My 3D printer wishlist
3D printing things is one of my hobbies. And while I am reasonably happy with the printer I currently have,there's always a new and shinier resin 3D printer around the corner.
But they rarely manage to really excite me in the way that I actually want to swap.
So, this is the laundry list of things that I want to see in one machine:
A heated vat or chamber. I print with an open window, and that means the room can get cool or even cold. 3D printer resin has a certain optimal working temperature, usually between 25 and 30 degrees celsius. That means a bit of heating.
A bed pressure sensor. That is pretty useful for two things: It tells the printer when there is something stuck on the bottom of the resin tank, and whether the print is releasing fine from the film. I haven't yet had a printer with such a sensor, but I hear brilliant things about them.
A tilting resin vat. Again, not something that I had so far, but the Prusa MSLA printer and the new Elegoo Saturn do feature this, and apparently it makes for cleaner and faster prints.
A decent build volume. 20x30x30 would be ideal, but 20x25x25 is fine too.
A decent resolution of pixels per cubic inch. Although, to be fair, all current printers have that. This is not where technology needs to advance.
Fill lines in the vat. Really, how hard is that?
A slide in locking mechanism for the vat. I have it on my GKTwo, and it is brilliant.
Same for the lever locking mechanism for the build plate. Again, brilliant.
Magnetic flexible steel sheets that attach to the build plate that aren't after market installs. All the FFF 3D printers have these by now, why not the resin ones? It's super useful.
Flip up lids, or doors. With a handle. None of this “lifting a shroud and then looking for a place to put it” nonsense.
An easy way to add an external ventilation hose. Generally, good air management, to keep the resin fumes controlled.
A good way to filter the air coming out of the printer.
An easy-but-sturdy levelling system. Although again, the GKTwo one works fine for me.
A vat with a proper non-drip spout for emptying leftover resin.
A non-flimsy vat cover. Sealing the vat firmly, instead of just loosely sitting on it. I want to be able to shake the whole vat full of resin with the cover on!
A sensor to pause the print when resin runs out.
Feet on the vat, so you don't scratch the FEP when setting it down somewhere
Easy to swap screens with a good screen protector by default.
A built-in way to cure the whole vat for capture leftover floating resin bits.
A built-in way for exposure testing multiple settings in one go, to speed up dialing in any given resin.
Any USB or memory card slots and buttons in the front of the device.
Surfaces with as little nooks and crannies as possible, to make cleaning the device easier.
The above are basically things I see as must haves in order to make me want to switch. The following are nice to have features:
Make the vat high enough to hold a whole litre of resin.
Wifi connectivity is nice, but not really that vital for me. IF there is some, I'll mostly use it to monitor the print status and being able to cancel the print in case something went wrong. Starting a print is.. eh, not really a thing I'd do remotely.
But managing the sliced files on the printer over wifi, adding and removing them would be nifty.
I see printers that have some of these features, but not one yet that has all of them. Any takers? :)
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