Announcing new materials, a user story, and Form X: a home for tinkerers

@digitalDougie, I believe that you can use any resin you’d like with the Form 1/1+. There is a ceramic resin made by a company called Tethon3D, check it out here: https://tethon3d.com/

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The open mode for the F2 is nothing more than a disabled wiper and heater. We cannot change laser power/speed, peel speed, etc as you can do with the F1/F1+.

Even if there are only settings for the ceramic resin for the F2, you can tweak the F1/F1+ settings file yourself to make it work for the F1/F1+ too. So you are not being left behind here. It’s the F2 users being left behind as they are not allowed to do anything more than standard work and not allowed to experiment.

So in my eyes, Form X and the experimental sub-forum is nothing more than categorizing things a little bit different to make it more clear to most users. Which is good! Nothing really changed. OpenFL is still the same. The tag “experimental” is however a bit confusing to me as I would expect this would include hardware hacks. The subjects we can discuss is more in the category of “advanced use” and not “experimental use”.

From a business point of view I can totally understand Formlabs’s decisions. It’s just not going as fast as I would like it to see. :slight_smile:

@danekshea Thanks for the comment, I get your point, however, FL do produce Form2 only resins. With the ceramic I’d like to put it in my Form 1+ and not have to experiment or adjust settings to get it to work. I won’t spend the money on a 3rd party resin in this case as, for me, there are too many variables & too many things to go wrong. I have used Photocentric clear & I have some Blue-Cast castable, however, they only require minimal changes to make them work.

@fantasy2 Thanks for responding, I didn’t realise that, I presumed that the F2 open mode gave you a lot more flexibility.

@digitalDougie I am in the same boat as you, I’d prefer to use the stock materials because of the convenience of having a successful build. That being said, not letting the folks that have the time and interest to discover the machine settings to make new, and and stock, materials work will limit the development of new materials. Blue-Cast developed their material to work with the Form2 Castable settings. That is a huge limitation for what their product could be.

There is an amount of “tuning” required even for those of us that use stock materials. I build my supports and layout my builds in a way that works for me. I’d like to adjust the initial compression for some of my builds. Maybe someone else has found other tunings that would improve my use of stock materials. I’ll never know because they can’t try those adjustments.

I understand the business reasoning for FL to limit access, and have some control over materials, but, now that they are opening the door, they should be clear about what their intentions are. What is FLs future plan? Stating that tuning a Form1/1+ is good for business, leads the Form2 owners wanting that capability.

It is good communication to give an indication of what your plans are.

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Although OpenFL includes a PreForm version that allows customizing material settings, a lot of the most interesting tools (in my biased opinion) are intended to allow hardware hacking. In fact, the early Form 2 prototypes involved taking a Form 1+ apart, reassembling the pieces, and using a precursor to OpenFL to have the printer trigger external motors via the serial port.

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I have to say, though the ability to use custom resin profiles is awesome, the Python scripts have enlightened me on how well thought out the Form 1 (+) really is.

I personally am limited with hacking the hardware until I have another resin printer. I would hate to break a great machine without having a backup plan. Maybe then, I’ll dive into that aspect of what else can be done.

I doubt FL is going to give any verbal (or written) indication on what the plans are. The fact that Form X is here tells me there are big plans in the future and both printer flavors and they will be supported for some time.

Yeah, that’s great and all, and I really appreciate all the effort, but if nothing about the Form 2 is open, we cannot do any hacking. It means we have to buy an older machine to do fun stuff while we have a really good machine standing at our desks.

Well OK, I am doing some exciting hardware hacks at the moment and I will share these later, but options are very limited as much is still processed in the software(or microcontrollers). I’m very familiar with programming the STM micro’s used and was almost at the point of ripping apart the machine and write my own stuff, but luckily I could resist.

So what are your intentions? Keep the Form 2 closed till you have a Form 3? I’m OK with that, but just let us know something, it now feels as if Form 2 users are left behind and we should swap it for a Form 1+ to do fun experiments.

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Yes it would be realy nice to be able to change settings on the form2.