3D Printers

Affordable, Fast Gizmo 3D Printer Coming to Kickstarter this Fall

Shortly after Silicon Valley’s Carbon 3D printer made waves across the industry with its ultra-fast CLIP technology, an Australian company called Gizmo 3D popped up promising its own extremely fast 3D printer.  I was initially skeptical, and, to some degree, I still have to be.  Sometimes, it’s difficult to write about these printers that I can’t see, use or touch.  I emailed Gizmo 3D to see what kind of information I could get for myself and received a nice little treasure trove of information about the printer, from founder Kobus du Troit about their upcoming Kickstarter campaign and their plans for the future.

Founder Kobus du Toit won’t comment too much on his method of ultra-fast 3D printing because it hasn’t been patented yet.  He has told me, however, that he may actually be able to reduce the print time from the 6 minutes (as seen in the video) to 4 minutes.

He describes what he calls “standard printing” as the method that requires the build plate to dip into the resin in order to gain a coat of resin, then move back up and wait for the resin to spread out.  du Toit also mentions the need for a wiper in order to maintain a flat build surface, which is an improvement he added as an optional feature for the upcoming Gizmo 3D printer.

With “Continuous printing”, he says that “the loop in the code only stops for a fraction of time to display the image so it almost looks like an animation when you look closely at the image being displayed.”  The skulls in the video were printed with a display time of 50 – 80 milliseconds per layer.  With his Gizmo 3D printer, the build plate almost moves constantly deeper and deeper into the resin, differentiating it from “standard printing.”

The CEO of Gizmo 3D goes on to say that continuous 3D printing is perfect for printing out small features or thin walls. In the Gizmo 3D software (which is called Gizmetor), Kobus also plans to add an Override Manager feature which will allow the user to manipulate certain parameters of each layer.

Gizmo 3D is planning on launching their Kickstarter in September (though the worst case scenario would be to launch in November), and are also planning on creating a triple vat system, so users can 3D print using 3 different resins at one time.  When the Kickstarter campaign goes live, anyone will be able to pre-order a Gizmo 3D printer starting at just $2,500, this fall.

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While it’s a little early to compare the Gizmo 3D printer with the Carbon 3D printer given that many details are obscured by obstacles of propriety, let’s take a closer look at the features of the Gizmo 3D Printer and see if we can begin to differentiate the two in a useful way.

Top-down DLP printer

On the Gizmo 3D DLP Printer, a projector displays the image onto the resin from above.  The one problem that such a top-down DLP solves is the suction issues that bottom-up DLP printers have. Carbon 3D is a bottom-up printer, but employs a sophisticated method:  by controlling the interaction of UV light, which creates the photopolymerization, and oxygen, which inhibits the reaction, CLIP continuously grows objects from a pool of resin.

Gizmo 3D Printers contain all the resin in the vat, which means that, if the vat is both big enough to print an item and is also full, the user will have enough resin to print the object.  This eliminates the need to add an external reservoir to top up the resin or add extra resin to the vat mid-print.  If users don’t implement the aforementioned wiper system, the top-down DLP printer has less moving parts than the bottom-up printers during printing and even less than FDM printers.  This also means that fewer components that can break, to be replaced, and fewer things that can go wrong during a print.  The Carbon 3D doesn’t need a wiper system, but does pull objects from a single pool of resin.

The Gizmo 3D printer doesn’t take longer to print when you add more items to be printed, unlike a FDM printer.  According to Gizmo 3D,  “The printer displays an image on the build plate and that image might contain a single pixel or fill the full build plate.  Most of the speed gain/loss is with moving of the build plate down and then up again.  Display of the image might only take 1 second while movement of the build plate and waiting for the resin to come to a standstill could be 15 seconds per layer.  It really depends on how the user wants the print to look at the end.  Printing faster will give lower quality.”  I’m not sure if this applies to Carbon 3D specifically as a point of differentiation, it’s just a standard ratio of 3D printing in general.

Approximate Print Sizes

Name Length Width Height
GiziMate 400mm 200mm 200mm
GiziPro 400mm 200mm 350mm
GiziMax 400mm 200mm 850mm

The biggest version of the Gizmo’s top down DLP 3D printer, the GiziMax, can print 400mm x 200mm x 850mm

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Print small

Gizmo 3D printers can print at 35 micron XY (depending on setup and projector) and have a Z resolution of 1 micron.  The standard FunToDo resin, that the printers are supplied with, can print at a resolution of 10 microns on the Z axis.  Small, high-resolution prints are achieved by moving the projector closer to the build plate.  With the Carbon 3D printer, as the printer pulls in on the Z-axis, the printer can go from 100 micron resolution to 1 micron by just scaling down the size of the projected image, without losing any speed.  For most printers, going from 100 micron slicing to 1 micron slicing, would slow down the printer by a factor of 100, whereas Carbon 3D just changes the image as it grows, due to its seamless layering.  Carbon 3D seems to have this process automated, and can scale from low to high resolution along with the print, rather than be at a movable, but static point like the Gizmo 3D printer.  Disclaimer: this is just an experimental comparison, as I don’t have access (and neither do you, most likely) to this new breed of 3D printer.

No vat to replace

“No need to replace the resin container or the lining of the resin container.  There is actually no lining on a top-down DLP printer.  This is something you need to do with printers like the B9 Creator, Titan 1 and Form 1+ and other bottom-up printers.  Not having to replace the vat saves a lot of time and money over the life of the printer,” according to Gizmo 3D.  Interesting.  Carbon 3D did release information that would warrant a comparison here.

Multi color vat

On the Gizmo 3D, it’s possible to install a vat with multiple compartments, allowing you to print in different colors at the same time, and the plan is to develop a multi-color vat kit that will also come with the multi-color build plate.  The user would have to remove the build plate from the printer and install the multi-color build plate that will be designed to be 4 build plates in one.

Heated vat

The resin in the vat is heated to 22 degrees C.  Heating the resin makes it flow better and that leads to higher resolution prints.  It also lends itself to repeatability, as the temperature of the room in which the printer is located won’t influence the prints, because the resin is always the same temperature.

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Software features

The control software for the Gizi- line of printers is called Gizmetor.  The name is a combination of Gizmo and Creator.  The software was written in Java 8 64bit.  You will need a 64bit PC to run it.  It runs on Linux, Mac, and Windows 7+.  Your PC will also need to support 3D acceleration.  Minimum spec for the PC is at least an i3 with 4GB of memory.  The memory will limit the size of the items that can be opened and printed.  We are using a 5 year old i3 with 4GB memory and it is possible to print a 10MB STL file with this spec PC.  The projectors have HDMI ports and the laptop has an HDMI port.  VGA to HDMI has not been tested.  The software for Carbon 3D is largely unknown, but I do know that they have to input the different chemical properties of each resin manually, and it seems as though it isn’t quite ready for public release or discussion.

3D Layout

A 3D layout feature displays the objects to be printed.  The look of the layout can be customized by the user. By default the layout loads an STL file of the build plate and displays it.  The projection area is then displayed on the build plate.  The user can change the projection area easily by right clicking and selecting the option to change the projection area, which will automatically move the projector to the right position on the printer before the print starts, if the automated projectors kit has been installed.

Gizmo library

You can add any number of directories containing STL files to the Gizmo library.  When you click on a directory, Gizmetor will show a preview of all the items in that directory.  It does use quite a bit of processing, because it opens the STL file and takes a snapshot of the 3D object, but this setting can be configured.  When you double click on the item the 3D preview changes to the 3D object in a 3D world.  You can move the object around in the mini 3D layout and do anything with the object in the mini 3D layout that you can in the full-sized 3D layout.  The object mini 3D layout is exactly the same component as is used in the full-sized 3D layout.

You can print directly from the library or add the item to the full-sized 3D layout.  When adding the item to the full 3D layout you can choose to add it horizontally or vertically.  Adding it vertically will add a new virtual build plate to the full 3D layout and then place the new item on top of the virtual build plate.  This all may be a bit difficult to picture without screenshots of the software and such screenshots may be necessary to demonstrate that the software does work the way Gizmo’s CEO proposes.

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Hotspot manager

The projectors supplied with the DLP printers from Gizmo 3D Printers have hotspots, as do all projectors on the market.  The hotspot is an area that gets more power than the rest of the projected image. With the hotspot manager, users can cancel out this hotspot to allow for more uniform prints.

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Override manager

The user can override certain values of the print per layer, e.g. the wait time after displaying a layer might need to be longer for a big flat area than for smaller features.  Using the override manager ,the user can change the wait time to be longer for one layer and shorter for another or display one layer longer than another.  More options will become available in the override manager as users need it.  This lends itself to variable physical properties throughout a print.

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Looking Toward The Future of 3D Printing

Interestingly, du Toit originally started using DLP printers after experimenting with the Makerbot Replicator 2x in order to create a bomb prop for his laser skirmish business. Among Kobus du Toit’s next steps are finding suppliers in China, and designing a vat for multi-colored printing.  He plans to have a beta machine ready by the end of June.  He had no problem finding beta testers willing to test the machine from every angle, before moving on to the late summer Kickstarter campaign.

There really isn’t enough information to thoroughly compare the Gizmo 3D and Carbon 3D at this point.  The Gizmo 3D looks very promising, and unlike the Carbon 3D, there is a release date and price ($2500).  Still, we’ll have to wait until we hear from the public before validating any of the info provided by Gizmo.  If you want to be a part of this public by joining the beta testers program, you’ll need to email [email protected] and $2500.  And, until we see a super fast FDM printer match the Gizmo 3D and Carbon 3D printers’ super speed, it looks like filament printers may become a thing of the past, but definitely not anytime soon.