WoWTools

Description

In 2017, a chinese company name SparkMaker or WOW! launched a kickstarter for a resin based 3D printer. I bought one out of curiosity because I was interested in trying SLS base 3D printing, and it was cheap. The printer arrived not long after the end of the kickstarted, and I started to try to use it, to find that I was not really liking the software provided with it, which was the only way to use the printer as it use a non standard format.

When I started that project the original goal was to try to understand the file format used to print, which happened to be a weird mixture of a standard G-Code file, a text format, with binary in the middle that represent a black & white bitmap image.

I then started to make a simple tool to parse the file, which started the WoWTools project.

One of the first step was to be able to extract each layer and image linked with that layer and able to decode that image into something useful.

The next step was from the data loaded, being able to write an exact copy of the original file.

Once that was done, and I was able to get all the layer data that was part of the printing file, I started to think that it would be useful to be able to edit some parameters, like layer thickness, time of exposure for each layer in the file.

This led me into creating a UI based tool around the library I made that allow to inspect each layer and change some of the parameters for each layers.

It also show some approximate informations like the volume of the print and print time based on the layer size, count and exposition time for each.

References

• Original kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/249504031/sparkmaker-the-most-affordable-desktop-sla-3d-prin
• Github page of the project: https://github.com/Godzil/WoWTools