Comment on returning to SLA-resin printing: Which printer, curing station & resin?
j4k3@lemmy.world 1 week ago
CW1 is too pricy for me, but as far as I am concerned it is the only resin printer than exists. All the others are proprietary. So I haven’t looked into them further. Sorry I’m no help. I didn’t want to leave ya with no replies.
EmilieEvans@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
I care about proprietary in the sense that I am locked to a certain slicer. Don’t care if the mechanical design and firmware is proprietary.
Also I don’t care that much about replacement parts. Affordable FEP-film (or those never versions of release film) is important. Other replacement parts are nice to have but never had to repair anything (the highest risk I see is flooding it with resin or dropping something in the vat that will crush the screen and if you are careful this is highly unlikely to ever happen especially now with the pressure detection on some printer models).
j4k3@lemmy.world 1 week ago
The issue in this area is actually that the screens are proprietary from those making them, but that leads to a criminal corporate culture down the line in most cases. The datasheets for most high resolution displays are locked behind nondisclosure agreements and not publicly available.
I support all levels of open source, but that is a personal opinion and not anything mod or community related here. I’m not monolithic in my hobby interests so I expect to put things down and return to them at will. That is not compatible with any subscription nonsense. The SLA space seems dominated by such subscription schemes IMO. Big messy projects or large spaces for stuff are not something I can do, so I am probably biased from that angle too.
EmilieEvans@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
Software subscription and DRM on resin/filament are huge red flags. Had a look at heygears offerings as people describe it as the BambuLab equivalent for SLA. Looking into it, the feels more like a FormLabs company with overpriced resins and DRM to make you buy their resin.
Spending once 1.5-2k€ for the Flex RS printer is fine (more than I would like) but paying 40-70€/kg for resin killed it. Just not possible to economically justify paying twice as much for the source materials (resin). This would mean HeyGear jacking up the production cost by approx. 50-80%, indefinitely. A better option is it spend a day dialing in a third-party resin on the Prusa or Elegoo.
subscription = selling the same software indefinitely
paid upgrades = forced to deliver value/improvements with each paid update
for materials it is similar:
DRM = jacking up prices
open = competing on quality: You could use our first-party product with perfect integration but you are free to source whatever you like
j4k3@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I think the only reason I might consider getting a SLA printer in the future is for making buttons, switches, and very small mechanisms. FDM is not very good for these in my experience so far, though I haven’t tried to print them with something like a 0.25 mm nozzle yet. The interface angles and texture have a very large impact on how a button slides into a small button on a circuit board and or is even more sensitive when the printed button is depressing a metal switch dome on a PCB.
Are there any really small SLA printers that have a rigged open tool chain for such an application? I care about stupid-tiny types of things like the buttons on the side of a phone.
On my bucket list is to etch my own 4+ layer circuit boards and make some really small stuff at home just to say I can.