With how cheap they’re getting, everyone seems to be jumping on the resin printer bandwagon. They may not be able to fully replace your trusty old FDM printer, but for certain jobs, they just can’t be beaten. Sadly though, creating those smooth time-lapse videos of your prints isn’t quite as easy to do as it is on their filament-based counterparts.
Although not easy, it is still possible. [Fraens] It is possible to make timelapses with any resin printer. This hack works wonderfully. First, you need to find a smartphone, which shouldn’t be too hard, given how often we all tend to upgrade. [Fraens] Open Camera is recommended to replace the default camera app on your phone, so that it does not close during long periods of inactivity. Any Bluetooth dongle can be used to trigger the camera. It is connected through a transistor circuit via an Arduino output. To trigger the shutter, a light-dependent resistor (LDR) is connected to one of the microcontroller’s inputs. The LDR is placed inside the bed of the resin printer — an Anycubic Photon in this case — where light from the UV panel used to cross-link the resin can fall on it. The Bluetooth dongle is triggered by a simple Arduino code at the perfect moment. A series of stills are captured and stitched using DaVinci Ressolve.
Below is a short video that shows the results. They look good to us. Although there are many other ways to accomplish this, we like the simplicity of our method.