Ideas

[perfessor101]

Hello Dayling

I've been using hydroponic syringes 100ml and up for transferring saltwater and resin around
Works quickly and I can remove mostly salt water or mostly resin

[Slatye]

I suspect the easiest way of removing the salt water will be to simply have a tap on the bottom of the build container. Open the tap to drain the water into a bucket, then empty the bucket back into the reservoir.

It'd be nice to do it all automatically, but then you need a sensor to detect when you've finished draining the salt water (conductivity? Does resin conduct electricity?), a pump (the little eBay ones will work, but possibly not for very long - and they're pretty slow), and control circuitry. Definitely not impossible, but probably too expensive to include in a $100 printer.


I wouldn't be surprised if most people just use the build container and reservoir as the printer case. If you size the reservoir just a tiny bit (a wall thickness) smaller than the build container then you can put everything in the reservoir and drop the build container over the top to seal it.

Getting longer ranges is something that the Peachy Pro is meant to fix. It'll have autofocus on the laser to maintain a nice, tight beam when printing large objects.

[Deadbot1]

the drip sensor for the z axis works because the salt water is conductive. so a pump with a drip sensor inline before it would be able to run until it stops reading conductivity(indicating that resin is entering the tube). A simple micro and some clever programming could be used to detect the end of printing and automagically start the pump.

I have read about issues with gaps in the print, supposedly caused by too high of surface tension. Most resins I have seen thin out with heat. How about heating the water in the reservoir as well as having a heater in the bottom of the build tank to maintain a constant elevated temp? Again a simple MCU(possibly the same one as controls the pump?) with a PID could be used. Since the simple kit requires us to supply our own tank, I would think that a clever maker could build one out of hard insulation board and FRP coating to get a nice build volume and an insulated,heated reservoir. An opaque tank would make sense as well to help avoid resin curing by accidental light exposure. Since you need to build the tank, you could integrate an enclosure for the unit easily.