See also

Tolerance and Modifications

SLA - vs. - FDM

The Reachy robot from Pollen is SLA printed. The original goal for the CL Reachy robot was to create an FDM-printed robot.

While we tried to print all of the pieces using FDM, in some cases we needed to use SLA.

• In some cases we wanted to use a different material other than PLA.
  • The brackets in the head that hold both the cameras and their corresponding lenses were printed using the Tough V5 Resin, which provides a good balance of stiffness and flexibility. [The newer version of the Tough resin is Tough 2000.]
    • When the piece is FDM printed, the loop on the bracket is too fragile and breaks.
• In some cases, the tolerances of the pieces were tighter than what we could reasonably support with FDM-printed pieces. [It's possible that with additional remodeling that one could get around this.]
  • Orbita, especially the pinions and gears.
  • Antenna ear pieces.
• In some cases the piece is (much) more difficult to FDM print.
  • The above camera brackets.
    • The screw threads that hold the lenses are difficult to print cleanly in FDM.
  • The ear pieces for the antenna. Attempting to FDM print the piece in its default orientation caused the piece to warp. Attempting to FDM print the piece in other orientations could require a lot of fine cleanup for a piece that already has tight tolerances.

The current list of SLA-printed pieces:

• All printed parts of the orbita assembly
• Antenna ear pieces
• Camera / lens brackets

Adjustments for PLA

Surprisingly, different colors of the same type of PLA from the same supplier had different results. White (the originally-planned color) turned out to be so problematic (skipped layers, poor resolution) that we changed colors. It's now blue.

• Even with the color change, we still had to adjust the printer profile settings to improve the overall print quality.

Changes to models

[Attempting to go back through status reports to capture areas of change.]

This likely isn't an exhaustive list. [At least one of the reports called out "changes if we can't FDM print, without any details.] Ideally this info will be added to notes/comments to the grab cad files themselves.