Saturday, May 21, 2011

initial fail

well, i just finished disassembling the projector and found that the lcd is reflective and not pass through so that kills that as a idea. next im going to have to remove the screen from one of my other junk devices that I know are backlit lcd's. I have a bunch of old automation direct touchscreens with blown flourescents I know I can use, the less good part of it is the reduced resolution. I had very high hopes of extreme resolution from the projector, but such is life.

Thursday, May 19, 2011

new ideas

Ive been working pretty steady on several different projects but may start another new one after seeing more posts about uv curing projects. I must say how much ive been impressed by Junior Veloso's work on the bottom projection system, and I recently found http://mrsec.wisc.edu/Edetc/nanolab/3D_print/index.html
which also gives a reletivly complete uv resin formulation. This got me thinking about doing something similar but using closer to a contact print design.

I happen to have a projector where the light in it has burned out and the cost of a new bulb is greater than the amount I paid for the whole thing. So, it has been in my storage for a couple years waiting for me to come up with a use for it. My Idea would be to remove the HD lcd from it and put it in the bottom of a Square/rectangular column, place uv led's under it and have the print surface on piston like rig with very fine indexing to raise the print platform. Im expecting in this instance to get a print area around 1-2" but with a extremly high resolution. I also have several other old b/w lcd screens that are a lot larger but much lower resolution. I could even see scavenging a large (say 52") HD tv screen and being able to print some rather large and yet highly detailed objects resonably quickly. I see a posible methoud where you convert your slices into a MPG video and have near continuous pull of the Z axis (actualy very small moves each frame).

I don't know if anyone has even tried anything similar to this but I Believe it will be my next major project. The one drawback to it is the cost of the uv curing resin.
If someone can come up with a cheap resin this would be a potential game changer.