3D Light Printer V1 and V2
The first version of the 3D light printer was my first project produced with help from the Edgerton Center at MIT. The project started as an old and broken Makerbot prototype to which an RGB LED was mounted. Rewriting the driver for the printer in Python was one of the most difficult aspects of the project. The team wanted be able to send a 3D vector file to to the printer and have it follow the predetermined path. The result was a light printer which could draw hologram-like figures in a long exposure photo.
The goal for the second version of the light printer was to keep the same basic functionality, but scale up the size of hologram that the printer can produce. We did this by stripping the electronics and software from the first version and using a laser cutter to fabricate a bigger housing from sheets 1/4" birch plywood. In the end, we found that the basic design was more suited to a smaller printer and to scale up the size of the printer, we would need to change the design.
In the third revision, we switched from a compression based system using toothed belts to a tension system where the RGB LED is mounted on 4 strings from each corner of the structure. The design was influenced by the Skycam system set up in stadiums across the world. By varying the length of each string, we were able to precisely move the LED in a 3 dimensional space. While the mechanical and electrical systems were completed relatively quickly and without issue, the software side of the project took much longer to develop. There were issues trying to convert the old code to the new design so the team decided to scrap it and restart from scratch. At the time, nobody on the team knew how to work with the legacy Python code, so the entire driver was rewritten in Java. This posed many interesting challenges such as compatibility with microcontrollers and developing libraries to parse the 3D vector files into the G-code used by the motor control system.
This project was a first for me in many ways. It was my first introduction to coding in embedded programming in Python, 2D and 3D CAD, and the control circuitry for 3D printers. Most importantly, through this project, I met Ed Moriarty who has helped me with many other projects over the past few years through training and guidance.
