ON THE TOPIC OF | 3D PRINTING
gained in daylight resin 3D printing
led directly to the LumiBee Project.
The goal of the LumiBee project is
to use the experience the company
gained in portable 3D printers and
daylight resins, but with a much more
affordable solution. Says Davide
Marin, Lumi Industries CEO: “We
realised that making a commercial
product using smartphones as light
sources was not feasible, but beside
the expertise in portable 3D printers,
we spent a considerable amount of
time designing and testing phonebased
resin solutions, so why keep
all of it closed in a drawer?” Davide
brought the LumiBee design to a
refined working prototype and it was
decided to release everything as
open source.
In the recent years he has
continued to work on LumiBee on
a personal level. He developed the
mechanical design, PCB design,
firmware and mobile App. When
it came to prototyping he had the
idea of designing all the resin 3D
Printer parts to be 3D printable with a
domestic FFF printer, so people could
recreate the LumiBee at home at a
very low cost.
“I made LumiBee as a personal
project,” says Marin. “I developed
mechanical design, PCB design,
prototyping, firmware and App. I
made first prototypes for the chassis
using the FFF 3D printer we have in
house, a Zortrax M200 and Z-ULTRAT
filament. M200 provided us with
everything we needed. The quality
was good enough even to print
threaded bars and nuts for LumiBee
Z-axis. An idea popped into my mind:
LumiBee parts should be designed
in a way that any user can 3D print
them at home with a domestic FFF
printer at a very low cost. I decided
with my team to release LumiBee as
free Open Source project by Lumi
Industries, perfectly matching our
mission to make 3D printing benefits
available to a larger public.”
The LumiBee chassis design was
split into segments, with specific
functions: holding the phone, housing
the PCB board, etc., and they can
be customised or replaced easily.
During the prototyping process, each
segment was printed in a different
colour to highlight this feature. The
name LumiBee is not an accident.
At the prototyping stage, the studio
had two filament colours available:
black and yellow. The finished
device resembled a bee, and this
resemblance went way beyond
appearance.
“In nature, this tiny animal
has such an important role in our
lives. It contributes to complex,
interconnected ecosystems and we
felt this reflected also the idea of
the project itself involving different
players like makers, 3D printing
lovers and fans, as well as different
companies to cooperate for the good
and, if possible even improved,
outcome of the project,” says Marin.
Partners of the project are
Photocentric, which provides suitable
daylight resins; Zortrax, creator
of the printer on which LumiBee
was printed; and 3D Filium, which
suggested particular filaments, such
as its non-flammable PlaQ FRVO,
which is perfect for extra safety when
embedding electronic components.
“We are glad that users of Zortrax
printers use our equipment for
creative projects and share their
solutions with the tech enthusiast
community. The ability to create your
own devices, modify and improve
them is one of the most important
things 3D printing brings to the table.
We are excited to see how people will
transform and modify LumiBee in the
future,” said Rafał Tomasiak, CEO of
Zortrax.
The LumiBee open source project
looks simple but hides some smart
solutions. For example, LumiBee
communicates easily with any
smartphone in the market. Every
smartphone has a built-in flash for the
rear camera, and accessing it is easy
in Android studio. Communication
protocol was reduced to the bare
minimum, using a quick blink of the
smartphone flash to say “go up 1
layer in the Z-axis” to LumiBee and 2
quick blinks to communicate “print is
finished, put the tray completely out of
the resin”.
LumiBee was a finalist in 2019
edition of the Purmundus challenge
at FormNext, Frankfurt. The M200
3D printer model used to create the
LumiBee is the predecessor of the
Zortrax product - the M200 Plus 3D
printer. !
LumiBee is able to
communicate easily
with any smartphone.
18 WWW.EUREKAMAGAZINE.CO.UK | FEBRUARY 2020
/WWW.EUREKAMAGAZINE.CO.UK