KickStarter - iBox Nano

I was wondering if anyone has seen the KickStarter for the iBox Nano and what their thoughts were on it. It's the first KickStarter I am participating in and I kind of jumped in blind to get the early bird pricing (missed the early early bird).

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/826799607/ibox-nano-worlds-smallest-least-expensive-3d-print

Cute, but the build area quickly squashes my interest. 40x20x90?!?! You can only print out so many miniature replicas and chess pieces. But if you are only looking to print out teeny tiny pieces, more power to ya I guess.

I was thinking for printing out jewelry to cast into gold. Though now I am wondering if the resin will work for "lost-wax" casting.

Like the idea, small and simple, however the guy with the big eyes in the video is freaking me out a little bit. And the video is so 'standard'.

Funny, I said to my mother this evening that I will print new chess pieces for my chess board. We just found my old chess-board while cleaning out a closet in my house but I don't have the chess-pieces anymore... So I'll design my own pieces now! Got a great batch of black and clear filament now so these chess pieces will be a blast.

Still would print it in PLA instead of on that small resin printer. I don't like to print one piece at a time. And on a 200x200mm print bed, you can print at least 12 at a time.

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http://www.marinusdebeer.nl/

One factor people don't talk about much is the dynamic range of a printer. For instance, with FFF/FDM printers you can print details as small as, say, 0.5mm and as large as maybe 200mm. This gives you a dynamic range of 400:1. The iBox Nano X-Y resolution is 0.33mm but with a max size of 40mm, which gives it a dynamic range of only about 120. You can see that by the time they blow up an image enough to make out the details, the prints don't actually look that sharp.

Are they making a vat out of laser cut acrylic? Kind of goes to the old saying, "If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."

It's almost tempting to get one and modify it with more precise peices. Those prints don't look like the greatest, but hey, you get what you pay for. Give it clean, sharp prints and I'd be in.

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Realizer- One who realizes dreams by making them a reality either by possibility or by completion. Also creating or renewing hopes of dreams.
"keep in mind, even the best printer can not print with the best filament if the user is the problem." -Ohmarinus

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cdru
You can only print out so many miniature replicas and chess pieces.

There's a whole hobby full of people who want lots and lots of small miniatures.

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Kurzaa
I was thinking for printing out jewelry to cast into gold. Though now I am wondering if the resin will work for "lost-wax" casting.

There is specifically formulated resin from MadeSolid intended for investment casting. Considering the enormous cost of FireCast I would assume there are some kind of problems with using standard SLA resin for the process to justify the expense.

Looking at the pictures, the bottom circuit board appears to be a Raspberry Pi B+.

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[scara3dprinter.wordpress.com]

Looks interesting and I can't understand where all 3 axes are? All I can see is the Z-axis, can anyone tell me where the x and y axes are hidden?
Thankyou

Resin printers don't necessarily work like that. It says it uses UV LEDs to harden the resin, so most likely the only moving part is the Z axis.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/22/2014 11:58PM by Evil Monkey.

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[scara3dprinter.wordpress.com]

There's an LCD under the glass dish that has a grid of pixels to do the X and Y.
This makes slicing easier too as there aren't any tool paths to calculate, just a bunch of silhouette images to expose each layer.

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Evil Monkey
Looking at the pictures, the bottom circuit board appears to be a Raspberry Pi B+.

It for sure is a Ras Pi B. They talk about it in the video but don't specify which flavor it is.

EDIT: Nevermind, I missed the side shots, for sure is a B+ with one of those nano B/G/N dongles. There really should be some kind of locking screw on that, people tend to pick at things and it wont be long before someone has a broken printer due to the dongle being slightly loose. It all ends up sounding like they packaged an OctoPi setup into a nice little box of a RasPi and the sheild, instead of having three separate boards like a reprap and octopi

Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 10/23/2014 07:03PM by zerodameaon.

I used to think these little kickstarters were neat, but this one really bothers me. I'm fed up with these startups swooping in and grabbing a half million from the public without their product having to go through the gauntlet of the consumer market. Here are the things I can see from just skimming the page: (I apologize in advance for the rant)

1. .39 microns? No way in hell. Even Stratasys's best only prints down to 16 microns. (which is still phenomenal.) I mean if you step down some 1.8 degree steppers to x16 microstepping and use threaded rod with a 1mm pitch you technically have a .31 micron resolution, but as we all know you can't just accurately step 1 microstep at a time. Furthermore, at these prices I would be very surprised if they drove their steppers with anything as nice as the pololus.

2. They say a RepRap makes 71 db noise?! That's absurd. That's like a vacuum cleaner from a meter away or a very noisy restaurant. Maybe they put the decibel meter in a tin can filled with marbles on the bed. Maybe there's a "chainsaw motor" variant I don't know about, I don't know.

3. The name. It makes me cringe so hard- in an already saturated market they chose a name that sounds like a generic mp3 player sold in 2007.

4. It is not the world's most affordable resin printer. You can't just say things like that when a $99 resin printer took kickstarter by storm LITERALLY one year ago. I didn't realize kickstarter doesn't do some sort of fact checking until reading this pag

5. "Engineering quality 3d prints are now possible." lol what

6. 328 microns on the xy axis is terrible. (I could be wrong, but off the top of my head that seems like a LOT) That could be a variation of over a half millimeter between layers. If any of our RepRaps were doing this we'd consider it an error.

7. Go read the paragraph about acrylic and try not to laugh- embelishing anything like that will make it sound good. Might as well throw in a bit about how it "uses advanced stereolithography files to perfectly triangulate an object's form" The public wouldn't know how common STL's are any more than they know that acrylic is as basic as clear plastics get. ^{(Minus like, PET, but then again IGES is older than the internet. The analogy stands.)}

That's from like five minutes of skimming. I hate to be so negative but this is just an example of how innovation gets stifled for money. I understand that there needs to be a balance between the two, but this 3d printer is definitely tipping towards to money side.

Also it's full of typos. It should be "World's" like ten times instead of "worlds." They neglected apostrophes all over the place.
This semicolon stuck out too: "We have achieved all of this for one specific target audience; you."

TL;DR: Using standard Kickstarter 3D-Printer embellishment protocol, Nophead and Prusa could've raked in Millions.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/24/2014 09:17AM by SamS.

Taking this just a little bit off topic, but you want to put things in perspective:

People are actually falling for this. There is a mean little part of myself that wants to point and laugh.

How does it work? "laser light sources which produce three-color beams, illumination part that makes the specific shape and uniform distribution of light intensity; laser-beam optical focusing system; and projection lens 'sandwich' with a metasurface which projects the images that coming from the space-time light modulator" Oh yeah, that's believable.

Frankly, crowd funding are what happens when innovation isn't stifled at all. You have great ideas, and some good ideas, but then you also have a lot of bad ideas, horrible ideas, and snake oil miracle tonic cures everything only $199 we have pretty video with graphics and smiling rich people delivery next week we promise!

... You get the idea. As sad as it is to see fools and their money part, there's honestly no amount of regulation that could be put in place here to keep money in the pockets of the truly and deeply gullible.

Plus even the FAQ contradicts some of the things shown in the video such as taking parts straight off the printer and giving them to a child without any post processing.

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SamS

2. They say a RepRap makes 71 db noise?! That's absurd. That's like a vacuum cleaner from a meter away or a very noisy restaurant. Maybe they put the decibel meter in a tin can filled with marbles on the bed. Maybe there's a "chainsaw motor" variant I don't know about, I don't know.

4. It is not the world's most affordable resin printer. You can't just say things like that when a $99 resin printer took kickstarter by storm LITERALLY one year ago. I didn't realize kickstarter doesn't do some sort of fact checking until reading this pag

2: My Reprap will make a hell of a lot of noise but only when I slice with Cura and it is making that first move down to the bed(does it do that for everyone). Otherwise its not loud at all until you try to take a nap near it.

4: Kickstarter does no fact checking of any sort, they approve all projects and let the community police them for stuff like IP violations etc. Just recently they let a kickstarter happen where they were selling someone elses design with off the shelf parts assembled into a kit. IP violation because the creator chose a non commercial licence, he said he drew the designs in CAD himself and the second was against the TOS because everything must be created by the kickstarters, no packaging pre assembled store bought parts.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/24/2014 12:17PM by zerodameaon.

It seems like Kickstarter is just a licence to print money!

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_______________________________________
Waitaki 3D Printer

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Kurzaa
I was thinking for printing out jewelry to cast into gold. Though now I am wondering if the resin will work for "lost-wax" casting.

I am sure you could use a solvent to dissolve the resin rather than heat.

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SamS
7. Go read the paragraph about acrylic and try not to laugh- embelishing anything like that will make it sound good. Might as well throw in a bit about how it "uses advanced stereolithography files to perfectly triangulate an object's form" The public wouldn't know how common STL's are any more than they know that acrylic is as basic as clear plastics get. ^{(Minus like, PET, but then again IGES is older than the internet. The analogy stands.)}

I completely agree. Im a shmuck however and still backed it, but i do agree the words used in the description seem like a lot of hype with the intention to confuse. The video is so cheesy too. Student considering carrying the printer in his backpack, and talking about printing in the library. Considering the mess resin printers create, it would be funny to see in real life.

yeap i agree its just another kickstarter with the aim of making money, with all the marketing hype to accompany it,

but the interesting question is how do they cure the resin?

what kind of screen(matrix) is used and how can you find it.

by the volume I would say its custom ordered (else they would accept smaller funding targets)

a second interesting question would be, why such a small size? is it a constrain of medium or of price?

maybe what they use has a meaning for us, as the beamer approach isnt exactly cheap or easy .


The SLA process is an interesting one when you need detail in small parts. FDM has its limitations on this front, even though persnally I am no fan of detail



I agree that the peachy printer is really ingenious. It has so many good (and cheap) ideas , as all the other 3d printer kickstarters combined. But after a year of research they still have issues that they havent solved yet. What they are doing is great and breaks new frontiers, but Im not sure how close they are in making a functional SLA printer.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/22/2014 12:42PM by waste.

Using some flavour of LCD screen, print resolution is about the same as the screen's resolution and there are not that many 13", 300 ppi screens on the free market. Much less affordable ones. My guess is, disassembling a laptop or a tablet is currently about the only way to go if that's crucial for you.

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Generation 7 Electronics	Teacup Firmware	RepRap DIY

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waste
I agree that the peachy printer is really ingenious. [...] not sure how close they are in making a functional SLA printer.

A printer being functional is pretty essential, isn't it? Seen in that light their ideas might be not as "ingenious" as they appear to be. Having ideas is no challenge, finding working and better ones is.

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Generation 7 Electronics	Teacup Firmware	RepRap DIY

They probably just use the kickstarter to develop a technique and then after the kickstarter come out with this super-expensive large-format printer

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http://www.marinusdebeer.nl/

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Traumflug
A printer being functional is pretty essential, isn't it? Seen in that light their ideas might be not as "ingenious" as they appear to be. Having ideas is no challenge, finding working and better ones is.

Quite a few of the beta testers have gotten good prints out of their Peachy kits. They're finalizing in on optimizing their production run (example, they thought they would be able to use a coil from off-the shelf speakers in the galvo, but it turned out that for the fidelity they need, it's cheaper to wind their own coils in-house.). They've got a projected delivery date in June/July and they seem pretty confident on it.

Peachy is late, but not dead. (it's already completely open source, so it can never really be dead anyway)

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Traumflug

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waste
I agree that the peachy printer is really ingenious. [...] not sure how close they are in making a functional SLA printer.

A printer being functional is pretty essential, isn't it? Seen in that light their ideas might be not as "ingenious" as they appear to be. Having ideas is no challenge, finding working and better ones is.

let me put it that way. from all the ME TOO 3d printing projects you see on kickstarter (even the meaningful ones as printrbot), they really had a fundamentally simpler and cheaper idea. I was really skeptical they would get results with their ghetto style approach, but they did.

yes they have a lot of adjustments to do (but they never hide it), yes maybe their process is not as good as the "traditional" SLA process but for a 100USD idea they have actually gotten quite far we have to admit.

but lets get back on the ibox-nano speculation. What actually puzzles me is not only the LCD density. I would be quite happy with "only" half the claimed resolution. What puzzles me is if the backlights are bright enough. So assuming they are using a UV led backlight instead of white LED , and then they project black and white (UV) images on the VAT.

a cheap chinese 9.7inch screen with 2048x1536 resolution has a DPI value of around 260 which means a DPcm value of around 100. So the theoretical resolution from the screen would be 0.1mm which is not bad at all for a cheap LCD implementation.

assuming the process works, you can probably get such a screen for less than 100euros and the only other thing needed would be a Z axis which would make a very cheap 14x19cm SLA printing area.

Since the Peachy is being discussed here I figured it might be worth it to mention that they've just put a video on youtube highlighting their newest test prints on the latest Peachy revision, (presumably, the one that is going to be mass produced) along with a few painted pieces sent in by the beta testers. Newest Peachy Prints

Alas, July seems like it's a long way away.

Does anyone know, how much time it (iBox Nano) takes to print an object of specific height? They didn't mention it anywhere on kickstarter or I might have missed it.

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Feign
Since the Peachy is being discussed here I figured it might be worth it to mention that they've just put a video on youtube highlighting their newest test prints on the latest Peachy revision, (presumably, the one that is going to be mass produced) along with a few painted pieces sent in by the beta testers. Newest Peachy Prints

Alas, July seems like it's a long way away.

Woah, missed this post but indeed it looks very, very beta. The laser is very thick and seems to cause very low resolution. Very curious if this can be improved, the painted models look beautiful.

I expect the resolution will only degrade as the build surface gets larger..

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http://www.marinusdebeer.nl/

Has anybody printed warhammer minatures yet? How do the come out?

Can you upgrade the UV LED to more powerfull ones? Can you replace the screen to one eith a higher resolution?

Can you increase the print area? More circled one?