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How Open Source Hardware Is Driving the 3D-Printing Industry
TheNextCorner sends this quote from ReadWriteWeb:
"Open source software has been a key player in all kinds of disruptive technologies — from the Web to big data. Now the nascent and growing open source hardware movement is helping to power its own disruptive revolution. ... As 3D printing, powered by Arduino and other open source technologies, becomes more prevalent, economies of scale become much less of a problem. A 3D printer can print a few devices — or thousands — without significant retooling, pushing upfront costs to near-zero. This is what The Economist calls the 'Third Industrial Revolution,' where devices and things can be made in smaller, cleaner factories with far less overhead and — significantly — less labor."
Currently, the cost of materials for most 3D printers is quite high. That makes 3D printing uneconomical for most purposes.
The other problem is that most useful things are made of more than one material. Consider even something as simple as a toaster. It requires a good conductor, a resisting conductor, an insulator and structural material. So, even something as low tech as a toaster is well beyond the ability of 3D printers to make at all and especially to do so economically.
Is there an open source hardware specification of a 3D printer?
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
The loss of jobs need not be a bad thing in what is quickly approaching a post scarcity society. Ultimately, perhaps even within the next few centuries, we're going to see a situation where the abundant resources in our solar system are harvested and processed by mostly automated engines, providing an excellent (upper middle class) quality of life for everyone on earth. There is no physical reason why this should not be the case.
Pollution and environmental concerns would be very minimal with adequate management, energy is abundant, and if anything providing a good standard of living reverses population growth.
The main difference between that and today, other than a general longer, healthier, better life, would be the types of toys you get to play with if you excel. Obviously not everyone can have their own private ocean liner, there's only so much ocean, so artificial scarcity will need to be introduced by either fiat or economic acrobatics. Overall though we are I believe on the cusp of a golden age.
first, yay for democratizing production. As long as patents and copyright do not get deployed to nuke this into the history books.
second, oh crap there goes the economy. This because the basics of the economy is production > wage > consume > production. Fully automating production disrupts this.
Check out RepRap and MakerBot
It's still at the prototype making level though. 3D printing gives you free complexity, but it's very slow. You can lay down layers of plastic, melt or glue powder together, or cure resin into the shape you want. The benefits are there's very little waste material compared to normal manufacturing. The cost is generally in time. I can print a part that uses $2.00 of plastic but that much plastic will take an hour to become something.
Still once you have a 3d printer, you build a few more and the economies of scale become more or less how many 3d printers can you operate?
It's still not mass producing - it's custom desktop fabrication. It's like laser printing in the 80s... very slow but nice quality. So in the near future it's still mostly for prototyping or small scale runs. Once your design is perfected you would still use that to create your master mold and mass produce the regular way.
The open source aspects mean that the entire field is advancing steadily forward. Open Source isn't really breaking new ground in technology, but it is making everything easier to build and cheaper if you've got the time to build it. Just like open source software.
When 3D printers print other 3D printers, that would be the "Third Industrial Revolution".
3D printers have indeed become more prevalent, and economies of scale might emerge for raw materials and the printers themselves -- but certainly no economies of scale for devices printed on them in sight just yet. Ask anyone who has built or used one if they would be ready to print "thousands" of devices without "significant retooling", or if current 3D printers are able to replace more traditional manufacturing processes even for small batches. Current open-source 3D printers are nice, but are prototyping tools only. Even qualifying them as "rapid prototyping tools" often seems stretching it to me right now. They do allow for rapid-cycle prototyping, though.
A poorly written summary that does not bring anything new that has not been discussed many times here since 2005.
It's a hobby for creating plastic toys. Even industrial rapi prototyping is only used for test models, as 3D printing is unsuitable for mass production of reliable objects.
...but that's about it in my experience. We had some disappointing results with 3D-printed components at work: they had poor mechanical properties and were permeable to water. We now use a rapid CNC-ing firm (http://www.firstcut.com/) that can produce one-off components cheaply and get them to us inside 3 days; plus they have a fantastic range of proper materials (ABS, nylon, aluminium, etc.). For the time being, we're staying put with CNC.
I'm currently working at a start-up co-working space and this one guy who got rich from a business he started up decided on a whim to buy a makerbot without even knowing exactly what to use it for, so now it's just sitting here and I'm having a field day. This thing is totally awesome :D
As more and more 'grunt' jobs are being replaced by machines, more and more folks do what they're 'supposed" to do: go up the "food chain"; which means go to college for a white collar job. And we know what's going on with that.
But what happens when all the menial jobs are done by machine, everyone who is able goes to college and goes into the labor force - and you have this mass of humanity that wasn't able to get a college degree for whatever reason? What to do with them?
Or let's say you have a mass of folks, who rightfully go into a field with better than average job prospects - like medicine - flood the market with workers there?
Retrain? Only to flood another part of the labor market with workers? This is what's happening now in a field. Between the economy and kids seeing what happened to all those 'Russian Lit' majors, many many went into nursing and now there's the worst job market ever for new grad nurses. Will it get better? Eventually - but not until all these unemployed, underemployed and current nursing students get employed.
In short, we're coming to an age when we're going to have a lot of folks who have no work. There are 7 Billion people on this planet and there aren't enough - and I don't see how enough can be created - jobs higher on the 'food chain'.
We have an economy that works only if there's consumption. And to have consumption folks need to be able to make a living. If we have less work because of machines, there is less ways to make a living. Less folks work, the less they can consume, The less they consume, the less production happens, The less production, less workers - and less machines. And round again.
You can only go so far up the food chain because the 'food chain' isn't that large and the 'Chain' is really a pyramid and the higher up the pyramid, the less room there is up there..
I've had waaay too much coffee.
can now be printed by anyone, anywhere, with a gadget that sits on their desk.
instead of having to trash the toaster and buy a new one, or find a used one on ebay, or go order one for $20 + shipping + processing from some faceless megacorporation that probably doesn't even realize it makes toasters.
You're correct about less waste and such but you used the wrong time scale. The reason I say that is look at the complexity of the parts in an iPad. Each part takes time to construct so I'll ask you this set of questions.
When you actually break it down, there's far more then an hours worth of time invested into the manufacturing of many products today. Only the cheap injection molded stuff can be mass produced in less time. A good example is a custom machine shop. Job cost are based not only upon setup time, that depending on complexity be a couple of days but how long it'll take to complete the production itself. Of course they include things like material cost along with payroll and profit but the key thing is that each and every job takes time as the material can only be worked so fast before you begin damaging it.
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
we already have abundant resources being harvested and processed mostly by automated engines. for example, wheat is almost entirely processed by gigantic computer controlled combines.
and yet there are millions of people starving in places like ethiopia (still).
if robots are harvesting material it doesnt really matter unless you actually own a robot, own the land they are taking the material from, etc.
look at what is going on in spain .50 % unemployment for youth. the hyper efficient society doesnt necessarily mean that that efficiency's products are spread around. it more likely means that a massive number of people will be considered 'superfluous' and essentially placed in an 'apartheid' system. think of great britain in the industrial revolution , and what it did to ireland (mass starvation, mass forced emigration, etc)
And not just because, well, civilization has collapsed.
See a big revolution (the first industrial revolution?) was through interchangeable parts. That's what (I've heard) gave the Union armies such an advantage over the Confederates, if something broke you didn't need a skilled craftsman to repair it. Just replace the broken part.
With custom made items from 3D prototypers everything will be unique. If civilization breaks down (no Internet!) being able to find the plans (or getting them scanned) will be much more difficult. Probably doesn't rank up there with water, food and shelter but it might be a serious impediment to recovery.
By the way, if I'm correct about the first industrial revolution, was the second one caused by the assembly line? Or am I completely off (from what most people think). Was the first caused by something like steam power and the second by electricity?
Our ability to create machines is far more advanced than our ability to deal with the human condition. At this time the notion of people prospering without hard work threatens the psychology of most people. Imagine people living at a high standard that need not labor or invest at all. Imagine your pay checks being issued by the government and taxes being assigned to the units of production that create the goods rather than to the public. Then imagine the strife and fighting over who gets to be free of labor first which is the flip side of being into forced retirement. One history teacher covers all grade school history and the class is pumped to every home by cable. The school building becomes an historic oddity. The school bus forgotten in time. All of the custodians and trades people who support a traditional school vanish. The entire educational industry almost vanishes and that is just one arena. Already truck drivers and taxi drivers are at risk of being eliminated by robotic drivers and the trend is poking all of us in the eye and yet no one sees it happening,
Debates about free markets, socialism and communism become unknown as the very notion of economies is twisted out of recognition. Do not assume that the lower positions will be hit but not the upper crust. Medicine and law could both be adapted to machines. The nurse at the hospital may become a rather high speed robot. This is gathering speed and social institutions need to catch on and figure out how to deal with it.
The first real spoiler might be a computer system set up to be a self owned corporation such that when the machine invests and earns all of the earnings are spent improving the power and abilities of the machine. Since 100% of returns would be folded back into the business there would be no taxes due and as the machine gathers strength no human centric company could ever hope to compete so that an entire industry becomes dedicated to providing funds to self investing machine corporations. Future shock may be like a canon in ones' ear.
so... here is the situation.
globofucker incorporated decides to almost completely monopolize the gadget_x industry, buying up competition, selling off entire factories, firing thousands of people, then jacking up prices, and most of all
introducing 'planned obsolescence' into their production process. i.e. they make crap thats supposed to break.
you can see the results of this by visiting any apartment complex dumpster on a weekend morning. vacuum cleaners are a particular favorite - you'd think that after a 100+ years of development, capitalism would have produced the finest vacuum cleaner in existence.
instead, it is actually producing WORSE vacuum cleaners that break more quickly than ever before. my parents had a metal vacuum cleaner that lasted for 50 years. meanwhile the average vacuum you buy in a store now will cease to function within 5 years or maybe a decade.
in otherwords. this stuff about 'durability' and 'reliability' doesnt matter anymore -we live in a world where it is profitable for corporations to produce unreliable, undurable garbage that breaks all the time so we have to buy more of it.
this is where 3d printing is having its first successes. you can go on thingiverse and find knobs and buttons for various appliances and gadgets - knobs and buttons which were obviously designed to break or designed without thought as to durability.
instead of having to throw out your old gadget, which is the dream of the finance people working inside FuckemCorp, you can now keep it running for a few more years.
From my website: http://pdfernhout.net/
In brief, there have always been five interwoven economies, and the balance of them changes with technological changes and cultural changes:
* A subsistence economy ("There's some lovely berries over here.");
* A gift economy ("The meat from this deer I hunted is going to spoil; I'll share it with the tribe, and others will share their hunting results some other time as they have in the past.");
* A planned economy ("Let's put the longhouse here. I'll cut the trees, you level the ground, you over there will put up the walls, and you over there will cook us some food while we are busy with these other tasks.");
* An exchange economy ("You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. I'll trade you some of my extra berries for some of your extra deer meat.");
* A theft (or conquest) economy ("What's yours is mine because I'm stronger, cleverer, sneakier, or can afford better lawyers.").
Paid human labor has less and less value due to several causes including:
* robotics, AI, and other automation,
* better design,
* the accumulation of physical infrastructure,
* relatively cheaper energy (which can often substitute for human labor), and/or
* the emergence of voluntary social networks.
So, we can expect the balance between those five interwoven economies to change as our technology and society changes, perhaps with:
* A subsistence economy through 3D printing, gardening robots, local PV solar panels, and other local clean energy technologies (like cold fusion or something else);
* A gift economy through the internet, like sharing digital files to use with our 3D printers or gardening robots, or coordinating the movement of free goods like through Freecycle;
* A planned economy on a variety of scales, including through taxes, subsidies and regulation affecting market dynamics;
* An exchange economy marketplace softened by a basic income; and
* Minimizing the impulse to theft (or conquest) and related violence through the previous four changes.
The particular balance a society adopts is going to reflect the unique blend of history, culture, infrastructure, environment, relationships, mythologies, religions, and politics of that society.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
How Open Source Hardware Is Driving the 3D-Printing Industry
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How Open Source Philosophy Is Enabling the Commercialization of 3D Printing
The market need for rapid prototyping with 3D printed parts is "driving" the industry. The technology is enabling the market to grow because of its use of open source hardware, and software. So, to summarize: Need drives, Technology enables. Necessity is the mother of invention, remember?
A dedicated machine for producing something will always do it cheaper and faster than a more flexible multipurpose machine.
That factory can use cheaper techniques and cheaper materials, for example making toy soldiers out of injection moulded polythene. And due to economies of scale they could sell them to you, and ship 'em to your door, for less than you'd pay for your feedstock.
Of course it will have higher fixed costs too. But if you're producing a large enough quantity that amount tends towards zero per unit.
Sure it's not necessary. It's just more economical for anything other than really small production runs.
This doesn't matter if it's a hobby. But if you're claiming this is the third industrial revolution I'm calling bullshit.
If those articles are ones that could be mass produced, it'd be cheaper, easier and probably quicker to just buy go out and buy them.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Then we adopt a non-market economy. Make basic welfare available to anyone and give college graduates some perks. Problem solved.
Of course, it's never that easy when it's time for changes, but I doubt it's going to be anything worse than any other regime change in the 20th century. It's not like we would need to wage wars for resources.
This has been done before, albeit under different code names. One, that I lived through, was called communism.
Everyone was equal, had enough money to buy a house, car, weekend house and everything that was produced by the factories and farms owned by the community.
It was working so well, that not even democracy, or elections were needed. It was a well oiled machine.
There were some problems with human shortcomings, like greed for example. The people who wanted more. They became our leaders and we compensated them with bigger houses, bigger cars, the right to travel to the evil capitalist countries and the power to control the military, just to name a few.
There were also people who were not ready for this idyllic way of living. Who pointed out issues with our leaders. They were obviously mentally unfit, and, with great regret, they had to be disposed of. For this purpose a giant meat grinder looking machine was built at the bottom of the Internal Ministry's building, located on the banks of the river Danube. The unfit was quietly ground up into fish food and ejected into the river through a pipe.
There were other experiments, like the Peoples Temple, unfortunately that had to be shut down by dispensing spiked grape flavored Flavor Aid to the members.
But hey, next time, it will work.
Seriously, stop using isometric views. That's not how the real world looks like.
There's a lot of other machines out there. On the CNC side there's the Mantis, a small desktop-sized milling machine for making circuit boards but it can also cut foam, wax, chocolate, etc. Most people seem to drive their Mantis with motors and electronics made for RepRap printers.
There's even a milling machine made out of standard LEGO parts (aside from the milling bit). It can mill 3D shapes into floral foam.
Need a stronger, faster mill? Build Your Own CNC Router has a lot of information, so does CNCzone.com.
The RepRap and other low-end 3D printers are toys. I see those things at TechShop all the time, but they're rarely used. All they can do is produce plastic trinkets.
Around $50K, the machines start to get good. Shapeways makes usable plastic parts. What the industry needs is a $2000 machine that really works. There's slow progress in the industry; 30 years ago the high-end machines were as crappy as the RepRap.
All these processes are incredibly slow. As in hours for one small part. It's inherent in laying down a 3D part in thin layers that it will take time. That's why Shapeways charges about $50 for a 1 ounce part. Injection molding is orders of magnitude cheaper and faster. This technology is not going to replace mass production.
I took the plunge and my Mendel arrived from RepRap Pro this week. I'm still putting it together, but it's not planned for mass production, it's going to make prototyping dead simple. I also plan to output some of the 3D CAD designs I've been working on so I can get a feel for form in my hand.
I chose this model because it's upgradeable to three material nozzles in future, has a lot of thought behind it and they encourage you to join in and help improve the design.
Every thing should become free. Unless there's human labor involved there's no reason to charge for it. Besides, who ya gonna pay? The machine?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
The point of 3d printers... make no mistake, within the next 10 years 3d printers will bring about the downfall of some very heavy industries.
Yes, right now they're limited, most people who would build such a thing (and i am one) are going to print things in (not that cheap) plastic but we already have printers capable of printing many different types of materials (including conductive) and in 5 years, those reprap's will be something there will be very big lawsuits over. Much like the digital media industry, the industry will have to cope with the change, they might win a few lawsuits, but they'll ultimately have to adapt. Consider what a 3d printer will give you in a couple of years:
- glasses (possibly even the lenses for them)
- fixtures (lights, power points, cases, things that other things hang on - this list is endless)
- crockery (plates, etc - theres no reason you could extrude a clay or clay substitute thats safe to eat off/drink from)
- Phone cases
- its hard to actually come up with a decent list thats compelling cause its just so wide ranging
With a minor amount of electronics, you can add to this:
- phone docks, keyboards, stands of so many different varieties, control devices....
Who'll benefit form this? The people who get on board... the guys who go "hmm, im just gunna make a iphone dock interface you can print an object around rather then making an entire iphone dock" - thats the industry of the future boys - selling electronics that you put inside objects people can 3d print... there isnt one yet, but mark my works, and heed this well as a prediction - in 10 years, this will be a major (or at least up-and-coming) industry. We'll even see a regulation and dmca like laws come into effect.
But look around you and take a SERIOUS look at the things around you and think, how many of these items could be printed? you'll be blown away by the things you could easily replace with something you can print yourself. The sad fact is people dont really notice until you have one, then you look around and see a whole bunch of industries destined for the scrap heap as people start printing their own items rather then running down the shops to pick one up.
sitting in front of me, i look and i think "my mouse, my keyboard, my glasses, my 3 hard drive cases, my phone stands, my mouse pad, my cup and the spoon thats in it. all my pens (sans ink)... i could go on".
The point is, the point people miss, isnt that 3d printing an object is in any way, shape or form more economical then buying the mass-produced equivalent. The point is that i can "have it now" (and have it my way)... much of what we do now and what the internet provided (and what content producers have fought hard to stop) is the "have it now" philosophy. Thanks to scale, prices of printing an object will go down, very far down. PLA and ABS (the main things people tend to use with the repraps) arent cheap, but that'll change. 3d printing isnt about "hey, new mass manufacturing process" cause its just not economical at that and never will be, its about not needing one in the first place, if everyone has a 3d printer (or access to one), whos going to make phone cases when people can just print their own?. The secondary point is you can build things you just cant buy or easily make or you can take a phone case and customise it. I dont know how many times i've wanted a lather or a router or whatever and even then thought "i probably wont be able to make it anyway"... well now i can and easily.
So right now you can do one of two things, look at 3d printing and see its potential or go "meh" and you'll miss out (even if missing out is simply the opportunity of being involved), but i believe that 3d printing will be one of the biggest and most disruptive techs to hit the world and when it does hit with full force it'll be one of the most important things we'll see - possibly even more important then computing. My point is make no mistake, what 3d printing can and will do will change life as we know it in
Ultimately all manufacturing will be "3d printed", eventually...
The only question is what is going to stop people from downloading an iPhone from pirateBay, and printing a copy.
And what will happen when the technology matures to the point where you can print out a gold bar?
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Oh, great. A 3D printer with DRM copy protection. "We have a very robust and advanced security and anti-fraud system that protects your creations at all times."