Slashdot Mirror
Breaking Up With MakerBot
An anonymous reader writes "Sanders Kleinfeld explains how his experiences with a Makerbot device led him to the decision that 3-D printing hasn't quite arrived as a legitimate, consumer-friendly technology. Quoting: 'Waiting five hours for your Yoda feels like an eternity; you can play approximately sixty rounds of Candy Crush Saga in that same timeframe (although arguably, staring blankly at the MakerBot is equally intellectually stimulating). To make matters worse, I’d estimate MakerBot’s failure rate fell in the range of 25%–33%, which meant that there was around a one-in-three chance that two hours in, your Yoda print would fail, or that it would finish but once it was complete, you’d discover it was warped or otherwise defective. ... The first-generation MakerBot Replicator felt too much like a prototype, as opposed to a proven, refined piece of hardware. I look forward to the day when 3D printers are as cheap, ubiquitous, and easy to use as their 2D inkjet printer counterparts.'"
Half of the fun of 3D printers is getting angry at them. If you want one to "Just Work" you are out of luck. Some are better than others, but they all are basically hot glue guns with some servo motors, there is no feedback, no control. You can however, print some really cool stuff. Sure I would not let my parents buy one, but I have loved mine personally.
I remember the failure rates for burning CD's early on was probably around 40%. Now if I burn a CD or DVD I don't think I've had a failure in a couple years now.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
"Waiting five hours for your Yoda feels like an eternity"
I just realized why online retail will never completely beat brick-and-mortar.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
In fairness to Makerbot, they can produce resolutions that the Ups can't touch - I operate both in my student labs. That said, because the Makerbot Replicators 2Xs we're using are 'higher performance', they're also much more finnicky about working until you've really cinched down on their calibration and preferred settings.
What we're really seeing here is the impatience of the Now Generation. What? You have to wait -thirty minutes- for something to be produced?? OMG!
Have these people any idea how long it takes to produce something through conventional CNC, let alone hand fabrication? I have fabricated parts that have taken 24 hours for a mill to produce. That's a lot of angry birds, right there! The ignorance of what goes into the technological artifacts people take for granted is astonishing. I suspect many people today would benefit from activities and hobbies that reward patience and discipline rather than instant gratification.
As an aside, It's interesting that the author uses a time killing game as a yard stick for the waiting period - as if the time spent while printing was 'dead' and couldn't possibly be used for anything productive.
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
altslashdot.org: The future of slashdot.
The first personal computers were on the order of about 3 to 6 grand in price. You can now buy one far beyond the capabilities of those systems for $50.00 bucks new. Even in that day the price tag was worth it for some processes. I know a guy in aerospace that was able to prototype load handling for engine mounts on a vector graphics system in a matter of hours instead of days it took on the main frame. That was back in the early 80's. Imagine where the capabilities of these systems will be in ten or twenty years. You already have systems that can use two different plastics and removable filler materials. You have systems that doctors are able to print out bones that need to be moved into position. You have systems that can print custom art on cupcakes and some that print living tissue. There is a system that will print actual walls and another that prints glass bowls using the sun. And another that prints wood objects. Shoot Jay Leno is using them to prototype out parts for cars that they no longer make parts for. The expansion and the innovative designs is amazing. To blow the current systems off as just making garbage seems short sighted about where this technology really is and where it will be shortly.
Well, that's a tiny bit of an exaggeration. The harsh reality is that a 3D printer is a cool, fun, convenient way to make one-off and limited runs of plastic parts that would otherwise have to be injection-molded or extruded.
Yes, I know some systems can print starch that dissolves so you can (sort of) end up with spaces and gaps in the finished item, but in the real world, it's basically up to you to drill the precision holes, sand the rough edges, remove the burrs, and do the actual assembly yourself. We're a LONG way from "download the plans to some finished consumer good & stick it to The Man(tm) by printing yourself an unauthorized copy".
Buying a hobby-grade 3D printer today is kind of like spending $800 to buy a copy of Sculpt-Animate 4D for the Amiga 3000 20 years ago -- full of promise, totally cool, and the greatest Christmas gift someone could possibly get you... but at the end of the day, frustrating as hell.
Back then, you'd spend days, if not WEEKS, defining 3D objects, start a render at 2am before going to bed, crawl out of bed the next morning for school, be happy that you weren't greeted by 30-40 scanlines of black (indicating that it didn't like your lighting for some reason), spend the day at school praying obsessively that you'd be greeted by 2/3 of a badly-rendered image when you got home instead of a guru meditation number, and if you hit the jackpot... your preview didn't look like total shit, and vaguely resembled whatever it was you were trying to render.
A few days later, you'd go to render a raytraced preview the size of a postage stamp, then go away for the weekend, because that's about how long a 16-25MHz A3000 took to render a 80x50 thumbnail. Assuming it didn't crash, and there wasn't a thunderstorm to reboot the computer. OK, months passed, and you're about to go take a 2-week family vacation, so you launch into the Holy Grail -- a 320x200 HAM animation with 8-16 frames. You start the rendering job, go away, come home a few weeks later... and to your despair (but non-surprise), are greeted by either a guru meditation number or a rebooted computer courtesy of Florida Power & Light.
You screwed with it a few more times after that, but the magic was gone. The blue smoke evaporated. It just took too damn long to render anything meaningful, and the program had an 80% chance of crashing before it finished anyway. And when it didn't crash, it was Florida before UPSes became affordable, so 2-second power outages were almost guaranteed to nuke any multi-day rendering job before it finished even if the program DIDN'T crash. Such was life on the bleeding razor's edge of computer graphics ~20 years ago. Sigh.
" 'PC Load Filament'? What the fuck does that mean?"
Extruder-based machines aren't a very good technology. The fundamental problem is that you're trying to weld a hot thing to a cold thing. Welding metals that way produces flawed joints, and soldering that way produces cold solder joints. Heating the build platform helps a little, but once you've built something of any height, the heater is too far from the action. Some of the machines have better temperature control of the build area than others, but they're all rather flaky. TechShop has tried four different brands, and they range from mediocre (Replicator2 ) to useless (the Up).
The UV polymerization machines seem to work quite well. The high-end machines produce consistent results and don't need to be watched while running. They're still slow, though. The Form1 printer may get there, if they ever really ship the thing in quantity. The ship date has slipped from April 2013 to October 2013, even though their Kickstarter funding was way oversubscribed. They also charge $149/liter for their custom resin. (I suspect that resin for 3D printers is going to be a similar racket as ink for inkjet printers. The stuff isn't inherently expensive; a slightly different formulation is routinely used for making printing plates, where it costs about a quarter of the price.)
+1 - I use the UP! Mini regularly ( weekly and often daily ) and it's about as simply as clicking "print" most of the time.
Failure rate: About 1 in 20, though I have had a few problems with ABS filament quality of late reducing that to about 1 in 10.
Just because Makerbot doesn't meet the OP's requirements, it's a little arrogant to declare the death of all 3D printers isn't it?
GrpA
Enjoy science fiction? "Turing Evolved" - AI, Mecha, Androids and rail-gun battles. What more could you want?
I had the reverse problem. My Up Mini is virtually useless to me. Firstly, I'm not sure if the build plate is heating adequately, and I can't change that temperature. Secondly, I can't print in PLA to combat curling, since the PLA I can buy just burns in the nozzle and clogs it (and you can't adjust the extruder temperature, either. It has an ABS mode, calibrated for THEIR ABS, and a PLA mode, calibrated for THEIR PLA, which was not available. Both about 30 C higher than the competitors' filament). Thirdly, that damned nine point software levelling system is a pain, and if you get it slightly wrong, you lose your levelling the next time you go to tweak it. Some of my problems with curling and adhesion I can put down to humidity, because I see a lot of steam coming from my Up Mini, a puff of it every couple of seconds. I do live in the tropics, and have no control over the humidity in my house, so I'm resigned to that.
My Replicator 2, on the other hand, although I've only had it a week, I am amazed with it. Even on low quality, it outdoes the best I ever got out of my Up Mini in both speed and overall print quality. I noticed my platform wasn't quite level while I was printing (the raft was getting a little scuffed as the nozzle ran over it), so I tweaked the levelling knobs on the fly (probably shouldn't have, but it worked), twiddled the knobs at each level by feel until the faint tak-tak-tak of the extruder hitting plastic stopped, and the dragon came out fine at 0.2mm layer height. On the Up Mini, every time I screwed up the levelling, that involved cancelling the print, throwing out the wasted plastic, redoing the levelling from scratch, starting it again, and hoping the print sticks and doesn't curl this time. If I had the nozzle close enough to really get the plastic into the perfboard, it would scratch the previous layers on the next layer. If I had it at the right level, there was never enough adhesion on the platform. I just didn't have the patience for it.
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
It's interesting that the author uses a time killing game as a yard stick for the waiting period - as if the time spent while printing was 'dead' and couldn't possibly be used for anything productive.
That's his point - for the purposes of using the makerbot, it is dead time. You can't iterate before you have something, and you can't have something for 5 hours with a 33% chance that hardware failure was the problem and not the design.
What we're really seeing here is the impatience of the Now Generation. What? You have to wait -thirty minutes- for something to be produced?? OMG!
That's basically the same as having to wait 5 hours, right?
Have these people any idea how long it takes to produce something through conventional CNC, let alone hand fabrication?
How many amateurs are willing to burn virtually all of their free time for a day to do those things? Very few. Comparing your professional abilities and patience to his amateur abilities and patience is unfair (to put it very kindly).
I've tried a few times to do unattended long prints on my Solidoodle but often enough something goes wrong partway - not only is the print ruined but a heap of filament gets wasted. Generally I stay close by and work on something else, and a couple of those times I managed to catcha problem that might have damaged the printer (e.g. snagged filament).
Anyway, it's not completely dead time, but it does require a fair bit of nursing. Im slowly improving some of the mechanics and operating parameters so maybe it will get better, but it's far from foolproof yet.
Sintered metal 'printers' can make jet engine parts.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
This is coming from someone who built his own lathe. My experience with building my own machine tools has taught me that not only does the algorithm (i.e. tool motion) matter, but also the properties of the material being machined.
With the traditional CNC machine, the method of material removal works the same irrespective of the stock material, with minor exceptions. A CNC mill can make parts from materials as soft as waxes to as hard as steel with little more than a bit change, and perhaps the addition of cooling lubricant.
A 3d printer, by contrast, is a deposition method which depends to a very large degree on the properties of the feed stock. Even at their best, they'll do no better than a mill.
And 3 hours to make a part is ridiculously long, especially given the failure rate. A trained machinist would instead choose the best tool(s) for the job and turn it out in short order.
Just for perspective: I spent one and a half hours building a molding machine from scratch. Rather than print out the part with a 3d printer, he could have made the molding machine and molds in the same amount of time, with the added advantage that he could make an almost arbitrary number of copies. Sometimes the old ways are just faster.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
makerbot sells their products as if they had the same reliability as Up! etc kind of printers. that's not up for debate, that's how they market them.
HOWEVER.. you need several mods and to be lucky that they sent you an unwarped build plate etc. to get decent prints. the gantry design itself isn't too bad and the electronics are pretty simple(they copied the gantry design from stratasys..).
I got two bots now, one makerbot replicator and another is a printrbot style reprap. the makerbot was 3x the price and took longer to get working reliably.
among the shit makerbot has done that has made my experience worse has been stuff like sending 0.2mm nozzles packaged in 0.4mm bags to vendors.
I got ZERO reason to buy makerbot ever again. for the machine as it came out of box it was impossible to print the two color models they used in marketing(as it came out of box it was lucky if it could print for 30 mins without jamming, there's upgrades to the extruder which are a total must to do - and dual color printing objects that size as the pr pieces held by bre were are such that the machine was probably placed in a sauna for printing so the pieces didn't warp). I still have a few upgrades to go(the arms that hold the build plate sag when build plate is heated still).
their firmware upgrades were such that it would have been pretty easy to outright _break_ the machine(I'm using a 3rd party firmware though, it's just much better and the support for it is much better..).
One important thing is that the makerbot design isn't safe to leave to print on it's own. it's a fire hazard - the safeties are all firmware based on a discount microcontroller that is also running the bot, it fails and the heaters can run off - there is no heat fuses of any kind anywhere - and they skimped on limit switches, so buggy gcode can break the machine as well(or if the other end limit switch cables break). notice how they NEVER in their marketing explicitly say that you could just walk away from it when it is printing? well, that is because you shouldn't. however in the same marketing they use models that take 20 hours+ to produce.
btw if you haven't tried yet, try buying some PET filament. rawks! and can be printed on plain aluminum without warping or breaking loose.
now there's plenty of printers that offer the exact same(and better) makerbot experience but cost 1000 bucks less than makerbots offerings.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Interestingly, I was talking to some Airbus designers, and they mentioned that they 3D print brackets used in ailerons out of sintered titanium. If they tried to machine the same part it would either weigh twice as much or cost twice as much for all the machining to lose the extra weight from its complex geometry. The 3D printing process let them only put material in the key loading directions the part had to be strong in, and nowhere it didn't. It made for a much better part.
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
altslashdot.org: The future of slashdot.
What we're really seeing here is the impatience of the Now Generation. What? You have to wait -thirty minutes- for something to be produced?? OMG!
Yes 3D printing seems to present about the same level of difficulty to hobbyists as computers did in the 80's. Loading my Apple from an old audio tape recorder failed maybe 30-50% of the time. The trick to getting reliability closer to 4 out of 5 was to mark the position of the volume knob with a pen. Of course that could have been fixed with money. Money could also have removed the annoying "family wants to watch TV" interrupt from the monitor.
If 3D printing takes off anything like computing did in the 80's then it will be a gold mine in the 2020's and the hobbyists who managed to make it "just work" (for a reasonable price) will be billionaires. It won't replace mass production but it could seriously disrupt the spare parts industry.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Comparing your professional abilities and patience to his amateur abilities and patience is unfair (to put it very kindly).
Professionals have resources, amateurs have time. The reason he has to wait 5hrs has nothing to do with his ability and everything to do with his resources. The reason he can't bear to wait 5hrs has everything to do with his personality and nothing to do with his status as an amateur.
Oblig anaology: The guy is like a gardener complaining he has to wait a year for fruit to appear on his tree and that when it does 1/3 of it will be inedible, while at the same time having that much fruit he is giving it away to friends and relatives..
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Not sure I agree entirely here. Even the better printers will take a while to build his yoda, they do it more reliably, so that does translate into saved time but....I think what he really lacks is perspective.
Having what you designed today in hand today, or even tomorow, is a HUGE WIN. Take it back a few steps and what do you have? A design on "paper". Going from that description of a yoda to a yoda could take a long time in more traditional setups.
Sure maybe this means 1-3 iterations per day.... compared to multiple days or more for each prototype. That is really the correct comparison. He is comparing it against his fantasy rather than against the real technology that it is an improvement over.
Because without the 3d printer, he doesn't get his yoda at all, or it takes days to weeks for him to get.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
What does that even mean?
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...