Researchers demonstrate the first chip-based 3D printer
news.mit.edu
news.mit.edu
However, resin itself has many downsides when compared to FDM. To get the upside out of the way first: The resolution, printing speed and visual quality are dramatically better. However:
- Resin is weaker than filament deposition products. Even 'tough' resins are still weaker than e.g. PLA.
- FDM prints are usable as soon as they're outside the printer. Resin prints need to be washed, cured, and often painted. The print itself is faster, but the amount of time you spend is greater. Besides, FDM printers have gotten relatively fast.
- A resin-printing setup takes up a lot more physical space, which can't be reused without thorough decontamination.
- And perhaps most importantly, resin is allergenic and can be toxic. The more often you come into contact, the sooner you'll become allergic to it -- that's not so much a matter of if as when, unless you take hazmat protocols seriously. You need nitril gloves, overalls, decontamination protocols, respirators and exhaust fans, otherwise you're begging for trouble.
PLA, by contrast, can be relatively safely printed in your living room with no safety equipment at all. Even engineering plastics are more accessible; polycarbonate, for instance. (...be careful with ABS, and scared of nylon.)
I'm not so sure of that. All of the PLA hinge assemblies sent to me from a customer for use in their clamshell testing units broke pretty quickly, like within a month or two of install. My resin-printed ones are still holding strong 3 years later.
It's also reasonably likely that your resin printers are solid resin, while the PLA likely wasn't solid PLA... but that depends on slicer settings, so I wouldn't know.
FDM printers are mostly used for prototyping. If you're doing that in a commercial context then the design time vastly outweighs the material and hardware costs, so.. polycarbonate would be a good default. It's hellishly strong, even when 3d-printed.
> The prototype chip has no moving parts
> The beam projects up into a liquid resin
Translated: Imagine a portable 3D printer with a small chip, a wat of liquid resin, a wash bath and a curing booth, you could drag around on wheels. But please only think about the chip in your palm.
> When powered by an off-chip laser, the antennas emit a steerable beam of visible light into the well of photocurable resin.
Oh, right, it also needs a laser.
> The researchers use electrical signals to nonmechanically steer the light beam, causing the resin to solidify wherever the beam strikes it.
That's so cool. It's almost like an LCD used in today's printers?
> Instead, the researchers used liquid crystal to fashion compact modulators they integrate onto the chip. [---] The researchers actively tune the modulators using an electric field, which reorients the liquid crystal molecules in a certain direction.
Right. So they reinvented reflective LCDs?
> In the end, the group used their prototype to 3D print arbitrary two-dimensional shapes within seconds.
3D print arbitrary 2D shapes? So worse than current printers?
If there was something interesting done with this research, this article did a very poor job of showing it.
https://hackaday.com/2023/04/09/holograms-the-future-of-spee...
https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/08/holography-based-3d-printi...
I think they run into exactly the problem you mention. This may have cool applications, but I don't think 3D printing with resin is one of them.