I watched Steve Mould’s video of Specular Holograms a while back, and it wasn’t until a cool student wanted to borrow my tabletop plotter to try it that I realized it was within reach. The plotter approach didn’t work, it really wasn’t designed to take the friction of a carbide tip etching surfaces. But its software stack is easily portable to anything with 2 stepper motors and a “tip” based action. So I thought it’d be a cool Christmas project to turn an old Creality 3D printer into something capable of etching specular designs.
And well, the results are mitigated so far, but I’m getting somewhere with a moving glint effect.
I need to tune the machine to barely touch the plexiglass, and figure out model creation. Moving a tip is easy these days, unsurprisingly though there are a lot more intricacies to uncover to get good results.
