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My Photon just arrived, and I have been testing it out. After about 4 weeks, I finally got a successful print! Any ideas on how to optimize my printer/setup?

Just YouTube your exact printer and you will get tons of set up advice.

To me, here is the order of importance to make sure is set up correctly:
1. Plate leveling
2. Support settings - not only having the supports placed properly, but the settings of the supports to how they connect to your mini, etc.
3. Layer and exposure time - each resin is a bit different, even between colors. Again, forums and YouTube will help.
4. Wash & cure - clean your minis good and do not over cure, as it can make the mini really brittle.
5. Safety and Health - OK, maybe this is more important, but not really part of getting the machine to make a good print.

Have fun!!

The biggest thing for me, was using the Photon File Validator. It tells you which layers have unsupported islands and if it's just a few pixels, it will fix it for you.
With the input it gives you, you can go back and add additional supports where needed.

I also level my print plate after each print and mix the resin with the plastic scraper until it has a uniform colour again.

I design CAD stuff at work all the time, and I found a guide on youtube that is just about the exact tone and style as the various crusty boomers I go to for Solidworks tips.

the first vid is "Why Autosupports Suck" and it's by "3dprintinggenius" or some such egotistical dumb name.

Followed his tips after my first incredible, spectacular failure of a print, and second print came out looking picture perfect.

Boy do I wish the program he uses in the vid worked with the new model of printer I'm using though. "chitubox" seems just a country mile more functional than the photon workshop. Just the ability to edit my supports after placing them in would be amazing - the button for it exists in photon workshop but doesn't seem to do anything!

the_scotsman wrote:
Boy do I wish the program he uses in the vid worked with the new model of printer I'm using though. "chitubox" seems just a country mile more functional than the photon workshop. Just the ability to edit my supports after placing them in would be amazing - the button for it exists in photon workshop but doesn't seem to do anything!

You can always place supports in Chitubox (or, even better, Lychee Slicer), export as STL including supports as part of the "sculpt" and slice it in whatever proprietary gak anycubic uses these days.

The old photon slicer was just a rebranded chitubox from years ago. The new versions of chitu should work with any photon printer as it outputs .photon files. If it's not part of the default supported printers you can easily add the info for it.

I do like ChiTuBox, but do not have experience with others, besides Cura for the Ender.

I did find the support function of the last few releases a bit buggy (1.6 - 1.7?), so whenever I had an issue I would open up in a previous version, 1.5. You do have a multitude of options to manipulate your supports, modify, add, remove, etc. so I never had any complaints.

If you do use the auto-support, just set the density at about 65%, then go in and add the few more you might need - this always works great for me. If you set it too high it places them in a lot of spots that are not needed or funky.

 Monkeysloth wrote:
The old photon slicer was just a rebranded chitubox from years ago. The new versions of chitu should work with any photon printer as it outputs .photon files. If it's not part of the default supported printers you can easily add the info for it.

There is a profile for the Anycubic Photon, but it exports files as a .photon. They upgraded the firmware a while back so that the newer photons require .pws files to print. I hollow and support my models in chitubox, then export to photon workshop to slice. It's not perfect, but it works. As far as I know, Chitubox has yet to add the new Photon firmware to their slicer, which is unfortunate.