A team of engineering students from Southern Illinois University Carbondale need help completing their fully open sourced DLP 3D printer for their senior design project, so they have turned to the crowdfunding community on Indiegogo to help them out.
Project PAM – Photoresin Additive Manufacturing – is a high resolution DLP 3D printer that will contain about $1000 worth of readily available parts that can easily be sourced. When the students who are trying to build it discovered that their SIU Engineering department funding wouldn’t cover the total cost of the prototype development, they needed to get creative. To fill the gap in funding, they are hoping to raise $2500 on Indiegogo so they can successfully build and test their prototype.
The final prototype kit will include everything that backers need to build a complete DLP 3D printer with the exception of the projectors. That means it will contain the chassis, linear motion parts, the resin vat, electronics and a complete enclosure. Backing the campaign for the full kit will cost about $1,500. You can also back the campaign for $250 and receive a professionally bound copy of all of the documentation of the project and the build. $25 get’s you a 3D printed keychain, and $5 will get you the standard “thank you” email.
Here is their Indiegogo campaign video:
This is certainly an unconventional crowdfunding campaign, as the supporters are actually paying more for the final product than they would by just using the open source documentation. Of course there will be no open source documentation if the students don’t manage to finish their senior project. So they are essentially asking backers to support them because they want to make it fully open source, so other people don’t have to support them. While that may sound like a bum deal, backers could look at it as investing in the open source movement, because that is essentially what they are doing.
The students have committed to making everything completely open source and not hiding anything behind a patent. And if they do end up with any extra funds from the campaign, it will be donated to creating a new student makerspace within the SIU Engineering department, so as a backer you will also be supporting a new generation of makers.
You can find out more about Project PAM on the students Indiegogo page, or check them out over on their GitHub page, where the project is being fully documented. And if you’re curious about what the 3D printer will look like, here is a very brief video of the final computer render:
