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3D Printing and the Replicator Economy
An anonymous reader writes "'Tea. Earl Grey. Hot,' is a command familiar to every Trek fan as representing everyday use of replicator technology. While its use on the show is simply sci-fi wizardry, the beginnings of that technology is now making it into homes, and could spark an industrial revolution. 'New 3D printing and other so-called additive manufacturing technologies are based on methods that industries developed over the past quarter century to rapidly create prototypes of mechanical parts for testing. But as these methods become increasingly sophisticated, demand is rising to use them to manufacture finished products, not only in factories but also at a boutique, one-off level for individuals. ... Already, 3D printing has been used to make tools and artworks, custom-fitted prosthetics for amputees, components for aviation and medical instruments, solid medical models of bones and organs based on MRI scans, paper-based photovoltaic cells, and the body panels for a lightweight hybrid automobile.'"
stock up on bullets EMP's and lasers don't work on them
3D printers have a way to go, but there already have been modeled objects that have received infringement claims. It will only get worse.
On the one hand you have the possible utopia of unlimited "free" stuff.
And on the other, the distopia of companies locking this technology up, and firing (almost all) the workers.
It would be great to believe the former. But a whole lot of people seem to be afraid of the latter.
Is there any unwavering indicator one way or the other?
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
So, when can I download my free car from TPB?
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
And the 3D printer would spit out a liquid almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.
From what I remember replicators converted energy into matter. 3D printing converts matter in one form like powder to a more solid form another albeit it is very customizable in the shape of the objects. To me it's more like assembly than replication.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Can you imagine the kind of virus attacks you will have to protect yourself from?
Beyond a pile of dildos falling out of your inbox every day, you may have to deal with theif-bots, explosives, smelly messes, noise makers, and herbal viagra advertisements. Then, there will also be the polotical campaigns.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
3D printing addresses one component of "stuff". Electronics, servomotors, glass, ceramics, metals, all those are components that may need to play a functional part in anything much more complicated than a Lego brick.
Don't get me wrong: I've been in complete awe of 3D printing since I saw one in 1991 at IMTS in Chicago. They used lasers to spot-harden UV-curable resin, then lowered the support table by 0.1 mm and drew in the next layer. After it was complete, they drained the resin and rinsed the part off. It was absolutely amazing, and that was 20 years ago. Modern additive machines are even cooler, with the ability to combine different materials and colors, making a finished part with a much cleaner process.
But they still have to affordably produce a sufficient number of end-user-usable things before we'll see them in the average home. Need a 100 cc measuring cup because all you have are imperial measuring cups? No problem! Need a TV remote control, or a toaster? Sorry.
John
The natural progression of most products is towards disposable goods. The danger of this generation (and likely the next) of replication machines is that the materials will not have the kind of physical properties that make things durable. Luckily we've been weaned off durable, and now we expect to be able to break most items with moderate human force. And these items will fit the bill in that case.
Making components for system critical or life safety functions, except as en emergency "everyone will die if the part isn't here right now" condition, is a bad, bad idea. Of course, there are too many people in the world...maybe this is just another way to thin out the herd?
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
These guys http:http://www.conformis.com/index.asp/ make knee replacements based off of MRI or CT scans. They exactly match your knee rather than the surgeon choosing from small, medium, or large parts out of a bin.
Amazing stuff.
When was the last time you built your own car? All parts required are readily available.
What percentage of all PC users build their own PC (overall PC users, not /. geeks)??
The thing is, most people don't have patince/skill to build things, and they're better of just buying thigs they need, like TFA says.
3D printing could be the next industrial revolution, but it could also be a niche for hobbists.
A few well timed words from the BBC http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b012r7ty - listen or look. Quite a few ideas and links to follow.
I think people who say 3D printers are "not going anywhere thanks to IP law" are missing the point. 3D printers are for people who want to design and build their own things and less about trying to save money by building your own version of a absurdly cheap Walmart available gizmo. A 3D printer will never compete with Lego as an affordable way to replace Lego's manufacturing capabilities. I have no doubt that these machines will be co-opted for nefarious goals on occasion, but mostly they will be cost additive rather than cost saving or even cost neutral compared to the mark up on a manufactured items.
I have a couple of things I've been wanting to build for quite sometime but I don't have rapid prototyping capabilities at home. Once I get to my local hackerspace and print out a a few prototypes and get the design worked out I'll be having them machined out of aluminum and sell the products. More money will move through the economy and maybe even a few jobs will be created. These may even bring about a renaissance in the small business. Here's to hoping anyway.
There is free 3D software, designs only need to be done once so sharing them online seems perfectly feasible.
I do not think people will commonly own them for the latter reasons, the same reason I do not own a photo printer. Either I could buy a crappy one that costs a lot in "ink" and does a poor job or just hire out to have the part made and mailed to me, like I do with photos.
Haas Automation, the largest automated machine tool maker in the US uses automated machine tools to make more automated machine tools. They use several hundred of their own products on their factory floor. This also lets them test out their product in a real working environment.
Look, 3D printers are cool. They're awesome for anyone who ever wanted to build something quickly. I use one at work regularity so I fully appreciate the technology..... BUT they are just not cost effective compared to mass manufacturing processes.
There are often many different ways to build something in manufacturing. You can machine something, mold something, 3D print something, etc, and many different flavors of each type of manufacturing. It will be 50 years before 3D printing a lego is anywhere near as cheap as just molding a lego if ever. This is the way of things. 3D printing is awesome for doing small custom things and giving you the ability to do stuff that you either couldn't do before or that would take you a lot of time and skill to develop on your own.
Let me give you a simple example. I use our 3D printer to manufacture small plastic pieces used in semi-conductors assemblies. This is not my primary job, just a skill that allows me to get my real job done faster. The size of the pieces I print out are around 2" x 2" x 0.5" or smaller. If I try to mass manufacturer them then I can *maybe* do them around 1 per hour. (I have to fill the platter with say 20 of them and it'll take me 20 hours to complete). This will get me accuracy that is not quite as good as molding or machining, but it's within an order of magnitude.
So, it's not better, not cheaper, and not faster (on a per piece basis). What it gets me is small-quantity-cheap. Custom stuff, prototypes, one-offs, etc. That's it's advantage. AND it can also do some stuff traditional machining/molding just can't do ever. These are this technology's sweet spots. Even if you give the technology 10 or 20 years, you're not going to compete with molding. It's just not cost effective.
Yes 3D printing is awesome. Yes it gives us the ability to prototype stuff in 6 hours or overnight. Yes it's cheap for stuff like that, but it's just not the be-all and do-all that the "tea, Earl gray" line would have you expect. It will be rare that you will save money by printing out your own stuff even ignoring the cost of the machine itself.
d
all language nazi's will burne in heil!
WhyTF does Picard have to say "Tea. Earl Grey. Hot" every freakin' time?
A computer that is sophisticated enough to fly a warpdrive spaceship and replicate food should be able to understand user preferences, no?
Shouldn't he just say, "cuppa tea" or just, "the usual" and get a nice hot cup of Earl Grey?
Only explanation is it's MS Enterprise 5.7 and user preferences are the great new groundbreaking feature in MS Enterprise 6... expected any decade now.
Assuming of course you have the 2000lbs of raw materials to feed into you printer. This is the fundamental difference between replicators and 3D printers that tech articles love to ignore. The replicator (seemingly) fabricated any item out of thin air (yea, there was probably some psuedoscience bullshit explaining this in a reference manual somewhere). But in real life, you're always going to need to feed in the raw materials. And it will always be more convenient to buy a car than to buy palettes of steel, plastic, rubber, copper, etc.
Picard's Star Trek post-dated Douglas Adams' take on the replicating tea machine, which was a sadly far more likely outcome than the Star Trek ideal.
hey, we're talking about the 24th century here. maybe Picard prefers his Earl Grey as almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea :)
A far more interesting exploration of replicating technology within the home was in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age. Although aspects of the exploration within that book went somewhat esoteric it did at least give a hard sci-fi contemplation of the impact of the technology, instead of using it as the background to space opera.
/. and literature, a strange but fitting combination... another nice novel about the possibilities of a self-made/replication-tech society is Doctorow's Makers.
I agree that there are serious technical hurdles to get over before these could possibly be revolutionary to the average person, and those hurdles might never be overcome.
However, I feel it's worth mentioning that your entire post could have been written about computers at any point from the 1940s until the mid-1980s, and they turned out to be kind of a big deal after all.
I always though that replicators essentially recycled everything for raw materials (and maybe had a cache of matter stored somewhere on board in case that wasn't enough). I seem to recall scenes in TNG where crewmembers put their dirty dishes into replicators and they were de-replicated (presumably for recycling).
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
They are just about the most boring technology we have today. They will not revolutionize anything..
They already have. Surgery (by modeling from MRI scans to get a better look before surgery), surgical replacement (custom-made joint replacements), product design testing and visualization (i.e. make a shoe or a skateboard; I've considered using one to make the plastic housing for a particular bicycle light), architectural modeling (quick and easy way to go from the CAD design to a model: much less time and labor).
Biotech has focused on using similar techniques to construct organs and such from tissues, with limited success. Forensics has found the use of image analysis software helpful: one can scan a bunch of pieces of a fragmented object and have the computer emit a physical model of the original undamaged object.
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Do you remember the first computers? You could spend 20 minutes loading a simple game from audio tape on a Commadore PET, only to have it fail the checksum. The audio was 'beep'. The displays were black and green, or awful CGA black, magenta, cyan and white, or black, red, green and yellow. The printers used thermal paper and had a tiny resolution. It was grim, but it was fun too for some of us who could see this as the first glimmers of a new universe of possibilities from a machine made not for particular purpose, but to be capable of doing an unknown nearly infinite set of things. Meanwhile the press said 'you can store recipies on these things', and 'they can remind you of diary appointments', and the average user wondered what the fuss was about.
The RepRap is like an X-Y plotter with a glue gun. It will produce arbitrary but rather wonky shapes with glue gun drool. It is pretty limited in materials. If you say "Faberge Egg" and hold out your hands, you will be disappointed. But it is affordable in the way the early computers were if you were a dedicated hobbyist, such as you may find in the the Slashdot target demographic. There are machines that can manage more materials and higher resolutions, but they cost much more. We got nice looking color pictures on our computers in the end. In time we shall get nice, smooth, hard (or soft) objects from our 3D printers. The press says 'you can make tea with these', and the average user wonders why on earth they should get excited about one. But those who understand what they are now, and also what they will become are excited.
Not interested? Well, the Internet is big these days, and I am sure you will find the lolcats, tubgirl, furry porn or whatever it is you are looking for. But the Internet was small once, and we had a lot of fun watching it grow. These are going to be interesting times for 3D printing, and we are going to have ourselves some fun all over again, and the Grinch himself cannot stop us...
Interestingly there is at least one company building one-off houses using a 3D printing-style device --- out of concrete:
http://www.physorg.com/news139161727.html
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Well according to the publisher of Forbes the price of 3d printers has fallen by a factor of ten in the last five years, which seems to fall pretty squarely within Moore's Law and hardly seems to be "behind the curve of technological process."
Sadly i can't seem to find any exact timelines of price/performance. (Does anyone else know of one?) I don't want to just appeal to authority, but he at least actually provided figures while all you've done is trash talk the technology. So until i can find some figures to confirm or deny the claim, or unless you can refute his figures, i'm going to have to go with... you're incredibly wrong.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
News articles of the "fluffy kind" do a disservice to people who want to know the truth about "3D printers".
The total cost of a rapid prototype or pre-production part can work out efficiently, but you need some critical items.
1. The "real" 3D model, sized for the process and the end use is needed: Functional differences will exist in the best machines depending on how the models are oriented & built. Hire a designer or get your own 3D modeling & CAD/CAM software, learn it & use it and the cost is anything but trivial. Usually at least $5k not counting your time, unless you get an educational discount.
2. The "good" 3D printers to make strong usable parts are typically SLS laser sintering machines that sinter plastic or metal powders in an inert atmosphere. You do NOT put one of these at home, unless you are Steve Jobs. Figure $500k for a good one.
3. Even the "good" parts from SLS machines often need machining and surface finishing to keep them from looking cruddy and having sizes that make fits come out wrong. I have personally spent 5 hours finishing a small RP modeled part so it would function as intended. It makes for REAL expensive parts.
The only way to keep costs down for good usable "3D printed" parts is to use a Rapid Prototyping job shop and hire or be a good designer yourself.
I think that printing parts could contribute to repairing things again. We used to do that in the 1950s and the 1960s, but now we throw away as the default settin, especially when we don't have a part.
I'm currently missing some simple valve components in the hot water system in my appartment, result the whole valve needs to be changed, what a waste. The current set of printers won't solve this [because it needs solid metal for the part] but they're edging towards it with sintering and laser shaping.
Of course this requires some sea-changes in our culture and economies too, maybe that's the hardest part. Perhaps we should 3d print some new leaders and politicians?
On y va, qui mal y pense!