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How hard is it to make a custom steno-lithography API? And do I even need one?

Hi, all. My name is J.A and I am co-owner of 3DPrintedDreams with my best friend. (We are both 17.)

During a brainstorm of what should be the flagship feature of our shop should be. We decided to take user images, (exact specifications TBD), and then use an API to transform them into .stl files so my friend can print it on his 3D Printer.

I am asking how hard or "easy" would it be to make such an API and what would be the bottom dollar if I were to make a collab post here about it? If anyone would be willing to listen, I could explain how all this would work in relation to the full stack of my website.

p.s. I understand that experience costs money and I myself have experienced this, but, we spent most of our money on the Pallete 2 from Mosaic. (about $500).

HOWEVER, we still have some money left. If a suggested price is to much for us to pay up-front, 3DPrintedDreams is willing to pay you in installments dermined by mutual agreement.

Thanks for your time and have a nice day!

-Josh

Co-founder of 3DPrintedDreams, LLC (Pending).

Comments
  • 1
    You mean photogrammetry right ?

    All depends how much precision you want to get. It’s a wide area of knowledge starting from camera hardware to 3d hardware, photo software and ending on machine learning.

    Read about fusion camera system used in Avatar because James Cameron is one of inventors and is pushing 3d to Hollywood.

    That’s why 2 cameras got introduced to the phones when it become possible from technical and economic point.

    Read how 3d picture effect is constructed.

    Then read about DIY 3d scanner and after that photogrammetry and if you got time for that there is company that is making special cameras with depth field and AI called MYNT EYE camera.

    There are special machine learning algorithms for 3D scene reconstruction.

    So it depends, there are limitations that you can’t overcome without good data scientist and it cost lots of money but for basic problems there is software called Alice Vision that is open source and maybe it will be enough for you to play with it and create api for it.
    https://alicevision.org

    Good luck.
    (sorry for long reply)
  • 3
    You mean stereolithography? Personally I have never worked with such images. But this is an interesting topic. I know of a couple of tools that could be used with a language such as Python through the FreeCAD API. This could be something worth to lool at as am alternative to having others do it for you.
    You could very well have the Python portion of the api in your server and just process the user submitted images. Else be aware that as soon as peoppe think CAD or image processing then they are willing to work for a pretty penny.

    This is as much as i know about this, sorry if it wasn't good u__u
  • 0
    @AleCx04 Isn’t stereolithography a printing technique used in resin printers and photogrammetry 3d model reconstruction and measurement from photos ?
  • 2
    @vane indeed. What i am not seeing is how it is not what op was talking about o.o
  • 0
    Apologies to all, when I said "stenolithography", I meant STEREOlithography.

    We have a TEVO Tornado that takes PLA filament.
  • 1
    @vane in the company's use case, we interpret it as .stl files. Currently, we use Fusion360 to model and Cura to slice, prepare and send off to print.
  • 2
    This is out of my depths, but is the most interesting thing I've seen today.

    Don't mind my 🚩
  • 0
    @AleCx04 Yes! This is exactly what I've been asking for! Thanks! What exactly are the tools that you are talking about?

    Also, concerning about the second part of your comment, what we plan to is use a rasberry pi connected via ethernet to our front-end server, (which could be another raspberry pi or a cheap Linux server).

    When a user submits an image, if it falls within our limitations, the raspberry pi connected via ethernet would then pull the image from the front-end server and using our api, would analyze said image and then use our MX server to send us an order report and the completed .stl file.
  • 1
    @C0D4 That's quite alright, thanks for stopping by though!
  • 0
    @AleCx04 Probably I misunderstood the “user images” part 😂
  • 1
    @LinuxMasochist ok so you want some kind of converter, the ugliest part of converting images from stl to gcode I spotted when 3d printing stuff is that sometimes you need to make some simplifications of vertex to print things nicely.

    That’s another story, never seen such tool but probably there are some that use vertex clustering.

    The simplest way would be show gcode output directly on your website. I believe someone already build such viewer. ex. https://github.com/joewalnes/...
    but don’t know if anyone made tool to display gcode layer by layer.

    So from my perspective it should look like this:
    - user upload model
    - api convert model to gcode and write it to some file accessible from web viewer
    - viewer display gcode on some plane and user can see how layers will be printed
    - viewer accepts the gcode and model is ready for printing
  • 1
    I did some quick research and apparently three.js can have gcode input.
    https://threejs.org/examples/...

    All it’s need to do is slice it by layers and show some scrollbar.
    That shouldn’t be to hard to do ( probably 😂).
  • 1
    @vane Ngl, when I saw the website, it blew my mind a bit. I didn't even know it could do that. TIL.
  • 1
    @LinuxMasochist yeah it looks ok.

    Also keep in mind client want to chose print quality, material and get print time. Maybe rotate model on bed.

    I started wondering if it’s possible to compile slic3r to wasm and use it directly inside browser so you can do everything on client side 🙂.

    That would be cool to provide just gcode to machine without knowing model as you could build machine that can print stuff directly from the internet.

    Have fun.
  • 0
    Just commenting to get notified :)

    Seems interesting!
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