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Cheap 3D Fab Could Start an Innovation Renaissance
blackbearnh writes "An article over on O'Reilly Radar makes the argument that, just as inexpensive or free software development environments have led to a cornucopia of amazing Web and mobile applications, the plummeting cost of 3D fabrication equipment could enable myriad new physical inventions. The article was prompted by a new Kickstarter project, which if funded will attempt to produce a DIY CNC milling system for under $400. Quoting: 'We're already seeing the cool things that people have started doing with 3D fab at the higher-entry-level cost. Many of them are ending up on Kickstarter themselves, such as an iPhone 4 camera mount that was first prototyped using a 3D printer. Now I'm dying to see what we'll get when anyone can create the ideas stuck in their heads.'"
I need to apply for patent lawyer school, pronto.
"What? They want $50 for that part?? Screw that, I can make it myself for $10."
And thus, a new legal conglomeration will be formed, akin to the RIAA and MPAA, but this time to sue people for owning fabrication gear.
There's a spot in User Info for World of Warcraft account names? Really?
+1 Informative, if only because I've never been bothered to make out what Rick Astley was mumbling between choruses.
From TFA:
""everyone should have one" category, and out of the "gee, I wish I couple afford one" tier."
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
Autocad, the only fully featured program I've ever encountered that works well with 3D manufacturing devices, is still $4,000+ dollars.
This is like the AutoCad is like the Photoshop to Gimp, in a manner of speaking. Yes you could probably find a free alternative that does what 60% of the people would use it for, but there is a reason Photoshop is still around, and a reason why both Photoshop and Autocad can charge ridiculous prices.
This is the cheapest path for a CNC and 3d printer in every home.
I have done quite a bit of research on it and it's competitors (Zen Toolworks CNC, Mantis CNC, Makerbot, Cupcake CNC) and none lead to a completed kit for this low of a price without serious time investment, trial and error, and knowledge.
twitter.com/gravitronic
While at first, at least, the open-source tools will tend to be more primitive and gimp-like, I think it's highly likely that (for instance) SketchUp and others like it will, as a response to the demand for good CAD software, become more functional.
And on the other end, AutoCAD and Catia and their ilk would be foolish not to release 'hobbyist' licenced versions at lower pricepoints. Perhaps older versions?
The motto for this particular nascent movement could well be "Si Factis, Venint"--"If you build it, they will come"
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
To being able to 'steal' the neighbors BMW.
With a relatively modular design, it would be simple to interchange the drill for a 3d extruder.
This would then be able to work as a 3d printer like the Makerbot, or RepRap.
twitter.com/gravitronic
Wow. A 3 digit UID troll being made fun of by a 4 digit UID. Isn't /. great?
"Dude, you need to download this CNC file, man, wait 'till you see what it does!"
Downloads file, begins printing...
And a tiny mechanical Rick Astley begins to sing.
"Haha, good one, man, good one. Pretty funny. But wait 'till you see what I found! No, seriously, it's not Rick Astley."
Downloads file, begins printing...
A large mechanical penis appears, gyrating suggestively.
Yes, I would really like to see those ideas that are stuck in our heads. The "creativity" will be truly inspiring.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Finally every CS student can bring their time-honored declaration into tangibility!
It's always confirmation bias!
If the ability to copy information is any indication, there are powerful people who are going to work very hard to make this sort of thing illegal. Unfortunately, they will probably succeed here, given the requirement of specialized hardware.
Great Intellect...
How long before someone creates a tiny singing mechanical Rick Astley and names the file "NakedAngelinaJolie.cnc?"
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
And the customized sex toy industry takes off!
I'll just wait until I see The Story, or DiaB is released.
Yes it is.
Other than maybe "it's already packaged".
Search Google for "Home Made CNC". People have been making these out of OSB & plywood for a while.
Here's a pretty nice one using an off the shelf router.
Hack a day has an article from 2008.
Another.
They do require some technical knowhow. But that's about it. I think the most basic use parallel ports for IO.
As someone who works with CNC machinery on a daily basis as a manufacturing/mechanical engineer, having a cheap low cost DIY desktop CNC would be incredibly useful for home usage. However, this will be limited in it's capabilities. Cutting metals like aluminum usually requires coolant or else the material will melt and jam up inside of the flutes of the tooling. Steels can be air cut with the right carbide tooling, but I don't think this machine will have the structural rigidity required to cut steel. Generally the rule of thumb in machine design is to make your machine as heavy and rigid as possible. There is a good reason why these machines aren't cheap.
Something like this will probably be useful for cutting plastics, wood, and maybe aluminum if your willing to mount a cooling and reclamation system. Also this system will be SLOW most undoubtedly. However it will have it's uses. Cutting HDPE to make molds for silicon casting would be one, great for modelers. Precisely making printed circuit boards would also be another useful feature. Drilling wouldn't be too bad as long as the machine has enough torque. I think something like this would work well with one of the homemade 3D printers such as the MakerBot or Reprap.
I'm very curious on my end, might end up building one if I can get my boss to let me utitlize company machinery to make one.
The real barrier to entry with these systems is finding someone who can design it in the computer. Or, having software that is simple enough that the end user can do with little training. I'm pretty well versed in CAD but moving to 3D is quite a step. Usually these programs assume an extruded material, which is then carved out, using logical operations. I think using real world tools - planes, knives, sandpaper (for smoothing) etc would translate better for the user.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Many of them are ending up on Kickstarter themselves, such as an iPhone 4 camera mount that was first prototyped using a 3D printer.
Next step: mount your iPhone 4 onto the prototyper as part of an automatic 3D scanner and duplicator.
This has nothing to do with Ab Fab!
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
Your head is a horse-cock dildo?
Remember to maintain your supply of
The Fab Labs program, spun out of MIT's Media Lab, is a champion of the overall approach of individualized production. It is a beautiful conceptual framework, and they have created a large number of labs around the world. Please have a look if you haven't investigated them, they are doing some wonderful things.
So let me see if I understand this, the thought here is that I donate to fund their building a product they will sell?
Why in the hell would I do that?
If the plans were FREE, that might be something, if the software was FREE that might be a reason, but to me this looks like asking me to invest in their company without any possible upside for me.
It's using a dremel as a tool head. It is not going to be easy to square it. Its going to be an open loop CNC. Maybe they should just make a kit to fit a grizzly mini mill?
It's easy enough to build a crap CNC mill, but not very useful. This one is made of wood, and the bridge isn't even cross-braced. It's not going to be stiff enough to do decent work. Just because the cutting tool is a Dremel tool doesn't mean you can skip on rigidity. Dremel used to make a drill-press rig for their tools, and it wobbled so much it was useless. And that was just drilling. In milling, you have side loads.
Little CNC mills have been around for years. Roland makes a nice little one. The usual little mill is a Sherline, and those can be equipped for CNC, although it's a retrofit. A Sherline can mill aluminum and mild steel. The MicroLux, at $499, is about as low as it gets in milling machines that can cut metal. That's not a CNC machine, but retrofits are possible.
These guys aren't the first to propose building a toy CNC mill. The Art Institute of Chicago has a little wooden CNC mill. And unlike these guys, who are peddling vaporware, the Art Institute machine exists. The Art Institute machine can be made from flat stock with a laser cutter. It can't mill hard materials, but if you're just making models of designs to look at, you can use various easy-to-mill foams, plastics, and waxes. A slightly bigger wood CNC machine is at Build Your CNC. Those are all proven designs.
Hype about CNC milling seems to be highest among people who've never used a milling machine. CNC mills are great devices, but they're not magic. The smaller machines don't cut very fast, the cutting tools are expensive, the process is messy (if you're cutting metal, you're constantly pouring coolant on the cutter, and in high-speed machines, the coolant flow is garden-hose sized), and for complex objects, clamping the work out of the way of the cutter is a hassle.
If you want to play with CNC on line, download the demo version of VCarve, which is a CAD/CAM design tool for 3-axis milling machines. VCarve will give you a sense of what you can and can't do with a 3-axis mill. VCarve can simulate the cutting process in 3D and show you what the finished part will look like. There's a really impressive solid modeling engine inside that program. VCarve (the pay version) will output the files to drive a CNC mill to make the part.
At the high end of CNC, there are 5-axis machines with tool changers, and software that can use all those features to full advantage. Watch this demo of Hypermill driving a Daishin 5-axis mill. The software package alone for that costs $20,000. The software figures out which tools to use in what order, and how much clearance is required to get the cutting head near the work. That's approaching the "replicator" level of CNC.
Now what would be interesting is to put a Dremel tool on a multi-axis robot arm, with force feedback from servomotors and Hypermill-like smarts. That would allow real 3D work, not just top-down 3-axis work. Most of the dumb 3-axis machines use steppers, so they don't know how much load is on the structure, and can't compensate for deflections under load. With servomotors, the software could compensate for some lack of rigidity.
Buy a pen-knife.
Larn to whittle.
Get off my lawn.
Its pretty cool, and written up here: http://nilno.com/
Here is an example of what happens when you have an idea stuck in your head, and you have pencil and paper at hand: YouTube - Doodling in Math Class: Infinity Elephants
And here's what happens when you have the same idea and a 3D printer on hand: Vi Hart: Blog: Entry
Just drawing stuff and 3D printing stuff because it's nifty. This is one of the places where awesome things come from.
But to actually take a working machine to market, especially one driven by steppers, is not so easy. I have watched dozens of guys try this in the past 6 years, but these guys came the closest.
http://www.probotix.com/FireBall_v90_cnc_router_kit/
I have one of these and it is a very clever design and seemed to be about the best deal around when I purchased it -- http://bluumaxcnc.com/BluumaxCNC.html
Not gonna happen. Just like cheap digital audio gear didn't cause an audio Renaissance and cheap video gear didn't cause a video Renaissance.
Creative people create despite the cost and obstacles. Lowering cost and obstacles doesn't cause more people to create, it generally just creates more mediocrity. Like YouTube.
Just my opinion.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
Just 8 lines of lousy poetry is all the words it takes to make a hit song. I find that interesting especially since there are so many hits out there with far fewer words than this, even. It never ceases to amaze me how simple and simpleminded hit pop songs, even the really catchy ones, can be.
Rocking-horse?
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Manufacturing at your home... Think it, design it, have the hardware make it.
I've started building my own 3D printer, and want to do some DIY CNC equipment (lathe, mill, etc.) also. I'm glad to see the CNC world active in the DIY area. (Not yet started down that path, but making plans for it.) There's a growing number of 3D printer parts suppliers like makergear.com(mendel/prusa), makerbot.com(makerbot) who have various company/community supported support options, almost 24/7.
Is there a decent list of suppliers/DIY'rs for that sort of thing in the DIY CNC arena also? Or is that still a growing market not yet filled?
I see a number of replies to OP akin to "oh great, now there will be a new legal group trying to stop me from printing sporks."
What do you think has been happening for the last decade? There's no money to be made in fighting music pirates. Legal groups are trying to stitch up the rights to digital media and digital rights, extending copyrights and patents, and generally trying to make sure that when 3d printers come they'll have all the associated actions, rights, and empowerment neatly sewn up. That is worth a hell of a lot more than some band's playlist.
It's like the writing's on the wall and we're standing around laughing at their caligraphy.
Public Knowledge just did a nice report about the coming collision of intellectual property expectations and 3D printing/CNC: It Will Be Awesome If They Don't Screw It Up .
I've seen these inexpensive little machines, and I think they're too persnickety for real use: sure, you can get decent models out of them sometimes, but it takes skill and luck and persistence. But their bigger buddies can make some really nice stuff: solid, clean surface finish, etc. I'm just waiting for someone to start a chain of 3D printing shops where you can bring your CAD design in the morning and come back in the afternoon to pick up a copy--just like the copy shops that started springing up in the 1970's after photocopiers got cheap enough.
I just love it when this word is used correctly as an adjective.
If you want to find out what's going on with people creating 3D works that are meant for 3D printing/replication, and what the implications of copyability are, check Bathsheba Grossman's work:
http://www.bathsheba.com/
Maybe we can get her to make a comment on cheap duplication. I think she's already getting some effects from service bureau-level duplication (Shapeways).
Despite all the noise about 3D prototyping, what really works well is making stuff out of flat sheet stock. Milling is slow. Stereolithography is slow. But laser cutting, plasma cutting, and water-jet cutting are really fast ways to make shapes from sheets of material. So there are getting to be lots of projects that involve flat pieces cut from plastic or wood. It's also really easy to create patterns for cutting machines - it's just line art.
At TechShop, the stereolithography machine isn't used much, a small number of people use the CNC milling machines, and the 3 laser cutters are constantly busy. Most of the laser cutter files come from Corel Draw.
Now get back in the Corral. And don't forget to take your dentist friend with you.
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
Why use a useless cheap home 3d printer. When you can have your models manufactured on a number of different high end machines for cheap !
http://www.shapeways.com/
These guys are amazing. They can capture the finest details and manufacture in metal, plastic, glass etc...
I thoroughly recommend.
On my PCB isolation milling machine, the spindle takes about 20 secs (including home-position time) to change - in fact I've just done it this very second [grin], I happen to be routing out an RJ45 module.
.0002").
The machine tracks to a known position and slowly lowers the drill down to the PCB, stopping when the drill just touches the copper - it uses an electrical connection (copper plate is ground) to figure out when it touches. That gives me the resolution of the stepper driver (0.005mm, or approximately
It uses a similar technique to measure the imperfections of the copper-clad FR4 board before actually doing the isolation, building up a 3d map of the surface, which it takes into account while milling - that really helps when you're milling out a 6-mil gap between two 6-mil traces, and you have to take into account the angle of the cut of the drill-blade (60 degrees, or 90 degrees) and the depth of the corresponding cut into the copper, so you don't mill away too much. You also need a *really* fast RPM spindle (mine runs at 60,000 RPM) to only cut away what is necessary under those exacting conditions.
The machine is an EverPrecision EP2002. Fantastic machine. Lousy customer service - they won't upgrade my software because I bought it from the *previous* dealer (!). Luckily, it just takes G-code over a serial port, so on my list of things to write is a gerber-to-gcode translator that calculates which tools to use and what the tool-tracks are. Oughtn't be too hard. Just need to get around to it...
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
3D fab is the first step for the eventual singularity intelligence to be able to generate its own robots.
-- Betting on the survival of the media industry is a serious risk. I advise investing elsewhere.
The only thing preventing an innovation renaissance is patent squatters and trolls; this is ironic, because patents were meant to promote innovation.
Look again. The gantry (bridge) IS cross-braced and there is a metal base version offered.
Now we can have pirated 'objects'. So now i don't have to steal my friend's widget that i cant afford and can just copy it. just like copying music bits.. no harm no foul.
I can see the ip/patent wars over this: "We have the patent on a sphere... "
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Looks like its about 400. From what it looks like in the drawings, you would be hard pressed to make anything out of something 'solid' and are stuck with plastics and woods. It also may just be vaporware " we have to have x dollars by January or we call it quits". I think it will be more of a toy than anything else.
If you want to actually do something like this you can get an small 'tool shop' sized mill and convert it yourself for under a grand and cut real metal with it, today.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Look again. The gantry (bridge) IS cross-braced and there is a metal base version offered.
The verticals which support the bridge are just flat sheets of wood, forming a parallelogram. If they bolted some angle irons on the side, that might help.
A possible future metal based version is vaguely talked about in their FAQ, and there's a rendering of it, which is basically the wood version with different shading and a base made from square tube stock.
Small CNC mills still cost too much, though. Decent desktop manual mills start around $500. CNC ought to add $200 to that. But servomotors are expensive, and controllers are worse. I was talking to a Maxon Motor rep at a trade show, when they'd introduced some motor controllers. He said they got into controllers because the motor and the controller cost about the same to make, but the controllers were selling for far more. Encoders are also overpriced, especially considering that older desktop mice have two of them.
Are these the tests of some sort of genetic trolling algorithm?
404: sig not found.
We've had this for over 40 years. It was called a Mattel Power Shop. There was no revolution then, and there won't be one now. You can't possibly stockpile all the chemical feedstocks required to make usable products. It's a hobby, that's all it'll ever be. It won't be this big, great revolution. And can we stop calling things "3D" now? EVERYTHING is in 3D. You don't see me calling my breakfast 3D. Can we just stop with the hyperbole and look at things rationally? I know that's asking a lot from a bunch of Space Nutters, but COME ON.
I work at a CNC company in Peoria, Illinois called Probotix. I'd be most pleased if you'd all check out the good work we do towards this kind of kit. I'll let you make your own decisions and not do too much more astroturfing.
Cheers
As many point out, it would be great to print out some part. But as others point out, you'd need to have the design first.
Once these printers become popular enough, there will be a demand for 3D scanners (which will make 3D printers even more popular). 3D scanners may not be perfect (especially considering shadows), but they'd still be useful.
Another problem might be the hardness of printed parts. I think blueprints will often require parts that differ in hardness/rigidity (yes, yes, I know many of you are now thinking about toys for teenagers, but seriously).
So at some point (probably before scanners become commercially available) printers will be able to accept different printing materials (different polymers?).
I work at a CNC company in Peoria, Illinois called Probotix. I'd be most pleased if you would all check out the good work we do towards this kind of kit. I'll let you make your own decision and not do any more astroturfing.
(pardon an earlier, similar reply I did not mean to make as AC)
Here's a little CNC milling machine kit for only $210. All metal, and strong enough to mill 3/8" aluminum. Motors not included. Motor sets of varying power are available. Motors start at $18 on eBay, and for about $250, you can get a complete set with a controller.
There are a lot of home-made CNC mill videos on YouTube.
That's a 3 axis device. For some 3D printing technologies, 3 axes are enough, but for milling, you need at least a 5 axis device for reasonable 3D fabrication.
...but I won't.
Stephen McGloughlin is a technology consultant in the Sacramento region of Northern California and a Dean of Technology at a local college. His background is in engineering, electronics and software and includes Intel, Microsoft, NEC, HP, Sandia National Labs and Olympus among his many clients. He is a published technology author for Prentice Hall and QUE, and holds a software patent with University of California Davis.
People are free to disagree with my stance, but hey...
anyone who actually works in industry knows that already, today, rapid prototyping is having an incredible, astonishing role in reducing lead times and costs I was just on a project with a plastic widget that would have taken 3 weeks and 100s of dollars to machine; our partner made a prototype in 3 days (1 day to turn the rough drawing into a Solidworks drawing for our approval, two days to ge that into a tool path, make the part, and get if over to us); we evaluated it, suggested some changes (one hole turned out to be off by a few mm ) got another one two days later,... we could do 4 cycles of refinement in 3 weeks, and most of that time was because I didn't get around to testing the part, not build time We now have a beta to take to customers; we could do a rapid molding (protomold - check them out, I'm a customer; you get good injection molded parts about 3 grand for the mold and a buck or two per part) but it was easier to 3D print 100 parts precision in any system, whether it be 3D printing, CNC maching, requires that something move with a precision commensurate with the precision of hte finished part, eg if you need a hole on your car windsheild wiper nozzle that is 0.1 +- 0.01 mm, then something needs to move with resolution and accuracy of ~ 0.001 mm if you do this mechanically, with stepper motors and linear slides, it is still $$, esp in 5axis of movement. There ae cheap steppers, and gear belt (rubber belts with teeth) but those are sill $$ unless you get heal volume (the miracle of an HP printer is not that it does things with near micron precision, but that it does micron precision for a few bucks - that takes a lot of design and vol) If you do this with some sort of light feed back system (like STM heads) still a lot of money
most of the other objections on this thread show a lack of reasonable extrapolation, eg the complaints about materials - when HP or Epson thinks they are going to sell 100 million 3D printers a year, cause kids are using them for school projects, or people use them to make models, the materials will become available For instance, if you now plastic, you know that additives, like glass fibers, can impart a lot of stiffness; so you could imagine a 1,000 dollar 3D printer with 3 "inktanks" one with standard polyolefin like material, and one with stiffener, and one with hardener; you could drill and tap the hardened spots post build
Or, you could have two machines each 1,000 bucks - a 3D printer and a 4 or 5 axis CNC jobber
or you could have std metal parts (star nuts) that get embedded inthe plastic and allow for subsequent attachment of metals (eg, you have a simple 3D arm that puts a metal nut, with flanges for grip, into the part as it is built; you can use the metal nut to attach stuff on the built part
Cory Doctorow's book 'Makers' has a lot of content about these kind of machines. Worth a read if you're interested.
I have seen almost exactly the same device sold on ebay including shipping from china for $450!!!
Why should this guy get $15k of funding to sell something no different to what is already available??
If it was a new design with something novel and useful it would be worth funding but there is nothing new in it!