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What's Holding Back 3-D Printing
An anonymous reader writes "An article at MIT's Technology Review makes the case that the complexity of the design tools behind 3-D printing are what's holding it back from widespread adoption. Many of the devices are indeed prohibitively expensive, but the inability for your average person — or even your average tech hobbyist — to pick it up and start experimenting is an even bigger obstacle. 'That means software innovation could be more important to 3-D printing than gradual improvements in the underlying technology for shaping objects. That technology is already 30 years old and is widely used in industry to create prototypes, molds, and, in some cases, parts for airplanes. ... Although additive manufacturing allows for designs that can't be made easily in any other way — such as complex shapes with internal cavities — so far, companies have mostly used 3-D printing to create prototypes or models of familiar products.'"
Tech sites like Slashdot are ignoring innovations like 3D printing, bitcoin, Raspberry Pi.
I don't really want a reprap or similar printer. The print quality is too low. And the cost of the high end machines is prohibitive.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
What's holding back 3-D printing is that it's only good for making plastic crap.
Doing something useful, like replicating a new carburetor for my 30-year-old roto-tiller, is more difficult and more expensive.
Patents will kill 3D printing before it ever goes "mainstream". You will NEVER go to best buy to pick up a new 3D printer cartridge. We are too stupid as a civilization to not kill this technology in the crib.
try printing anything with some volume to it and it gets expensive real fast.
the properties of the materials are not as good as what is available with subtractive mfg.
Really. What am I supposed to do with this thing? All the stuff people sell from these devices are little trinkets and jewelry. I don't need a 3D printer to get that kind of stuff cheaper. I thought I'd see this used more to make custom enclosures for projects, but I haven't seen much of that.
$299 price point for a basic one (get them later with the cartridge refills just like with inkjets), stock them at Best Buy and make a TV commercial showing all the cool shit you can print. That's how it normally works, right?
Buy your next Linux PC at eightvirtues.com
What's holding back 3-D printing is that there's hardly anything worthwhile to be done with it.
Other then printing an AR-15 lower receiver or magazines what can you do with a 3-D printer that's worth the bother?
Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
The software. Do these things even come in working order? Or do I need some 3rd party software...that costs a grand? I just dont have the time to figure it all out....so who cares?
Really, 3D printing is a new fad but the amount of useful stuff one could do with it is pretty small. Usually, people say "my own Lego set" and "plastic toys". And that's about it.
Call me when 3D printers learn to print with metal.
As long as the raw materials are priced in tens of dollars per kilogram, printing out random stuff is always going to be too expensive. Really, it is bulk plastic. It should be priced nearer 40 kilograms per dollar than 40 dollars per kilogram.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
It's over. Can we please something else to hype now? Asteroid mining has maybe a few more months left in it before it becomes obvious to even the most delusional sci-fi geek that it will never happen.
General competence in use of 3D design software is only critical to the ubiquity of 3D printing because everything that someone might wish to construct will be affected by intellectual property law: if someone else was granted a patent or copyright, then they can demand payment for use of it. Since especially at this stage that payment demand is likely to be unreasonable and excessive, the average person whose 3D printing needs are personal and not entrepreneurial has two choices: either pay the excessive IP demand or simply do without (or find some other traditional means of meeting the need). Most people are likely to choose the latter, at least for the time being.
If, on the other hand, a small few who are highly competent in use of the design software were to create a large body of fully open-sourced designs, or at least ones priced reasonably and fairly, then the vast majority of people interested in 3D printing could simply use those designs rather than being forced achieve that same competence and each create their own designs... and potentially reinventing the wheel repeatedly in the process.
The way this process actually plays out won't be ideal by anyone's ideology. It will be a series of rather ugly compromises that, like most everything else, will wind up disproportionally benefiting a minority, but even that minority won't benefit as much as they'd like.
Manufactured goods are just too cheap. Compare and contrast this with the computer revolution. With an early home computer and some programming knowledge, you could write a word processor, a game, music software, unusual "demo" art, or any number of other things that had never existed before.
With a 3-d printer, you can make inferior plastic versions of things that already exist.
OK, you could make cool demo art with a 3-d printer too. There's some potential there. Of course the problem with that is that my house is already full of... cheap manufactured goods. If I don't like a demo on my PC, I delete it. If I don't like a sculpture, I have to recycle it or put it in a landfill or something, and I paid money for that plastic.
In short, the 3-d printer has the potential to meet a need that's already being fulfilled; but to do so in a way that's less convenient, more expensive, and less durable.
When they make a unit that requires very little, other then inputting what you want printed and putting materials in it, then it probably won't get that widespread adoption that the big corporations think is necessary to make a profit.
And if you all you can think of as uses for it is to make legos and toys, then I'm sorry for you. I can think of hundreds of useful things it can print for around the home. And even more for the home hobbyist.
Be seeing you...
The cost of materials is the real barrier to entry for total cost of ownership for the best technologies like SLM/SLS (Selective Laser Melting or Selective Laser Sintering) Even though many of the raw materials base products are low cost like glass filled nylons, steels, etc, the powder mesh requirements are so small that production methods to make these raw materials into proper powder mesh dimensions is the real issue. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4odUhDjKHzo
Materials cost and specialty status is also the barrier to other technologies like polyjet and SLA where the polymer materials are UV cured and require high tech chemical production plants to make the raw materials. Polyjet also has a high amount of waste materials used in a catch can to keep it's print heads clear throughout it's build process and so far this resin is not reusable. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nlq4Nm254fM
Another factor is cost to operate. Some have calculated that to start up a large SLS machine filled with metallic powder including the energy to start up etc, it requires quite a large amount of capital to justify it. Upwards of $2500-$5000 depending on the material. Not to mention the machine itself that can cost upwards of $500,000 for a large SLM/SLA
Extruder based 3d printers are far too slow, inconsistent, and expensive to recommend to anyone other than an enthusiast. You have to learn the 3d design software, slicer software, and then spend a few hundred hours getting to know your printer.
If you're building prototypes or something, they can be a useful alternative to subtractive machining. They can not be used to replace an existing plastic part without a really good 3d scanner, and far more tweaking than most people are willing to endure.
Some day non-trivial parts will emerge from these things in sub-workday time frames, without the need for constant nursing, but that's not here yet.
The quality of the produced items is a long way from injection molding and likely will be for a long time, if not always. It's simply not possible to create something smooth, shiny, and strong like the latest iDevice using extruded plastics. Even after plenty of sanding and filing.
I've been using printed parts for mechanical mock-ups and prototypes for years. The tech has improved, but we always switch processes for delivery, and not for cost reasons.
Making your own Lego? Hardly. That would cost a fortune and probably wouldn't survive more than 3-4 (dis)assemblies.
I hope for a breakthrough butnim not holding my breath.
A friend of a friend made this:
http://www.printcraft.org/
Make something in minecraft on this (free) server and it emails you a 3D printer file of your object when you disconnect.
The notion that consumers will one day be able to customise 3D designs on their computer screen and print them at home is fanciful. Anyone who has tried to teach/learn three dimensional geometry can tell you that 3D hurts the brain. We don't even see in 3D. The retina is 2D and we have some vague conception of 3D. Close your eyes and consider for example the intersection of two ice cream cones. What does this look like? Is it ever an ice cream cone? Going beyond this, there are geometric phenomena in 3D that have no analog in 2D, which we don't naturally perceive, The problem is that we design in 2D, our mind's eye is 2D, our experiential perspective is 2D, and our design technology is 2D. Our perception of 3D are essentially some sort of projections of 3D Objects. It took painters centuries to even conceive of this. (Of course, you can train your 2D mind to design 3D objects , but basically you've got to be a specialist. For these designers, why would they choose 3D printing, it looks like a lathe tool to me but you are restricted to the material you can use. )
We really just don't need that much plastic crap. I mean sure, you could print a replacement thirty-cent plastic O-Ring for your vacuum cleaner or something, but really you could have just driven to the hardware store and got one of those. I have seen some fairly nifty artistic uses for them, but it's just not something the average Joe needs to be able to do right now. Maybe when we get to the point where we can print organs with them and I can print a new liver every week, it might be a different story (And a body-zipper for easy organ access! Yeah!)
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
-The hobby community is still using EXTRUSION-BASED PRINTERS. Absurd.
-Every-day users don't know CAD. How are they supposed to print something if they can't even design it?
-"Everything has been done". Seriously though - if there's something obvious, it's been built. 3d printing is mostly just good for prototyping. Existing manufacturing technologies can bring the price down for anything in quantity.
Been using 3D solids for rapid prototyping new medical equipment for over 15 years.
Job shops can make your parts quickly and relatively inexpensively compared to other machining and hand working methods, so that part is OK for prototyping and functional parts that can stand being done in the limited rapid prototyping materials & processes available.
Skills need are the understanding of the design of physical parts with all the subtleties and the desire to learn to use a competant 3D solids modeling environment. You don't walk in to this expecting a familiarity with PowerPoint as enough skill to do the job.
Competent 3D solids software from the likes of SolidWorks, AutoCAD or other similar programs start at about $5,000 per seat and they don't become highly usable until you get near $10k. It easily takes 1000-2000 hours to become good at doing 3D modeling, assuming you are already familiar with design and 2D CAD.
There are 3D solids RP machines in half a dozen types and you can't afford to buy them for hobby uses. Stratysis laser sintering for Nylon, SS & Titanium type things cost more than a Ferrari, so forget it, unless you are Jay Leno.
Hobbyist RP printers are just that. It is like the difference between a go-cart and a McLaren F1.
Each printer does only 1 or 2 material types, each with its own characteristics that can be good for some uses and not so good for others.
Soft elastomerics & elastomerics on hard plastic can be done on Objet machines and they are very useful for mocking up co-molded parts that would be produced by multi-shot injection molding later. They can look nearly like finished molded products.
Strong Nylon parts can be made in Stratysis laser sintering machines, but the layer thickness, dimensional accuracy and fuzzy surface of finished parts can result in a lot of cleanup hand work to get a decent part.
For snap fit parts there are some newer materials that act more like Polypropylene now, but there are still limits to judging "feel" from RP parts because the surface finish is not like molded parts at all.
No RP machine produces the equivalent of injection molded parts that I am aware of.
You have to dive into the real world and get hands on to be able to get familiar with and judge the real world conditions of the various RP materials to find out what you can and can not do.
It's not being held back, it just can't match the unrealistic hype that has grown around it.
The funny thing is the hype is along the lines of "flying car" impracticality instead of some of the utterly amazing things that are actually being done, especially with biological materials. It looks like printing working nerve cells is not far off which creates medical possibilities that the magazine and blog writers pushing the hype have not considered.
There's only so much that can be done with plastic and sintered metal powder that is as full of holes as swiss cheese (unless there's other steps later), but that's not all this fabrication method can do.
A worthy goal would be to make a 3D print process that creates other 3D printers, then let everyone have a chance to create.
Once you get familiar with 3D solids and RP printers, what does it take to get a custom box with a lid and latch as someone above considered?
You have to model up at least 3 pieces and how the fit, hinge, lock and go together. Been there, done that and sometimes that is 10-20 hours if there are subtleties you must develop for sealing, locating, strength, draft & such.
Then you email the models to your contract job shop RP modeler. His guys evaluate the models and may let you know you have defects in the 3D model and ask you to fix them. More modeling. Then you send them off they quote and if it is shoe box sized, you pay by the cubic inch and machine time, so don't be surprised if the RP machine takes 8 hours for the parts and costs you $1000.
I personally would go to K-Mart, The Container Store or Home Depot & find a stock plastic box.
Companies do not want a tool that can disrupt their control on any sector.
Most Flatbed Scanners by makers like HP still have the same painfully slow scanning speed for ~ 15 years already. Some other minor makers have fast and better scanners, but those are not common in retail stores and are available mostly online.
The same reason will cripple the 3d Printers. i.e. due to influence from the industry giants, 3D printers will end up with limited capabilities to limit their usage under the excuse of IP.
This is the exact reason I haven't picked one up. I can make and use a vacuum former. I can sculpt, and make castings. All of these things are easier for me than working with the current set of 3D printers. I'm sure I could learn to work the thing, and make the programs, but it's just not worth my time, when I can do it the old fashioned way faster. Not everyone is a programmer. If the interface was slick and easy, I'd cough up the cash in minutes. I've been watching the progression of these little things for ages, and would love to have one. However, even my most tech savvy buddies have to spend more time trouble shooting than making. Hell, even the Mojang guys were tweeting about a new 3D printer, and damn if they didn't have to trouble shoot, and replace a part straight off. So the article is right. It's not the $2000 that is holding me back from buying one. It's the learning curve, and the inhospitable user interface. I may be a techy artist, but I'm an artist, not a programmer.
Many of the devices are indeed prohibitively expensive, but the inability for your average person — or even your average tech hobbyist — to pick it up and start experimenting is an even bigger obstacle
Hold up for a second there.
I'm pretty sure that the "prohibitively expensive" part is the bigger obstacle.
Even if the printers were free and the software was perfectly consumer-friendly, the cost of maintenance, materials, design time, and printing time would still be steep for something made from cheap plastic.
The dude needs a permit first. and then look out!
I used to be
There's plenty of hobby gun makers around. I used to work with a guy that tested brass tubing, and he made some to the rejects into cartridges for his one inch smoothbore "Brown Bess" lookalike that he had built as a breech loader, even if it looked like a musket. He had to get a different gun licence to the usual but the Australian government didn't have any problems with him making it and owning it.
Lack of color.
Lack of cheap integrated 3d scan/create device.
Of course business will go crazy when this is invented.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I am convinced that 3D printing is a niche market, I would say that until 3D file generation become as easy as operating a camera, point and shoot, most people will ignore 3D printing. It has been shown that people would like one or two 3D printed items, but why have a printer to print items that are cheaper off the shelf, or fill rubbish bins with failed prints from under powered computers, poor 3D modelling, or corrupt files?
People assemble 3D objects all of the time, they don't need a printer, they have hammer and nails, file and drills, knives and scissors, they don't need a printer. That's part of the issue, we think that a 3D printer opens a new world, and in some areas it may, but many areas are already covered by artisan crafts.
Besides, who wants the smell of ABS drifting through the house? (my Makibot is on order, for printing custom buttons for my wife)
There was an unknown error in the submission.
almost a year now, on and off. Here are my comments...
Trying to use Arduino Mega2560 controller board with RAMPS 1.4 and LCD/encoder/SD card reader and Marlin firmware has been a nightmare of surfing through thousands of posts on dozens of internet forums to try to get info on how to get the compiler to run, what needs to be modified in the firmware for my machine- no documentation but the often cryptic comments in the source code.
The latest, greatest firmware, Marlin, was developed using an old version of the Arduino-0023 IDE and cannot be compiled on the latest Arduino IDE. The old IDE attempts to define the "round" math function that is already defined in the AVR-GCC compiler, so it will not run unless you comment out the "round" function definition in the old Arduino-0023 IDE.
Next, you have to modify the firmware to fit your machine- it needs to know things like steps/mm in each axis, how big is the print bed, etc. How do you know what needs to be changed? Read through the poor comments in the source code because there is no other documentation, or start hunting through forums. Just figuring out the logic for the endstops is a game of trial and error even though proper comments or better yet, a manual of some sort telling what the defaults are/mean and how to change them, would be a huge help.
Once you get he machine running, there are about 50 variables in the firmware that can be used to tune its performance, if you can figure out what they are and how they affect the print results.
Open source is a nice idea, but I'll take thoroughly documented, reliable PIC hardware and IDE over an Arduino any day of the week, but I'm getting off topic...
Using a printer is a whole different set of problems. Unless you just want to print other people's designs, you need to create a 3D model, requiring knowledge of CAD software. Once you have the model, you have to slice it up using yet another piece of software and requiring knowledge of intimate details of the printer's mechanical, electrical, and thermal characteristics to get maximum quality results.
I used to use PCB milling machines in the 90s and processing the files for cutting a board was a major PITA back then. Here we are 15 years later and the software situation hasn't improved. Until someone integrates the model creation, slicing, and printer control software into a single package and makes it easy for almost anyone to use without a lot of special knowledge or training, 3D printing will remain a hobby for hard-core geeks.
When people get excited about 3D-Printing, it's because they are envisioning Picard saying "Tea, Earl Grey, Hot", or because they picture themselves inventing a thing that solves that problem that's always annoyed them, or because they see themselves upgrading the plumbing, wiring and gadgetry around the house. Or they're a parent with delusions of making cool stuff for their kids.
Then they find they have a friend who already got a 3D printer and discover that with do-overs and experiments, it costs more - in time, money and hair - to make whatever it is that you want to make than it would to just go take James Dyson to dinner and see if he would make one for you.
3D printing is not taking on because people have cognized that it's in it's infancy, pathetically pointless and utterly wasteful of time stage.
Affordable, extant desktop 3D printing lets you make PROTOTYPES, moulds, plant pots and coasters. It's useful for NOTHING unless you have some skill/talent as a design engineer (I don't!) and it also turns out that you kinda need to be a cad/graphics artist if you want a remote chance of designing anything that won't end the way of a digitally conveyed gorignak.
Today's 3D Printing tech is to accessible, open-source, desktop manufacturing what the IBM 402 is to accessible, end-user open source software development.
-- A change is as good as a reboot.
even the best stuff if fairly fragile to a machined part, so really what good is it at this point to mass produce 99$ 3d printers to make a do-dad, when the do-dad can be fractured by minimal mechanical stress?
Wall St which controls all money is scared to death of 3D printing upsetting their entire apple cart of investments in the current cheap labor manufacturing and transportation model. 3D printing, if widespread will devalue those investments faster than "they" can recover "their" money. Also, even though evil cabal's like Disney can DRM their 3D images, there is no way to stop similar likenesses or extract payment.
Changes is a bitch.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
most people really fail badly with it, but as its the whole point of 3d-printing to be able to model your own stuff I see why many people would fail. I myself am pretty good at it (considering that I built counterstrike maps back in the days), but even so when I tried to use blender I gave up because its just a too strange world.
There is a new titanium power which will make the process much cheaper too.
http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21571847-exotic-useful-metals-such-tantalum-and-titanium-are-about-become-cheap
OpenSCAD seems to be relatively unheard of, but just what I needed for getting a couple of bits 3D printed (and one milled from metal).
Red to red, black to black. Switch it on, but stand well back.
It is the software. Skeinforge and pronterface, which is what I use for my Solidoodle, look like high school programming projects from 1995. It is too difficult to do simple things. For instance, this morning, I was trying to figure out how to print without a raft (the bottom layer touching the pad). I'm still looking how to do it. It should be a simple check box in the Options dialog.
As for 3D printing, it will take over just like regular printing. I am already printing replicas of lost and broken pieces around the house. Instead of throwing things out, I can print a piece and give a toy or other device a new life. It is also spawns creativity. My 8 year old daughter has learned Sketchup after seeing my printer in action. Her first project is to print furniture for her doll house.
Once these devices are able to print metal and ceramic, brick and mortar hardware stores will be obsolete.
I don't know how it works in the US, but in France 3D design of industrial parts is taught in high school provided that you choose a technical course.
Part of my baccalaureate grades depended on how well I could use solid works and frankly it was not that hard. My point is: it is not that hard to do as long as you have the right tools. The problem is that the right tools are freakingly expensive.
I've been experimenting with 3D printing, and my observations agree with TFA.
For starters, 3D CAD is difficult. Designing a 3D object on a 2D screen with 2D controls (mouse) is a lot to get your head wrapped round no matter what. You need to be able to translate between 2D and 3D. Having experience in drawing or creating objects (sculpting, model building, anything) helps.
Second, 3D CAD software is a mess. Simple programs are too simple: you quickly run into the limitations of programs like Sketchup and AutoCAD 123D. Complex programs are expensive and require training, or are free and require more training (Blender).
All of them have odd limitations. Try subtracting two shapes from each other. Sounds simple, no? Forget it; it works sometimes, but other subtractions convert your model into a mess of triangular fragments that takes hours to correct.
All too often, CAD programs can't create a true arc or circle, but approximate them with lots of straight line segments. This will come back to bite you in the ass later on.
There's a whole category of CAD programs that you shouldn't use (surface modelers) because they create lots of problems when preparing the CAD file for 3D printing.
(third) Then there's the software you need to prepare the CAD file for printing. For some reason, 3D printers care about the normal of a surface. Why should that matter?
At this stage, you'll find out that your carefully-created CAD drawing is full of problems: holes, degenerate faces, etc. Your preparation software can often fix this, but at the cost of having to learn another language (Meshlab, I'm looking at you).
Oh, and those straight line segments? Thanks to those, a simple cone shape consists of 100,000 tiny triangles, and Shapeways has a 10E6 triangle limit, so you have to simplify your model (preferably without sour simplifications becoming visible).
(/rant)
When you succeed, there's a big reward. Seeing the 3D drawing you created from scratch come alive as a plastic object is very satisfying. But it is a steep hill to climb.
If the little bricks didnt cost $5 each to make
Most people are consumers, not producers. Why BOTHER.
NOTHING!!
Have you seen the grow graph of any 3d printing association?. They are exploding with exponential grow every single year. Our group has rates bigger than 100% so nothing is "holding it back". Prusas, printrbots, Ultimakers, Makerbots...Have you seen their grow rates?
What hold back 3D printing for 30 years was patents, as patents expire, some of them last year, or some soon in the near future, prices comes down, and consumer adoption comes.
Because if 3D printing really was just a matter of going to Walmart and buying a 3D printer for $80, a 5kg sack of pellets for $50, and downloading a 2GB RAR file of 10,000 fun pointless things to print, global warming would become a minor nuisance in comparison.
I think part of the problem is that a hobbyist's prototype is also (usually) the final product, and therefore the parts have to be strong and look nice. Often 3D printing -- especially that available the hobbyists -- can't provide sufficient quality. Whereas a manufacturer doesn't mind if their prototype is fragile or a bit rough-around-the-edges, as long as it works well enough to test.
So 3D printing, as it currently stands, has more applications in industry than at home. Hopefully that will change as printers get better and cheaper.
So until the average consumer can buy these kind of printers at a normal price, and can see practical use for them, I don't see 3D printers taking off very much on a consumer level. However anime figurines are printed in 3D which is pretty neat but the figurines also still cost over a hundred dollars a pop. So even though 3D printers are used to create products at a fraction of the price, they still cost the same as they always have. Shame
What's holding back 3D printing is that the companies making the machines are either rinky-dink startups who make machines for hobbyists or they are 3D printing specialty companies that make very expensive industrial machines. When a consumer products company like HP (remember what they did with laser and ink-jet printers), or one of the Japanese camera companies gets into the business and mass produces machines that are easy to use, reliable, and cheap, they will start showing up everywhere.
With regards to manufacturing, 3D printers are slow. If you want a plastic doo-dad you wait for anywhere from several minutes to several hours for it to finish printing. So if you need a million plastic doo-dads, a 3D printer doesn't look like the way to make them. But just imagine there are a million identical, reliable, easy to operate HP or Canon 3D printers out there, all networked together. Now if someone needed a million plastic doo-dads they could be produced overnight by putting all those machines to work on them (we'll look at the distribution problem later) at the same time.
So how do you get people/companies to buy 3D printers and put it in their homes/workplaces? By offering a way for the machine to pay for itself by allowing it to be used by other for mass production purposes. You buy a printer for $1K, and allow it to print other people's stuff for $ when you're not using it. Maybe the company that makes the machines leases time on the machine to you and puts the machine in your home for free.
How do those 1 million doo-dads get where they need to go? The data that is sent to your machine for 3D print is also sent with a 2D printable shipping label to affix to the envelope/box, and a pickup is automatically scheduled. Yeah, I know it doesn't sound very "green"- thousands of guys in brown pants picking up parts at a million locations. It's not. But neither is any other way of making a million plastic doo-dads in short order, yet they get made all the time.
My company has over a dozen 3D printers in the our design office in SF and our manufacturing facility in Shenzhen. They range from $250K professional units to $1K consumer models. I've seen the progression from old 2001 models to the the state of the art models purchased this year. We actually produced several iPhone case/adapters in the past. It's a small company, so we all helped out by testing different case designs.
The first round of testing involved a simple case design utilizing all of the plastics and printers that we have available. Most plastics were too brittle and would crack when you snapped them on the iPhone. In fact, only 1 ABS was usable. The consumer models had a hard time with the curved surfaces and felt much grainier in the hand. But once I tried out the final soft-touch part that was produced using injection modeling, I would never go back to the 3D printed model. The difference it feels in your hand is night and day. Oh, and the mass produced cases cost $.10 per unit. I think we spend more on packing than parts themselves.
3D printers are great for prototyping and hobbyists doing 1-offs. But the tech has a way to go before being useful to the average consumer and software has nothing to do with it. I don't see this changing anytime soon, unless a need for cheap plastic figurines sweeps the nation.
The stonecutters
The cost of materials are WAY too expensive.
I'm a 3D modeller and work with this for a living, and the thing is...if you buy a printer today, you can get it almost for free, but as you know, there really are no such thing as a free lunch, the only reason you get the printer thrown at you - is because the manufacturer wants you to buy printer cartridges that cost up to 4 times the price of the printer, and you'll run out of them fast because todays cartridges are chipped and holds a VERY small amount of ink.
There will be no difference in the 3D printer industry either. ABS rolls of plastic are sold at ridiculous prices, they are in fact more expensive than cables with copper-core wire inside of them, why? Because you NEED those to make your 3D printer...print. Without it, your printer will just sit there on its desk, just like your already emptied printer does.
It's also true that these setups are FAR too complex for the average Joe, but 3D wasn't meant for the average Joe - YET. First we need the enthusiast to get it going, to build a horde of competent 3D creators and users, magically...this will create many thousand jobs, but the price of the "Cartridges/ink/ABS-plast" is still the issue we've had for ages. Plastic cable doesn't cost DIDDLY to produce, but greed is universal.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
Output quality is what is holding 3D printing back. The output is course(low tolerances), weak, fragile.
There are other issues like slowness, cost, the skill needed to create the 3D design/rendering, but all of those barriers would not matter if the finished product was any good. If it was possible to print parts that were reasonably close to the quality of injection molded parts, 3D printing would take off regardless of cost.
For now, it's just a really cool process with very limited real world applications.
Maybe the problem is that 3D printing is mainly for prototyping products. How many consumers are going to do that? Probably very few, particularly at today's price points. Hobbyists may, but even then, it is often cheaper, faster and better quality to send the design off to a specialty house than purchase the equipment yourself, unless the hobbyist is going to be doing a lot of work.
In short 3D printing isn't taking off in the consumer market for the same reason that CNC machines aren't. There really isn't a consumer need.
When I can 3d print out a wax model to make a mold to pour hot metal into or print out the mold itself then I will consider 3d printing to have arrived.
Plastic may be amazing and useful, but not for the things I seek to make.
Our work from fifteen years ago: https://github.com/pdfernhout/PlantStudio
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/PlantStudio/
A user comment: "Plant Studio is the best 3d plant creator/animator that I have seen. Very nice job."
The idea can be used to design almost anything, even music (also by us):
http://www.evojazz.com/
Richard Dawkins had the idea first though (or others before him), as shown by his "Blind Watchmaker" software which we had seen before PlantStudio.
So, basically, for most people, 3D is hard because the dominant 3D software paradigm of assembling shapes via splines and meshes and such is too hard to use.
However, Minecraft (and Infiniminer before it) show another easy to use 3D design paradigm (assembling blocks).
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DW-2xaIDtMk
It' still price prohibitive, but people need to quit saying, "3D printing is only good for making plastic crap."
I'm surprised the Print-Your-Own-Gun folks haven't created their lowers on one of these yet. Maybe that's because these machines still cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Cost will eventually come down here, too.
You stereotypers are all the same...
There are thousands of visual effects artists who are, or soon will be, out of work -- who would be happy to model anything for you. Schools today are training thousands more every year.
I think the biggest problem is that people don't want something unique -- they wants something everybody else has.
Think about it -- say you could print your own phone; and it would be unique; custom fit to your hand (say), and really the best possible phone for you. How many would want that, vs. the phone that everybody else has?
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
I have read a lot of comments about 3D printers not being able to print bigger objects.
I found this on KickStarter: Gigabot 3D printer.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Remember when printers were expensive and had relatively poor print quality, so generally few people had them in their homes? 3D printers are still at that stage. Plastic extruder printers have relatively poor print quality and resin / powder printers are a bit too expensive for widespread adoption.
Maybe once extruder printers are under $100 and resin printers under $300 then we might see widespread adoption, but what do we expect the average person to use a 3D printer for that would make spending $500+ on it worthwhile?
I've been using AutoCAD since about '84, and Solidworks after that. Just an FYI - neither can hold a candle to Rhino (www.Rhino3D.com). Rhino is a true 3D modeling package with a wealth of fantastic surface modeling tools. It sells for US$995.
So the price barrier has been lowered, but that's not to say there's not a significant learning curve for both the software and the design process. Just as PowerPoint makes it easy to create horrible boring presentations with distracting text, jarring color combinations, and badly scaled pictures, learning a 3D CAD package does little to help you learn how to design and build something.
The sad truth is CAD software has become its own discipline. A separate silo of knowledge, if you will. When I was taught board drafting, the focus was on communication. Object lines were drawn darker and thicker to cause the object to "jump" from the page, while meta data (dimensions, text) was drawn with a thinner line in order to make it less visible, unless you were looking for the data. When CAD drafting came along, so much effort went into teaching the operation of the software that we no longer had time for the communication aspect. Pretty much all CAD software uses artificial tools that do not exist in the physical world, and are thus difficult to teach. The net result is we have some of the most visually confusing documents in history being churned out in massive numbers. Old drawings are now being considered as collectible works of art.
Contrast that with the Desktop Publishing Revolution. In effect, PageMaker was a "paper simulator". All your skills of pasteboard layout applied directly to PageMaker. Word processors were also difficult to use until the What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG) word processors arrived. When was the last time you heard of someone going to training for a word processor?
I actually know of a CAD interface that directly models the subtractive manufacturing method. If you know how to machine, it is simple to use. If you don't know how to machine a part, learning the software teaches you a lot about the process. But I'm sad to report that the major CAD vendors show little interest in rocking the boat.
Place nail here >+
I think the best comparison we have to the current market in 3D printing is the early PC market. TRS-80, Apple II, Commodore, and similar. We are hitting where the cost is becoming affordable, but the user experience of most is inconsistent at best, and the time spent is usually not worth the return for many users.
Content is one question, do most people want to generate their own unique content or do they want the equivalent of a template to create new things?
Even if they have the content, do they have enough to consistently print in order to purchase a printer for themselves and learn to use it?
I'm working on one approach to the existing market, starting with the hardware, but will be building up the software more as we go. The MakiBox is the world's least expensive 3D printer, but also the most simple to assemble and maintain. We've gotten it down to where the assembly takes around 3-4 hours for most users and will see that go down with the final production design revision. Initial prints usually come out the first time, since settings are consistent between printers, which reduces a lot of the initial testing and calibration with the less expensive printers available.
The next target for us will be to see how to get the technology to where it is useful for the consumer markets. It will take another generation of development to get the hardware to that point, and we will be looking at a lot of different ways that software drives the work flow. I don't believe it is any one piece that is lacking, but a whole ecosystem that will emerge.
Cost is probably the main reason. But there are multiple technical reasons to hold it back too. First is a limited number of material those printers are capable of using. You cannot use glass, ceramics or metals in most printers that are commercially viable. In fact commercially viable printers are using just a small subset of plastics that have limited mechanical properties, Those plastics also have limited temperature range in which they work properly, limited UV resistance, etc. The maximum size of the printed parts is another limitation. The inexpensive printers are only capable to print relatively small parts. You cannot print many household type items because of this limitation. The surface finish of printed parts is also rough above what required for precision parts. Most machine parts not only require machining to achieve required precision and surface finish but also complex heat treatment and chemical treatment to work properly. In summary relatively inexpensive printers cannot be used to produce any decent machine parts nor larger items. Printing machine parts of substantial strength and medium size is probably the breakthrough needed to attract hobbyists do it yourself type people and create mass market. Another limitation is time required to print. Those printers are still horribly slow. If I need to build a device that consists of few dozen parts it will take several days to print them. Another limitation is the cost of materials. Those printers must be using ink jest printer business model. Printing anything is generally not economical. Printed parts cost significantly more than mass produced parts. That is why the people still buy books in the bookstore instead of printing them on personal printers at home. Finally CAD tools. The decent CAD programs are prohibitively expensive. The few open source and other free software such as Google Sketch are too primitive to create complex, well controlled shapes. The advanced CAD systems such as AutoCAD, ProE, SolidWorks, Catia, NX are very expensive or way too expensive for general public. In addition those CAD systems are too difficult for average person. You practically need engineering degree to learn and use them efficiently. Even those simple ones available for free are not that simple to learn to create more complex shapes. There is also lack of ready to print models available on the web. If I want to print some plastic box to replace broken one in my home there is no way to get a data model of that part. I can search the web for replacement part number and even buy it from some store but it is very difficult to find a model of such part. So the only resource for anyone is to precisely measure the part, make CAD model of it to print it. How many people have desire to do so let alone skills to fully reverse engineer parts ? You need lots of practice to do so well.
JAM
It's just very expensive to get into 3d printing. A makerbot is over $2k, a lulzbot is almost $2k. (It probably also doesn't help the cause that lulzbot sells 3d printed parts like this or this printed on the very same almost $2k machines that look like crap.) Even build-it-yourself machines cost close to $1k, not even factoring in time spent.
Then there's filament at $40/kg, the occasional hotend replacement, material wasted on prints that don't come out or stop halfway, etc.
The print quality and material strength is also questionable. PLA is water soluble so it doesn't work outdoors, cracks easily, on the other hand ABS releases toxic fumes when melted.
It's hard to justify all that cost even for someone with money to burn to print a $20 stove knob, or odd $5 broken plastic pieces for a car's door to open. It's a great tool for rapid prototyping and for nerds, but not for mainstream.
of Yoda heads.
Pretty sure patents are the #1 thing holding back 3D printing, as with a lot of other technologies. As such, it'll start taking off in China then trickle back to the rest of the world.
Mind the frickin' laser...
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/formlabs/form-1-an-affordable-professional-3d-printer?ref=live
I'm not associated with that project at all, nor have I bought or plan on buying one of their printers. But it looks like they are sub-$2500, and the resolution on their examples looks damn good. Though I do wish the pictures themselves were higher resolution...
Even if that printer turns out to have issues, I still don't think printer cost should hold this back. What's $15,000 to Kinkos or a University or a craft store or a hardware store? The demand will easily make it worth the large startup cost. Even your local public library might get one. I could also easily imagine completely automated kiosks, like the photo printing ones.
So what is holding it back? Maybe a lack of awareness among non-geeks, copyright/patent issues, or the feeling of a 'solution in search of a problem'. It needs to find a niche where it's in high demand and visible to the public, and from there it'll take off. Hopefully.
The more I think about it, the more the automated kiosk (perhaps located inside a store or mall for security) seems like it'll be the key for the simple reason that it allows people to easily violate copyrights/patents. Charge by the gram and/or time it takes to print. Have a bunch of open source and licensed forms already loaded on it, but also allow people to bring their own forms. People download them from the net, bring it in, print it out, and watch the IP holders whine and whine and whine about it while the kiosk owners shrug and point to the many 'legitimate' uses their printers have, saying they don't have responsibility any more than the owner of a photo kiosk is expected to prevent people from printing child porn.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1650950769/rigidbot-3d-printer
An industrial designer studies for 4 years to become vaguely able to design physical objects that work. Material science is a giant topic by itself: you say plastic, how many different types of plastic are there? Which ones are flammable, which ones are stiff/flexible/food safe/insulating/long lasting? Mechanics come into it. How do you design something that is strong enough and not too heavy? ... is ... hard. Inherently. Just like designing things.
Even designing a frickin' plastic spoon that will not hurt your hand or melt in your soup (possibly poisoning you) is a difficult job.
So you don't want to do it every day, because it is not your work and you are not trained for it. So you will do it maybe once a year. How do you justify a specialized piece of equipment like a 3D printer for that limited amount of use? You can't, and so it has to be a nice hobby. People keep talking about the printers being too expensive and the materials being hard to get and expensive but I think this is really barking up the wrong tree.
Compare this with software. Nowadays you can get the excellent GCC compiler and the excellent Eclipse IDE for zero dollars. You can download and read excellent programming tutorials on every possible topic for free. Is everybody writing fabulous software? No. Because designing and making sofware
There is great scope for replicating existing designs, just like there is a lot of scope for downloading and running software that other people have written. And this is why we have a PC in every house. Probably, once there is a large enough library of free/libre or cheap enough designs that you can download and print, 3D printers will take off. Even if they never get below the 500 USD price point.
You know what's holding 3D printing back? As someone that's fighting with one, I've got a few thoughts.
I'm building a Prusa Mendel, with hardware mostly donated by a friend that also has a Prusa Mendel. It *should* be straightforward. It's not. At all. My friend and I got the frame built, but I brought everything else home to finish on my own.
I managed to get the mechanical end sorted out fairly well, to the point where I need the entire printer to run right to get the rest of it dialed in. I managed to get the software side sorted pretty easily, too. The electronics, however, are proving to be a major pain.
The machine has a few problems that I can not seem to sort out. The hot end temps vary wildly, in about a thirty-degree Celsius range...However, it's all built "right." At this point I'm going to build a second heatcore and replace the thermistor attached to the nozzle with a new one (that I had to order from somewhere else) in hopes that something is wrong with either of these two items.
I am proficient with electronics assembly and repair, to the point where I build my own pedals to use with my bass, repair my own bass gear, repair other folks' pedals and gear, etc. I do computer software troubleshooting and programming for work, so I'm fairly proficient with that. I'm also a hard-core gearhead; I've been playing with mechanical things from guns to cars to motorcycles to machine tools and just about everything in between for as long as I can remember...But I'm having a hell of a time sorting out a *basic* 3D printer. I've spent the past three weeks of weeknights and weekends working on the thing and, honestly, I'm about ready to throw the whole pile in the trash and forget the whole thing.
It doesn't help that no one local to me has any more experience with building these things than I do, and all the people that have pre-built 3D printers are also hating them right now...My old employer has a MakerBox Replicator 2X that they can not get to run right. It seems like the vendors themselves don't really know what's going on, either...The vendor I got the hot end parts kit from seems to supply wire that I would consider wholly inadequate for moving 12V@5A around, but apparently it works.
The guy that supplied the parts for me to build my Prusa Mendel purchased a Rostock kit for no small amount of money...And is having all kinds of trouble getting it working right, too.
What's holding back 3D printing? The fact that even people with higher-than-average technical proficiency in all the areas required to make a 3D printer run well are having problems with their 3D printers indicates that they are in no way ready for mainstream use.
The quality of legit comments on this article tells me we've passed a personal threshold here.
All of you, regardless of who you are... if you're throwing around an opinion that is not backed up by some kind of evidence, you're the cancer that killed slashdot years ago.
I denied it back then, i like to think of myself as an optimist...
The article was terrible last week when i read it for the first time, and should never have been posted here... but reading the comments made me feel like i was on youtube.
The design software isn't the problem. The problem is that the low-end 3D printers suck.
The ultraviolet stereolithography machines work fine, but so far, they cost too much. The Form 1 machine ($2300) is supposed to ship Real Soon Now. That's probably the first low-end machine that will really work.
The low-end plastic extruder approach (MakerBot, RepRap, Up, etc.) is fundamentally flawed. You're trying to weld a hot thing to a cold thing. That never works reliably. Cold solder joints and bad welds are the usual results of trying to do that in other materials. It sort of works for small objects where the previous layer doesn't have time to cool completely. But the time between one layer and the next being laid down has way too much effect on the weld quality. You need some way to heat the layer below the weld just before the weld, like a laser or a hot air jet. It probably would only take a few watts of laser power aimed at the join. You'd have to enclose and interlock the build area, as with a laser cutter, but that's not hard.
The plastic extruder machines will probably go away once stereolithography gets cheaper. It's a sort-of-works technology. Printers went through this. There was wet electrostatic printing (Versatec), magnetic printing, ink jet printing by electrostatic deflection of a stream of ink drops, electrolytic printing (dates from the 19th century), and spark printing. Commercial products using all those technologies were manufactured and sold, but xerographic and ink jet technologies were just better.
I've been trying hard to find opensource (and free) 3D and CAD/CAM software for the ShapeOko wiki:
http://www.shapeoko.com/wiki/index.php/Software
and I'm not finding much w/o significant issues of some sort:
OpenSCAD --- programmers only, mesh is okay for printing, but not milling (ImplicitCAD is better on that front, but needs to be easier to install, and to have 3D G-code export)
SketchUp --- also limited to meshes, weird interface which requires odd workflow to achieve precision
FreeCAD --- bizarre interface
Blender --- ditto
Inkscape --- 2D only, drawing interface not as nice as Macromedia FreeHand
&c.
I'd be very interested in any opensource (and free) 3D and CAD/CAM software which isn't listed on the wiki.
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
The design tools have nothing to do with it.
There is no marketable benefit of a 3D printer.
It's cheaper to buy your plastic widget from China than to buy the ABS or PLA reels to print your own, so there is no cost benefit.
There is no "plug and play" 3D printer that costs less than $1000. Try 10x that - So there is no ease of use benefit.
It doesn't matter how easy the software is or how good it is, someone still needs to design what you want to print. Mr or Miss Consumer doesn't have the skill or effort to do so.
It's not instant. Printing a complex object takes hours upon hours. You could get some things delivered overnight quicker than it takes to print them.
You can't print everything. Sure its nice to print some xmas decorations, but you can't print a chip. Your widget is going to be plastic and plastic only (or what ever other material your printer prints).
What's holding back 3D Printing??? Seriously? Just few off the top of my head (BTW we use 3D printing for prototyping and very small batch runs which are really THE ONLY sweet-spots for 3D printing in the real world)