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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.
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I don't see why everyone's so fascinated with those extruding printers. They're extremely complex, extremely slow and their output is very low resolution. They have to fill solid parts with extruded material in a zig-zag pattern... takes forever and the output is a joke.
This, on the other hand, almost looks like magic. This thing makes one whole layer at a time with extreme precision. It's also extremely simple in design: a single motor on one axis, one projector and a container for liquid resin.
Compare the output of the two types of machines. If you still prefer the MakerBot-type machines after seeing the video and the photos, please explain because I can't see any reason for the MakerBot to even exist. It's like wanting Windows 3.11 instead of Linux or Mac OS X.
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.
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The problem is you can't make bricks of the same quality as Lego bricks using any 3D printer currently in existence or on the drawing board --- the tolerances simply aren't tight enough --- Lego uses _tons_ of pressure in their molding equipment, moreover, Lego is constantly doing QA on their production and will pull a mold and grind it up to re-use it at the slightest deviation --- the new Lego bricks I purchase for my kids still work fine w/ four decade old bricks from my childhood. Lego's precision for brick parts is something on the order of 2 micrometers.
By way of contrast, the printer which Shapeways ( http://www.shapeways.com/forum/index.php?t=tree&goto=1339&#page_top ) uses as a tolerance of, ``... about .1mm, but the material can change it slightly. Overall, .5 should be fine, just make sure that they are not any sort of support walls or they may get broken during shipping or printing.'' .1 mm == 100 micrometers
If you want to know what its like when the tolerances are sloppy, buy a set of Mega Blok bricks, but even those have tighter tolerance than the tenth of a millimeter which Shapeways quotes.
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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.