A customer is concerned that the Tough 1500 will be more dense than Tough, which would result in a weaker bluetooth signal through the material. It’s a case of some sort with a bluetooth device inside.
Is there any merit to that? I’ve been printing a lot of 1500 lately and having really good success. I do have Tough as well but I’m curious whether anyone has any insight into this bluetooth question.
thanks,
DW
I don’t know for sure but I wouldn’t expect any SLA resins (or for that matter any plastics) to attenuate a bluetooth signal. I’ve tried Googling but not found anything so perhaps there’s an expert here that might be able to give you a more definite answer.
I’m not an RF expert so take this with a grain of salt. But my intuition says the difference will be negligible enough that the only applications where it matters are those so sensitive they already have the engineering expertise and equipment to test and measure it.
You could set up an experiment sandwiching a strip of each between two metal plates and take some capacitance measurements. I’ve used printed resin as a dielectric in capacitive touch / proximity sensing circuits and to be honest I don’t think material choice would have made much difference relative to the mountain of noise present in those applications.
We are using Durable material as a cover close to antennas (Bluetooth and ANT+ signal) and noticed that the cleaning of the product is a key point. When the IPA is saturated and doesn’t clean the part well enough we had a weaker signal. Not sure what is happening but maybe some uncured resin sticks to the surface and doesn’t even cure when putting it into the Form Cure. I do believe that wall thicknesses are key too! The thicker you go the more problems you might have!