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Thousand Oaks-based 3D printing startup Orange Maker is putting a spin on the traditional 3D printing process with the debut of its patent-pending Heliolitography process this month.
Orange Maker’s flagship Helios One product will utilize Heliolithography (as opposed to the typical Sterolithography process), which means it will direct UV light with ultra-high precision to solidify liquid resin through a curing process.
Founders Kurt Dudley and Doug Farber started this process in 2011 and then brought on engineer Chris Marion to design the end-to-end 3D printing system for use in the home and the office. So far, they've had no outside funding.
“Quite simply, we’ve found a way to streamline efficiency, design, and material economy in 3D printing,” Dudley said in a statement. “We’ve reached an ideal—greatly expanding functionality while achieving elegance and simplification through design and engineering.”
Here’s 3 reasons you can go ahead and nerd out about the Helios One:
1) It prints continuously
Instead of breaking from the resin between each layer, the Helios One constantly rotates its build platform, creating a spiral.
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2) It uses a new type of light source
Instead of using a laser or a projected image to cure the resin with UV light, Helios One is using "a unique light system that we’ve developed that has allowed us to introduce light in a continuous fashion."
3) It solves a bunch of pesky problems
These small, yet important, problems include: slow printing speeds, poor surface finishes, high consumer costs and low resolution.
4) And there’s only more to come
The Helios One will debut in 2015. In the meantime, the team is testing and getting ready to manufacture. Its target users right now are prosumers like engineers and architects, but they are planning on expanding to a more mainstream consumer base after that: “We’re ferociously excited about the future of it,” Farber told GigaOM. “We are so passionate about the way people can use this. In a lot of ways we want to inspire people to want to create.”
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