I’ve always looked with awe at the whole 3d printing phenomenon. I believe something clicked in my mind with the Star Trek replicator and 3d printers are the closest thing to it we have nowadays.

I waited long enough to get an original Prusa MK2 (also reviewed here) and a little more than a year ago I finally bit the bullet and jumped into UV resin printing.

The beast to beat at the time was the Formlab Form2 but the price to get it and especially to maintain it is too steep for an tinkerer like myself. To the rescue the Peopoly Moai, a Laser SLA that is not only affordable but also comes with a variety of very wallet friendly resins.

The Moai at the end of 2017 wasn’t ready yet so I emailed Peopoly asking for information and within seconds I received a reply from Mark (the founder) who promised to ship within a few weeks.

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Back to the roots! After a long period of high quality, high volumes fancy factory made keyboards I was missing my early DIY days. It all started from there: an idea, a bunch of hand wired switches and a layered acrylic case.

The keyboard enclosure has always been a problem. Layered acrylic (or aluminum) is definitely an option but it presents its limits and anyway you have to have access to a laser cutter. Time has passed –five year since my first custom?! gosh, time flies when you are having fun– and 3d printing finally got to a point where it’s both easily accessible and decent quality.  The problem with “home” 3d printers is that the building area is rarely big enough to host a whole keyboard so we have to be creative.

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I’ve been skeptical about consumer grade 3d printers for long time. They were expensive, slow, required a lot of maintenance and quality was less than optimal. Things are moving rapidly, though and we’ve reached such a nice sweet spot between quality and price that I couldn’t simply resist the temptation.

First of all I had to understand if I wanted an FDM (fused deposition modeling) or SLA (stereolithography) printer. Without going too much into it, SLA generally produces higher definition prints but it is also more expensive to start with and maintain. You can find very cheap FDM instead and while the print quality is not as good, it is exceptional for quick prototyping. So FDM it is.

Only few months ago Prusa released the second generation of what is probably the most famous filament 3d printer in the DIY realm: the not-so-originally named Prusa i3 MK 2. It comes in kit or fully assembled, I was convinced to get an assembled one but it wasn’t available at the time so I went for the kit because “it can’t be that difficult, right?!”

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