The Form 3 SLA 3D Printer
The Form 1 Wall
Linear Motion Systems
One of the guideways in the linear motion system uses a low friction plastic as a bearing surface. Here is a prototype of the arrangement that I built to prove that a slider (shown above) is better than a roller for this type of system because the d
I used a Keyence structured light scanner to inspect the plastic slider every 10,000 test cycles to understand how the shape and size of the contact patch changes over time. Tribology is an interesting field that I hadn't really explored up to this
My proposal for a simple apparatus for measuring the position of the tip of the LPU (light processing unit, our UV exposure engine) in both the vertical and horizontal axis. An optical profilometer would be rigidly mounted to the LPU and point upwar
The apparatus from above, as built. An 80/20 aluminum extrusion frame was used to ground everything to a single mechanical reference frame.
The optical profilometer pointing upwards at the array of steel dowel pins. If the LPU moved up or down in an unexpected way, this sensor would record it. Each layer was printed in the area between the ‘landmarks’ placed on either side of the profil
An example of raw data in the sensor acquisition software. The increase in pin amplitude from left to right is due to a lack of parallelism between the trajectory of the LFS unit and the array of pins. Since this slope is constant, the data was de-t
A zoomed-in view of a single pin, as recorded over several successive layers of printing. As you can see, the height of the LPU was changing by almost 20 microns across different layers, which results in an inconsistent surface in the printed parts.
After a modification to the LPU linear axis, this is a new zoomed-in view of the same single pin from above, as recorded over several successive layers of printing. The change in height of the LPU across different layers is reduced drastically, whic
Here are two printed cylinders, printed in Formlabs Clear V4 resin. The left pillar was printed before the improvement in layer height repeatability, and the right pillar was printed after. The two plots shown previously are from each of these two p
Working in a factory
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