CHITUBOX Helps Tipsy Producing 3D Printed Bluetooth Hi-Fi Earbuds

3D printing continues to grow. It has been positively changing various fields, like figure making, jewelry, and dental industries, and demonstrated its huge potential with its increasingly extensive application in our daily life.

CBD-Tech has clearly witnessed these changes, as we are the solution provider in this industry with nearly 7 years of resources and experience. Around the Spring Festival, we visited the Bluetooth earbuds manufacturer Tipsy, and learned how they use 3D printing to produce customized earbuds. And CHITUBOX, the data preparation software developed by CBD-Tech, also helps them optimize their workflow, reduce costs and improve production efficiency.

Earbuds are an important role in the consumer electronics world. There are a wide variety of ways to produce them. The traditional one is injection molding. And besides this, there are also other common processes like lathe, CNC, casting, resin casting, die casting, powder metallurgy, and more.

But in recent years, wireless Bluetooth earbuds have become popular all around the world. And a lot of custom demands have appeared from this huge market. Traditional production processes seem to be unable to satisfy them.

Before using LCD 3D printing, Tipsy had been relying on resin casting to produce earbud housings.

This process exploits the characteristics of UV-curable resin that it hardens when exposed to ultraviolet light. And it goes through the following steps: you make an earmold, wax it, and cover it with agar to create an earbud housing mold; then you pour the resin inside the mold, cure it with UV light, remove the uncured resin to get the final earbud housing.

There are some drawbacks to this process: first, it is hard to generate the complicated custom interior design, which makes it more difficult to install parts inside quickly and improve sound quality; second, it takes so many steps to finish casting that it lowers the production efficiency.

So they turn to something that can easily overcome these challenges -- 3D printing. One of the greatest advantages of 3D printing is that it easily outputs tailor-made designs. It is the solution to Tipsy's pain point.

In 3D printing, data preparation is an essential step. The tool Tipsy uses is CHITUBOX. Its powerful and easy-to-use support editing feature helps Tipsy generate the right support structure for the earbud's unique shape. The supports are also stable enough to ensure printing success and ease of removal. When they have been removed, the model only needs some simple polishing so they can be put into the ensuing steps.

Also they can copy models in CHITUBOX by simply clicking the Copy button. And the Auto Layout feature can help them increase the utilization rate of the platform, maximizing the efficiency of a single print. These are in fact favorite features of the users that print small or dental models.

Using 3D printing, they can design the interior structure at will, making the installation of the inner parts much easier. In addition, they have more freedom to improve the sound quality. This is achieved by customizing the sound tubes of the earbuds -- they can easily set the tube to any size and length, which is a great influencing factor for sound.

What's more, the simple process of 3D printing makes it faster and easier to produce earbud housings. And the products are highly consistent in shape. This allows for the process to have a higher yield and be more standardized.

In fact, in the early stage of integrating 3D printing into their process, Tipsy had tried various printing devices and materials, only to discover that none of them can satisfy their special requirements.

In the end, they decided to design the printers on their own using the chitu systems hardware, and mix the resin themselves. These largely speed up the printing process (printing 35 housings in over one hour) and save the trouble of coloring the housings (the resin they mix can have various colors).

The abilities to perfectly work with chitu systems hardware, efficiently process model data, ... These are all the reasons why Tipsy choose CHITUBOX.

In the future, CBD-Tech will keep improving the chitu systems controlling systems and the CHITUBOX software. With these efforts, we hope we can bring better experience to the 3D printing users.

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