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MakerBot Gets $10 Million Investment
First time accepted submitter chrisl456 writes "MakerBot Industries, makers (hah!) of 3D printers / personal fabrication devices, just got a big boost in the form of $10 million from an 'all-star lineup.' Replicators, here we come!"
Hahaha idiot. You can print ABS plastic with these things, for starters. You can make real stuff with them. These will become the next common home appliance. The age of fragile prototypes is long gone.
And corporations will be up in arms. Want Lego? Why pay $30 for $1 worth of blocks when you can print them for a couple dollar's worth of material. Want a body kit or some lightweight/cheap replacement body panels (although even common cars now have plastic body panels) for your car but don't want to pay so much? A printer with a big enough build volume can do that too, and you can get an exact copy of a commercial product. Want a custom computer case or a copy of an expensive commercial model? Knock yourself out. Want some cheap/custom furniture? Plastic built into the right structures can be very strong. See: milk crates. Except it won't look ghetto because that will just be the under-structure of your custom furniture.
This will do for many physical objects what computers did for movies and music - including making it easy and cheap for anyone to produce it.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Uhm, lack imagination much? It's distressing the anti-nerd, anti-tech, anti-imagination tone of a lot of comments I see on /. these days.
Yes the current incarnation is not much in terms of utility - but you wouldn't want to be commuting to work today in the first automobiles either. The notion here is to get the technology out into the hands of a bunch of self-motivated tinkerers and some of them will come up with useful, unforseen ideas. If you're an advocate for the free market, or American ingenuity, then you really shoudn't be taking issue with personal stereolithography.
Funny that you're modded down, your reaction pretty much matches mine.
MakerBot is cool, but pointless and not actually useful yet for anything that matters. The technology just isn't there yet at the hobbiest level. Its certainly out there, just not at the hobbiest level.
Right around 1980 or so you could have said the exact same thing about personal computers, and it would have been true.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
This will do for many physical objects what computers did for movies and music - make non-entertainment companies assume you have stolen from them?
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Additive machining is cute, but not a miracle. It's a slow process.
Sure, but that's not the point. If you need 100,000 greeblies, you can probably afford to have a $100k mould cut for your high-speed injection moulding process. The exciting property of 3D printers is that it's now possible to create plastic (or metal) parts in small numbers.
Printing also has some advantages over the usual machining techniques; clamping is one. The absence of tools means you can create structures that are too fragile to achieve with a milling machine. You can print objects inside one another.
For some industries, the 3D printer is a revolution. I build scale models. Until now, the model kit cottage industry created kits by hand-building a master (a process in which it is basically impossible to get curved surfaces exactly right) and then casting resin copies of it. The 3D printer means that we can create sub-mm accurate masters, or even sell the 3D parts directly (though they still are more expensive than resin cast parts).