Delta DLP 3D printing with large size

Abstract

We present a delta DLP 3D printer with large size in this paper. Compared with traditional DLP 3D printers that use a low-cost off-the-shelf consumer projector and a single vertical carriage, the platform of our delta DLP 3D printer can also move horizontally in the plane. We show that this structure allows the printer to have a larger printing area than the projection area of a projector. Our system can print 3D models much larger than traditional DLP 3D printers. The major challenge to realize delta 3D printing with large size comes from how to partition an arbitrary planar polygonal shape (possibly with holes or multiple disjoint polygons) into a minimum number of rectangles with fixed size, which is NP-hard. We propose a simple yet efficient approximation algorithm to solve this problem. The time complexity of our algorithm is O(n3 log n), where n is the number of edges in the polygonal shape. A physical prototype system is built and several large 3D models with complex geometric structures have been printed as examples to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.