Comment on returning to SLA-resin printing: Which printer, curing station & resin?
EmilieEvans@lemmy.ml 1 week agoSoftware 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.
corodius@lemmy.world 5 days ago
It is only just announced, thus preorder (so wait if you prefer not to preorder) but tinymaker might be right up your alley. tinymaker3d.com