Optics specialist Dr. Jeroen Vleggaar used a resin 3D printer’s 405 nm light source to expose photoresist while fabricating two custom OLED devices: a seven-segment display and a fixed text or image display. The printer served as a patterning tool—not as a machine that printed the OLED layers. The account describes a specialized demonstration, not a complete or beginner-ready recipe.
What Vleggaar made
Vleggaar described the project as a return to polymer LED work he had done as a researcher at Philips Research in the 1990s, and as a test of whether he could still make a good OLED. Gareth Halfacree’s Hackster.io article, which summarizes Vleggaar’s video, reports two devices: one displaying numerals on a seven-segment layout, and another showing fixed text or an image. Read the Hackster.io account.
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How the 3D printer did lithography
Vleggaar removed the vat from a resin printer and used its 405 nm LEDs as a photoresist exposure source. Custom STL files provided the patterns. The printer did not deposit OLED materials; it exposed selected areas of resist so that the underlying substrate could be patterned.
Hackster.io reports a printer pixel resolution of 35 microns and characterizes the approach as easy for patterning, but relatively low resolution. That figure describes the printer in this account; the article does not name its model or provide a comparison with other exposure systems.
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Reported fabrication sequence and materials
The account outlines some steps, but not enough parameters to reproduce the process. It reports spin-coated glass substrates that already carried indium tin oxide (ITO), followed by resist exposure and baking. The bake temperature and duration are not stated.
- Pattern photoresist using the resin printer’s 405 nm light source and custom STL files.
- Bake the exposed substrates; the reported account does not give the conditions.
- Develop the resist with dilute sodium hydroxide, then etch with 30 percent hydrochloric acid.
- Use physical vapor deposition for subsequent layers. The named materials include ytterbium and Alq3, or tris(8-hydroxyquinolinato)aluminium.
The article does not specify a complete film stack, layer thicknesses, all intermediate steps, or a full safety procedure. The reported use of corrosive chemicals and physical vapor deposition also makes clear that this is not simply a printer-only project or a low-risk household process.
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Why the displays degraded
The devices were functional but not durable in air. Vleggaar said they still looked acceptable to the naked eye after about 30 minutes, while microscopy already showed degradation. This was an observation reported by Hackster.io, not a controlled lifetime test.
The reported failure mode was the growth of black spots as oxygen and water entered through pinholes in the cathode. The devices were not encapsulated, and the article notes that avoiding cathode pinholes is difficult without a high-class clean-room environment. The demonstration therefore shows that the devices could be made to work, not that an ordinary printer can produce reliable, long-lived OLED displays.
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