OLO – the $99 box that transforms any smartphone into a 3D printer

This seems like a great use case for an old smartphone that still works.

Are we sure it is sensitive to ALL forms of light? If the plastic bottle reflects UV, and the material is UV sensitive it could make rational sense.

Although I'll grant I am pulling theories out of thin air. I have no idea if this product is even real let alone how the material/bottle works.

It's clever but so impractical for consumer use. You're going to put away your phone for a few hours while this prints and be OK with that?

And if you're going to have to buy another device just to use this in a practical way, why not already just include a cheap android wifi-only device into the base?

Other SLA printers like the Form 1 and 2 from Formlabs also cure with (barely) visible light technically (405nm laser). It normally doesn't cure fast enough for the problem you describe to be a problem, though stray light will in general cure it over time.

It seems peachy printer is mainly for creating pocket rockets...

I immediately looked into that as well, since I'm still waiting for mine to ship. It's about two years late, and all the delays seem to be due to the fairly standard Kickstarter stuff (inexperience, shocking misunderestimatings of manufacturing, typical defect and spec failures, etc.)

The really cool thing about the Peachy Printer is the mechanism for the laser and such - sophisticated results for just a few parts. And the super cool thing about the OP printer is how simple the mechanism is. I look forward to see which ideas win in the end (or at least for which types of products - some resins are certainly better than others).

They'd still need software to control said hardware. We can assume such software would be mobile, based on what they're currently offering.

Then they'd need a way to pair the phone with the controller, or otherwise get the data over. This complicates things for the owners. At that point, you might as well just use the phone itself.

Mind you that this limits the versatility of what they're selling - you can only print something as big as your phone - but they aren't aiming at the high-end market with this.

In addition to what mankyd said, this printing method ties precision to the pixel density of the screen. Low resolution screens like the one you linked give lower quality prints. You would really need to step up to a higher-resolution small tablet or large phone (something like [1]) to get a package that works well for the average consumer. That's going to add at least $50 to the BOM and make overall development trickier.

[1] http://www.aliexpress.com/item/12/32579900233.html

It looks like in the video it has the phone underneath the resin and a platform that raises up from the resin so that it's printing in a top down manner.

SLA printers (resin) print the models upside down. Thats because they pull up to break from the bottom container with the liquid, and lower back down to do the next layer.

Usually for post processing, you'll use a UV lightbox to cure the parts completely.

From the video it looks like it spends time hardening the layer closest to the phone's screen, then presumably, when that layer is sufficiently hard a mechanism pushes it up and begins working on the next layer.

For 50$ you can easily get a used phone off ebay/craigslist/a friend. Heck I have two droid bionics and two HTC M8s collecting dust.

I suppose you could use it whilst you charge your phone at night?

Backlight won't be an issue. LEDs like that have service lifetimes longer than your own. The switching elements in the screen burning in is another issue, but it seems like burn-in on modern displays (AMOLED) is a reversible hysteresis effect that you can clear out by flipping the pixels to extreme values approximately.

If I were to use this myself, I would have no problem keeping my phone plugged in. I always have my laptop anyway, and if I'm at home I can just use a wall charger.