Potential resolution

[Pete]

Just making a smaller aperture would not necessarily make the beam tighter, as you start getting dispersive lensing effects at very small apertures for physics reasons that I can't remember the names of.

diffraction is the one you're looking for.

[rylangrayston]

But by changing this aperture would it affect any calculations the team has done and already built in to the printer?

For example if they said to poke a hole with a tooth pick rather than a pin the aperture would be different, and the laser would cure different amounts of resin than initially expected and change the wall size of the print. If you were to somehow make the hole smaller than initially expected the laser could possibly be moving to fast for it to actually solidify any of the resin.

Our am I just going crazy waiting for this thing to get here

Very very good point bovalis2037
We are really focused on making the peachy printer hackable, built TO be modified, there are many many things that users will want to change that will effect any default calibration.. Thats why there is no default calibration per say... instead every time you make a peachy printer you calibrate it! We are shipping with not only software to print with but also software to calibrate with, That way if you build a different printer for better or worse it still has a great shot at working!

Since this is a problem that im very passonate about solving ill get into it a bit
There are 3 basic ways we are doing this:

1 . The printer always draws a bit of a warped shape with its moving laser beam, there are many stacking and unpridictable reasons for this, so we have been implementing a way for you to create a specific profile for each of your peachy printers. It applys various transformations to unwrap you unique printer.

2. Cure Rate calibration print-- (as you mentioned) If a larger aperture was used or a different laser power or even an different resin was used then the amount of light needed per volume of cured resin would be different. To calibrate for this we walk you thru doing a print where every layer is progressively cured less and less, once this print is complete you tell the computer at what height the printer did the correct amount of curing and the software correlates that with the settings used on the layer at that height.

3. drips and containers- We are making an easy to use program where you let the drip feed run from one height to another. After entering the hights int the computer it counts the drips and tells you how many drips per mm there are in your setup.

[bovalis2037]

Im soo glad what I said made some sense. Thank you for explaining!

Now does that mean that I will be able to (in highly improbable theory) be able to print my own apertures?

[Anuvin]

You probably could, but it would be challenging. If your resin is clear or semi transparent, it won't work. But if you have opaque material, sure. Probably just simpler to poke a hole in tin foil or whatever though.

On the other hand, I bet it prints a little hole in a disk really well. Perhaps one could print sequentially finer and finer aperture disks, which would be really cool.

[bovalis2037]

Thats exactly what I was thinking! The more fine I get my aperture the more fine I can print one and it then becomes a cycle. Im sure that the accuracy would increase but after a certain point it would be negligible.

[rylangrayston]

Thats exactly what I was thinking! The more fine I get my aperture the more fine I can print one and it then becomes a cycle. Im sure that the accuracy would increase but after a certain point it would be negligible.

There is something very appealing to me about cycles like this. I keep joking with everyone about the idea of printing a record, on which is encoded a "song" which when played into a peachy printer, prints another record.
And of course Im very excited to try printing a peachy printer with a peachy printer (Peachy RepRap) .

I have no clue how well these things work in actual practice but I can tell you that the resin blocks uv light very well. Im sure you can print a large aperture, but i don’t know how small you could print one.

What ever happens be sure to post because others (like me ) will really enjoy seeing the process !

[bovalis2037]

I will!! But I wanted to print a record! One of my friends and i were working on some software to convert super high quality mp3 files to record "bumps" as we've been calling them. And i kept telling him that i have full faith in the peachy cause of its insane z axis resolution. I am still soo shocked at how clear and glass-like that column was in update 13

[Morten]

So is the cured transparent resin transparent to UV light as well as visible? Because I'm thinking about printing lenses now

[mike_biddell]

Printing spectacles would be brilliant for the 3rd world (and ours for crazy specs). Wonder how you convert an eye prescription into a 3 dimensional lens? The optician can do it, so we just need to know how !!!!

[Feign]

diffraction is the one you're looking for.

Considering that the original subject of the thread was using diffraction to create colored prints, I'm a bit embarassed to not have remembered it.

I have no clue how well these things work in actual practice but I can tell you that the resin blocks uv light very well. Im sure you can print a large aperture, but i don’t know how small you could print one.

You've mentioned before though that you can fill a hollow print and it will cure under sustained UV, which would suggest that the cured resin isn't completely opaque to UV. I'm sure it's too opaque to make into a focusing lens for the laser though.

I think most glasses-wearing watchers had the lens printing idea after seeing the column print video. I look forward to running some tests to see what kind of refractive index the resin has and just how smooth it can print with that sub-layer interpolation that was talked about.

I think that it would be easier to write an equation to directly generate lens cross-section based on z-axis and focal point than it would be to make a parametric lens model and use a slicer. The machine that grinds out the lenses for the optomitrist already uses a CNC process that might already be very similar to g-code.