Submitted 11 months ago by EmilieEvans@lemmy.ml to 3dprinting@lemmy.world
If you don’t want to have to think, Hey Gears and their walled garden of printers and resin is what you’re looking for. Their printer, their slicer, and their resin. But you don’t have to (and can’t) mess with settings. And any failures are on their customer service to troubleshoot.
But you weren’t asking for cost effective. You were asking for a works out of the box solution. That’s the tradeoff.
I use the Elegoo Saturn printer and Mercury curing station. No problems so far. I use an old plastic container for my initial wash, and reserve the included container purely for the final wash. I’ve had no issues so far. They’re fairly cheap, especially if you buy second-hand; mine came from the official Elegoo eBay page for refurbished products. I got both for about $300.
For resin, I basically exclusively use the Saturn for tabletop minis, so I use Sunlu ABS-Like because it has enough flexibility that arms and stuff flex a bit instead of breaking. If you want something more rigid I can’t really suggest anything.
FauxHammer on youtube has some pretty good reviews of the popular printers. There are pros and cons to all of them so its really just about deciding which works best for your use case
I have an Elegoo Saturn 4 Ultra. I hate that it’s proprietary, but in the resin printing world the only non-proprietary option is Prusa, and it was just too small and expensive to justify. My Elegoo doesnt get network connectivity (so no risk of unapproved updates), and I use prusa slicer to slice and then uvtools to convert to the “encrypted” chitubox format. Since the printer isn’t allowed to update, I’m not worried about ever being forced into using chitubox.
I don’t really care about network connectivity for it; the built in camera is useless for me. I just have a rpi zero with a webcam on it for monitoring, and I also have an IOT switch controlled by that pi via a lan-only http server with a toggle button to control its power. If I see a print is failing via the webcam, I just cut power to the whole printer to stop it remotely. This works even outside my LAN via VPN.
I do still have to start prints the old fashioned way using a usb stick. This doesn’t bug me much, since I have to go check on resin levels, make sure there’s no crap in the tank, etc before starting a print anyways. I have a short usb extender cable to avoid wearing out the usb port on the printer itself as well. I have mucked about with using the rpi as a dummy usb drive where I can just upload files to the rpi and then the printer reads off of it via the usb port, but I couldn’t get it working :/
I’m happy enough with the printer itself - it’s fast, reliable (so far) and produces some high quality prints. The price was very reasonable at the time (iirc $450 for the printer, $250 for wash and cure station), all things considered. If someone ever produced a mainboard that supported an open-source firmware for it, I would buy and install it in a heartbeat.
relaible!!! I want to start a print and return once it is done. Not worrying about print failures
Well, any printer will do that if you calibrate it well enough. I have seen many people not doing anything in that regard and complaining that they can’t get anything to print.
However, getting to that calibration can be easier or more involved.
Works with a good slicer. Back in the day I used PrusaSlicer with UV-tools to convert it to Anycubic fileformat.
I only used PrusaSlicer for FDM prints; for resin, I use Chitubox or, more often, Lychee Slicer. “Good” is fairly ambiguous here because what would a “good” slicer look like to you? Either of the ones I mentioned would be good and are fairly popular.
resin vat mixing (vat tilting is good enough) to prevent resins from seperating during long prints
I don’t think that most consumer resin printers have this sort of feature. The Lift and retract of the built plate should be enough to keep the resin well-mixed and any resin that is separating because of that wouldn’t be something that I would consider buying again anyway. Funnily enough, since you mentioned Anycubic Resin, this was specifically my experience with it that it easily separated. Never had this problem with other manufacturers like Elegoo or Sunlu.
at least two washing containers (first stage dirty IPA, second stage “clean” IPA)
This would be hard to get “out of the box”, but you might be able to get a replacement container for the wash station separately (at least that is what I did).
I noticed none of the printers have magnetic/spring metal build platforms. Are they outdated/no longer required?
This is mostly an upgrade that you can do to add a magnetic sheet on which you then can add this flexible built plate. This is still around like WhamBam Flex plates. I used that on two of my printers but never bothered to do that on my current printer because with the right raft and bottom exposure settings there isn’t much need to do that, also it is messier.
cleaning liquid: Is isopropanol alcohol (IPA) still the goto?
Pretty much for any “normal” resin. Water-washable resin has gotten more popular but the majority is still cleaned with more aggressive solvents like IPA.
Cure and Wash? No idea. all the solutions I have looked at seem to be still similar to the old anycubic cure and wash. The Prusa CW1 on the other hand looks like a well-thought-out solution.
I think this should be answered based on what printer you choose in the end. My first Printer was an Elegoo Mars 2 Pro with a combo wash and cure box from Anycubic. I always had to remove the models from the built plate before washing them, which made a mess and I used so many paper towels to clean that up.
With my Saturn 4 Ultra, I can just take the built plate and put it into the Wash bucket and let both the built plate and the models get clean which is so much more convenient and I have less of a mess to clean up because it is just IPA that I have to wipe up and not Resin and then clean the surface with IPA again and wipe that up too.
As for the Printer, I am pretty happy with my Saturn 4 Ultra at the moment. It is affordable and I could quickly get it to print because of the Auto levelling feature (which isn’t really auto levelling) and the integrated exposure test which is much faster than what UVTools would generate. The VAT tilt is a bit dangerous because of a potential resin leak of the release film, leaking into your printer’s internals, but it will speed up the printing process quite a bit.
The other features like the camera weren’t that interesting to me but the 16K version has, for example, a light (which the first gen was missing) so you would also be able to check the printer in a dark environment. On the other hand, the AI detection for print failures is still something I would consider a gimmick because it would only do that from one side, the side facing the camera. A failure on any other side would not be detected.
Unfortunately, I also don’t have any other experience with other brands or printers, I only ever had Elegoo printers from the Mars 2 Pro, the Original Saturn and now the Saturn 4 Ultra and was fairly happy with all of them in what they brought me.
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.
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.
corodius@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Elegoo are my goto for resin printing, they are one of the more open manufacturers, and their ABS-like 3.0 is actually very ABS like. I use it a lot for model railway parts and it goes very well.
I use a Saturn 2, but either Saturn 4 or Mars 5 (ultra has more features but ofc more expensive) would do well. their Mercury wash and cure stations go quite well. I still use Isopropyl for washing, but they do a resin cleaner mix that sone swear by.
lpinfinity@lemmy.world 11 months ago
A note on the Mercury wash station: despite being sold in a bundle with the Saturn 4 ultra, the build plate of the Saturn 4 series does not fit in the tub, so I would not recommend it for those printers.
corodius@lemmy.world 11 months ago
This is true, but I dont think any will fit the saturn build plate, or none I am aware of. I just take the prints off the supports or plate and put them in the wash basket.