Elegoo Mars Pro User Guide
Safety
UV curable resin is very toxic to animals and people, and should never be disposed of without curing it first. See the disposal section of this document for proper disposal procedure, and if you have questions, ask on the #3dprinting channel on Slack.
Wear the proper PPE, and wash any resin off of your skin and clothing immediately. If resin gets in your eyes, use the eye wash station to flush your eyes thoroughly.
Hazards
- Serious Eye Irritation
- Skin Irritation
- Respiratory Irritation
- Skin Allergic Reaction
MSDS
PPE
The following PPE should be used whenever handling UV Resin
- Chemical safety goggles
- Rubber Gloves
Using the Printer
Summary of Use
The resin printer at hack.rva uses UV light shone through an LCD to quickly cure a UV sensitive resin to build your model up layer by layer. This is similar to how an FDM (filament) printer works, with a few major differences.
- The entire layer is cured at once, which means that the speed of your print is only dependent on how tall it is, not how much is on the build plate. This means if you can load many objects onto the build plate, you’re able to consolidate the clean up steps without affecting time to print.
- The parts are pulled up out of the vat of resin upside down
- There are extra curing and washing steps involved, and the machine has to be thoroughly cleaned between each use
- The resin cannot be exposed to light for long periods of time because of its photosensitive nature
Slicer (LycheeSlicer)
There are 2 slicers that you can use for our printer. LycheeSlicer and Chitubox. Examples in this document will use LycheeSlicer, but the process is similar for Chitubox. LycheeSlicer is free, but will show ads and prompt you to upgrade. You do not need to do this in order to use the slicer.
Setting up the printer and resin
When you open up LycheeSlicer, it will ask you what printer you’re using. Scroll down until you find the Elegoo Mars Pro. It will be in the list somewhere. Note that this is not the Mars Pro 2 or 3, it’s the original.
Next, click the Resin button in the top left corner and we’ll set up our Resin.
You’re going to want to find the settings for your resin from the manufacturer. For the Elegoo Standard Resin that’s stocked at hack.rva, make sure your settings look like this:
Things that you may need to change are Exposure Time for the Burn In layers and Exposure Time for the Normal Layers. Everything else should be correct by default, but double check to be sure.
Next, we’ll add our models to the plate. You can drag and drop your STLs into LycheeSlicer, and they’ll be imported into your scene like so. In our example I’m using a MushroomMan D&D mini.
Because most of the detail that I want to preserve is on his face and front, I’m going to lay him diagonally on his back, so that the support material will leave his front untouched. Use the Rotate tool to put your model in a suitable position.
You can also scale and arrange your models as needed. Next we’ll generate supports and a raft to stick our model to the build plate. Click the prepare button at the top.
I usually just use automatic supports, and manual supports are outside of the scope of this training. You can find tutorials if you need to generate supports manually. Select your model, select Support, and click “Generate Automatic Supports”. My model looks like this after this step. This is now ready to print.
Click the Export tab at the top.
Insert your USB, click Export slices to file, and save it to the USB drive. You’re done with the slicer. Now on to the printer.
Printer Preparation
Wear safety goggles and disposable rubber gloves for the remaining steps.
Turn on the power strip to the right of the printer. You should hear the ventilator turn on below the printer. Turn on the power switch at the back right side of the printer.
Shake the resin well (30 seconds). Remove the red cover from the printer and pour resin into the vat. As long as you fill it below the max, there’s no such thing as too much resin in the vat. We’ll recover all of the remaining resin once we’re done printing.
Make sure the build plate is pushed all the way back and secured using the 1 metal hand screw on the arm over the vat. It should be aligned over the vat so that it’s able to be submerged in the resin vat. Make sure the 2 thumb screws that hold the vat down are secured finger tight.
Replace the red cover on the printer.
Printing
Select your print from the USB drive on the touch screen of the printer and hit start. Fold the clear cover back over the printer and wait for your print to be done!
Removal
Once your print is complete, open the ventilation cover, remove the red cover, unscrew the top hand screw, and pull the build plate out of the printer. Immediately cover the printer with the red cover to prevent the resin inside from curing.
Using the plastic spatula, scrape the edges of your support material pads in order to separate them from the build plate. You want to remove all of the cured resin from the build plate in this step.
Curing and Washing
Turn on the power switch on the curing and washing machine in the back right corner. Remove the yellow cover. Inside, you should find a plastic bin filled with isopropyl alcohol and a plexiglass plate. Set the plexiglass plate aside for now. Open the bin with alcohol and drop your parts into the basket.
On the front panel, press the mode button until it displays the picture of 2 droplets with a rotating arrow. Increase the time to 3 or 4 minutes and press start. You should see the alcohol begin to swirl inside of the bin. While your part is being washed, begin cleanup.
Once your part is washed, we’ll begin the curing stage. Remove the metal basket from the bin, and remove your parts from the basket. Replace the basket, seal the alcohol bin, and set it aside.
Cleaning Up
- Resin replacement - Remove the resin bath from the printer, and pour any remaining resin through either the metal filter funnel or the yellow funnel with a paint filter installed back into the container that the resin came from. This will allow the resin to be used again in the future.
Wipe down 1 - Using paper towels, thoroughly wipe down any residual resin from all of the following parts:
Build Plate
Resin Vat
Scraper
Funnel
Table
Anywhere else that resin might have gotten while you were working
Wipe down 2 - Next using the jug of IPA and clean paper towels, we’re going to wipe down all of those parts again to remove any residual resin from them. Make sure the film on the bottom of the resin vat is clean on both sides, and make sure the build plate surface is 100% clean as well.
Clean up printer:
Replace the resin vat and tighten thumb screws
Replace the build plate and tighten hand screw
Replace the cover
Shut off power to the printer (back right corner)
Close folding plexiglass cover
Clean up Cure and Wash machine:
Make sure latches are closed on alcohol bin
Put alcohol bin in C+W machine first, and put plexiglass plate on top
Replace yellow cover
Shut off power to C+W (back right corner)
Turn off power strip to shut off ventilation fan