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3D Printers / Re: New to lasers and SLA and need some info
« Last post by Jasonpgr on March 30, 2018, 03:12:46 PM »That's really unfortunate. I sent them an email a couple days ago and I'm still waiting for a response.
It kinda seems like there's no good way go about making a laser driven SLA printer. At least from a software/firmware perspective. I see a bunch of companies are doing it, because you can buy one. And most of them are driven by a small board that doesn't seem much different than a raspberry pi or arduino type board. A lot will print from an SD card much like a typical FDM style printer, which leads me to believe they are just streaming gcode from a slicer software.
Maybe I should phrase this differently. Since you have a much stronger knowledge of galvos, and coding and all the areas where I'm lacking, if someone came to you and said "I have this galvo head (the one I included the manual for in the last post) can you turn it into a laser sla 3d printer?" How would you go about it? Would you prefer a digital or analogue head since it can come as either one? What are the missing components and where would I source them in order to pull it all together.
With my limited knowledge and experience it seems like the best way would be to find some way to reconfigure a basic marlin/repetier firmware to drive a galvo instead of steppers on the XY axis, and swap the extruder bits for laser ttl on/off commands, and just use a ramps board to do it all. But I have no idea how to go about doing that, and I don't want to have to manually modify massive amounts of Gcode manually before doing a print. The solutions are definitely out there because people are doing it fairly inexpensively. I just keep running into brick walls, so maybe I need to take a whole new approach all together.
It kinda seems like there's no good way go about making a laser driven SLA printer. At least from a software/firmware perspective. I see a bunch of companies are doing it, because you can buy one. And most of them are driven by a small board that doesn't seem much different than a raspberry pi or arduino type board. A lot will print from an SD card much like a typical FDM style printer, which leads me to believe they are just streaming gcode from a slicer software.
Maybe I should phrase this differently. Since you have a much stronger knowledge of galvos, and coding and all the areas where I'm lacking, if someone came to you and said "I have this galvo head (the one I included the manual for in the last post) can you turn it into a laser sla 3d printer?" How would you go about it? Would you prefer a digital or analogue head since it can come as either one? What are the missing components and where would I source them in order to pull it all together.
With my limited knowledge and experience it seems like the best way would be to find some way to reconfigure a basic marlin/repetier firmware to drive a galvo instead of steppers on the XY axis, and swap the extruder bits for laser ttl on/off commands, and just use a ramps board to do it all. But I have no idea how to go about doing that, and I don't want to have to manually modify massive amounts of Gcode manually before doing a print. The solutions are definitely out there because people are doing it fairly inexpensively. I just keep running into brick walls, so maybe I need to take a whole new approach all together.