μRepRap: The RepRapMicron

gist

The RepRapMicron wiki describes an open project to build a RepRap-style printer that works at the micron scale from common materials. Its current PIKA V0.02 build uses 3D printed flexures and stepper motors to reach about 1μm repeatable positioning in an 8mm cube, deposits UV resin droplets as small as 4μm, and has printed a 0.5mm Benchy at 4μm layers.

ideas

• Flexures replace rails. The design grew from OpenFlexure microscope stages, and the earlier MAUS testbed reached about 5μm over a 4mm square before PIKA's print-in-place table improved on it.
• A probe does three jobs. A needle or electrochemically etched wire acts as Z touch sensor, engraving tool and deposition head, and PIKA can etch its own probes.
• Resin moves by capillary action. The probe picks up Top Coat UV nail gel from a smeared reservoir and leaves sub-15μm droplets, which a UV LED in the bed then cures; a fibre optic probe has cured 9μm lines.
• The parts are ordinary. It uses NEMA17 steppers, GCODE over serial with Arduino GRBL, and two USB microscopes for setup and alignment.
• Replication is the long goal. The wiki says humans cannot handle micron parts, so the project needs ways to detach, move and rotate them, and hopes to reproduce the system at a yet smaller scale.

quotes