Build Your Own SLA/SLS

PacManFan,

I'm building a bottom up SLA printer and trying to experiment with conductive/nonconductive prints - essentially making resistors, and 3d Circuits. I'm working on designing a dual vat tray that can be swapped between each image. My original thought was to hack your tilting code (the plan is to use a FEP bottom so we don't need that function) to run the motor to swap the vats.

I've got an offline fork of your code running in VS. I have never worked with a coding project this big , and its been a few years since I've done c#. I've basically been stepping through the code and making notes about how it works - focusing mostly on where you import and parse the stl and your slicing algorithm.

I work mostly with solidworks, and the .stl files that it generates do not seem to contain information on materials - just on the facets. My original idea was to find a way to take your code and have it treat each imported stl file as a unique object - basically adding a parameter to each triangle (material1 or material2). When the time comes to run the slicing algorithm -> for each z you'd examine the triangles of each material separately - creating two bitmaps. The gcode for the z-stage would essentially be duplicated (plus a swap vat command) in any case where both material1 and material2 intersect a given z-height. The user would probably want to be able to choose which object gets its layer printed first to minimize bubbles/cavities formed when you swap vats.

I'm definitely interested in helping make this happen!

Very cool stuff, I didn't realize anyone was working on multimaterial prints like this. I hope it doesn't knock the thread off-topic too much, but could you explain how you're not cross-contaminating your different resins by dipping your piece back and forth between two vats? I have to let mine drip for a bit once it's done, and a lot seems to stick to the build plate and already-printed model.