MakerBot made 3D printers affordable by going with FDM (fused deposition modeling). But now a college professor has created a far less expensive printer—albeit with a tiny print area--by going the stereolithography/photopolymerization route, whereby resin is cured in place with light. The crazy part is, he figured out how to do it using just the light projected by your smartphone screen.

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The inventor, Jeng Ywam-Jeng, is a professor of Mechanical Engineering at the National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, a/k/a Taiwan Tech. Here's a time-lapse of his device sitting on top of a smartphone and doing its thing:

Obviously this bears some explaining:

The phone printer works by placing a coated vat of specialty resin on top of a smartphone, or similar device. While the light from the phone cures the resin onto a metal printbed, held above the vat. With each layer cured, this z-axis platform lifts up until the print is complete.

One key to this technology is the resin, also developed by the Taiwan Tech team, which can be hardened by visible light. Rather than use UV rays or a laser, the photopolymer from NTUST is cured by the dim light of a smartphone. So, all that is necessary to create a 3D print is a mechanism for raising the printing vat, layer by layer.

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One of professor Jeng's research assistants, Hanhsuan Lee, provides more surprising details: "There's no need to enclose the printer in a dark box," he told 3D Printing Industry. "Just to shut the lights off in part of a room. As you know, the power of light on a smartphone is very low, so our print speed is still relatively slower than other vat polymerization machines now, but we are working hard to solve this problem and seem to getting promising results recently."

3DPI states that the as-yet-unnamed device, if commercialized, would run "around $100+." Dr. Jeng and his team, having won top prize in Taiwan's 2015 3D Printing Innovation Application Contest, are reportedly looking into said commercialization and considering a Kickstarter campaign. We'll keep you posted if we learn more.

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