among other things, so some of the optimizations discussed on this thread would be needed to make larger print scenarios feasible. That's why folks are playing around with pump hacks to replace the basic dripper, which is great for small print vats, but won't scale well for bigger vats. It's the first of several components that need upgrading to enable the larger scenarios. Bear in mind, too, that laser safety with a small vat configuration, and laser safety with something mounted on your ceiling are completely different animals.

[Anuvin]

Toasterboy nailed it. Just imagine the jars you see in the video were pool sized and the printer was mounted higher.

I am going to be doing a bunch of videos very soon, so keep checking the forums and you will get a lot more info soon.

Here is my unboxing video of the Peachy Printer, if you are interested: