I’m watching the video for a new 3D Printer project on Kickstarter. “Are there not enough of those EACH WEEK?!” Well, with this one I’m thinking… or rather, my skin is crawling out of itself (if that’s possible) growing a brainstem of it’s own and thinking, “Great gobs of laser-fused resin, FINALLY, new 3D print tech that is shifting the possibilities!” It is, far and away, the smallest, least expensive, most badassest printer we’ve seen this year. The price? $120 USD ($100 CAD). It’s called the Peachy Printer and the blown past their $50,000 CAD goal, nearing $500k with the better part of October to go. They are also committed to the project, files, software and hardware being completely, 100% open source. Here are the details.
Resin is Peachy
The Peachy Printer is developed by Inventor Rylan Grayson, head honcho of Rinnovated Design based out of Saskatchewan, Canada. Saskatchewan has more sunshine that any other Canadian province and it looks as if that’s good for Ryan’s ol’ brain cells. He’s not only developed an inexpensive method to create 3D prints, but has also taken resin-based layering technology developing a method that allows the printer to build the object using audio waveforms interpreted from the 3D geometry.
How does Peachy Printer Work?
While not unlike other resin-based stereolithography (SLA) print systems that use photolithography (using UV/laser light to cure resin), he’s translating the 3D data in a very different way. The software he has developed is currently built as an add-on to Blender. The geometry in Blender is converted into an audio waveform and sent to the printer through your computer’s headphone jack. This in turn drives a pair of electromagnetic mirrors which control the position of the laser to create the X and Y area of the 3D print. The resin is lifted by a salt water mixture rising in conjunction with the waveform’s audio level. Say what?? It’s an astounding method with impressive speed that is thoroughly illustrated in this video.
Along with being a 3D printer, when combined with a camera (your own camera), you are able to photogrammatically scan objects, with the mesh built up inside Blender. So, an open-source, resin-based 3D printer, 3d scanner. As you can see below, the prints are a little rough looking, particularly for SLA/DLP style printers that produce higher quality prints. It’s one reason they are going after crowdfunding–1) to improve the product, specifically the software and 2) make high volume orders to keep costs low.
More details? The printer is powered by the USB port and headphone jacks alone. The build volume is very flexible, limited by size of the reservior. It will ship with a container to have a build volume of approximately 6” X 6” X 9”. Resins can be mixed and they’re even talking about making it open source as well. There are a lot of questions about this printer and a good list of them answered on the campaign page.
Ship dates are set for October 2014, a year away, so with the surge of interest in 3D Printer technology a lot could change in that time, but based on the the stagnate development of FDM/SLA in general over the last, oh, 20 years, it will be interesting to see how this project plays out. The campaign is running till October 20th, 2013, plenty of time to check it out and become an backer.
