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How 3D Printers Went Mainstream After Decades In Obscurity
An anonymous reader writes: By now, everyone knows the likes of MakerBot, Bre Pettis, and the gun-printing cage rattlers at Defense Distributed. But the tale of 3D-printing goes all the way back to the heady pre-Macintosh days of 1983, and a simple plastic cup holds the distinction of being the first-ever 3D-printed object. Garage entrepreneur Chuck Hull managed to print it using cobbled-together hardware that looked like something out of Waterworld, laying the fragile plastic framework for everything to come. From retrofitted hot glue guns, to a machine made specifically to print on-demand shot glasses, the last 30 years in 3D printing have been full of strange twists, odd characters and melted failures. And the possibilities are just beginning to emerge now that anyone can play.
Used to get plastic printed trains at Griffith Park when I was kid. Now, I can make my own plastic printed train. I'm so happy you have no idea
Spatula City won't, either!
Still a long way to go - they are still just a toy.
Bought one for the school I work for, and it's cool to watch but it has a LOT of problems, not inherent to the implementation.
When people ask how it works, I explain to those old enough to remember pen-plotters that it's just one of those, with melted plastic and a vertically-moving surface. They nod and then realise that we could have done this decades ago with any number of other materials and got something similar. And we actually did, and have done.
The process has a long way to go - plastic is a nicer material than some home-brew thing could made, but it's still having problems. Cleaning supports and struts is a pain - I understand if you have a completely "floating" support that they are necessary but in, say, a teacup the whole thing is joined to every other point so there's no real reason to require supports. Moving up AND down a level and being able to orient the head would help a lot here and solve some other problems.
The layering produces obvious stripes. If you print circles, inevitably you have to adjust the print movement or else you end up with a "seam" where the head completes the circles and moves up a level. It's very hard to 3D print, say, a watertight object - even with the best preparation it's hard to guarantee the material will stick to the print-base, and that it will join to itself perfectly.
And print time is still atrocious. All things that will get better, I'm sure, but given that it's a plotter with a vertical base, you have to wonder why the speed isn't anywhere near the best plotters as were around 20-30 years ago.
Their patents expired. It was hip new technology in the 1980's with a lot of industrial researchers making exciting new tools and generally doing what patents encourage.
But there was only niche use for it, and the cost of all the overlapping patents stifled the market for 30 years. You couldn't sell a 3D printer without paying homage (and a fuckton of cash) to the inventors back in the 80's.
Those patents are expiring and now making, selling, and operating 3D printers is economically viable for the general populace and not just niche tool shops with a big wad of cash. Without the burden that those patents created, the technology was allowed to go mainstream.
Kinda makes you wonder if existence of patents are such a good idea in the first place.
I thought this was common knowledge.
Newton message pad? heck even touch styles have been around since the 70's
The base technology is just starting to catch up with the dreamers. Microsoft was promoting tablet edition windows XP in 2002. It took until 2010 until the tech caught up to the promise(and even then it still has a lot of things to improve on.
Quad copters have been built and flown since the 1930's but the tech was always just lacking. it took computers to create fine enough controls to stabilize the flights enough to be practical. In coming Decades we are going to look back at the various flying machines of the 1950's and 1960's and build them with new tech. The base ideas are the same it is the material science, sensor designs, small enough transistors that has drastically improved to make old ideas practical.
Look at the V-22 Osprey. That machine literally couldn't fly in the 1980's they couldn't quite get it to work. It took 15 years of additional refinement to make it practical.
3D printers aren't quite there yet. the material science is still working on it. But it is a good start.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Tested In-Depth: Desktop 3D Scanning
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Thanks Don!
Today's 3d printers are just a subset of his Santa Claus machine. Some day we'll catch up.
http://www.tinaja.com/santa01.shtml
The solution to "electricity too cheap to meter" was inventing cheaper meters.
The solution to "can't manufacture stuff at home" is inventing cheaper manufacturing tools. I don't think we'll see replicators any time soon, but there's no reason why, for example, plumbers shouldn't be able to print plastic parts for dishwashers on-the-fly or in the shop rather than waiting for it to be delivered.
Of course, if we get to... http://robots-everywhere.com/r...
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
Someone made a gun and the rest is history.
Funny how at the start of the US patent system toward the end of the 18th century, patents expired in 28 years. Back then the pace of innovation was glacially slow compared to today. Today, when technological progress happens several orders of magnitude faster, patents now expire in only 28 years. Thanks to Disney, copyrights can last even longer. We live in a truly amazong world! How about 5 years for patents and for trademarks 5 years or as long as they're actively being used?
"When you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform." - Mark Twain
My Copam CP-2500 vinyl cutter didn't have a really decent pen option for paper plots. Originally I bought a flimsy ballpoint pen adapter for $12 shipped and using it practically shred the paper since the point tip was so hard and fine. Almost useless. So I went to eBay and found someone who was selling a simple 3D printed rectangular shaped Sharpie pen adapter with a tapered conical holes in it for $5 shipped. It came with two adapters, one for fine tip Sharpies and one for the fatter kind. You simply swap out the knife holder, put in the pen adapter and adjust the cutting pressure to a lighter setting. Works amazingly well and it turned my vinyl cutter into a useful plotter for templates. In this instance, it was the best $5 I have ever spent. The quality is very good and I don't see them ever wearing out.
I suspect cheap and huge computers had a large effect too. I haven't done a 3D print, but the app that slices an object for printing and plans the head path probably takes a significant amount of CPU and RAM. The printer could easily have been built in the 80s, but only recently have home computers become powerful enough to drive them.
Not that this wasn't entirely predictable.
FOSSCAD Mega Pack v4.7 Aramaki is out. Look up Rrepringer. It can be produced by plastic injection, metal extrusion and 3D printer.
...imagine if all hackerspaces built on the cheap one of these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... # SatNOGS is for satellite tracking & communication
(read - less than a high-end computer).
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
not one single picture of the machine or the cup it produced, fucking awesome
This is truly a troll where the author has made some thoughts about balancing troll themes.
checklist:
[y] Insults staff
[y] Tell long meaningless story
[y] mentions goatse
[y] mentions bible
[y] complains about slashcode filters
Additional value: The troll uses the complaint about the filter to actually fulfill its requirements, elegantly retaining the script-like form by separating the content of the complaint from the main theme. This again shows the good utilisation of space.
This gets a full 7 goatses from me.
The low-end 3D printers, the ones that try to weld ABS string together, still suck. TechShop has several of them. The Jet was a a flat failure. The Replicator 2 is OK if you're not building something more than about 2cm thick. I haven't tried the Type A Machines unit. In the end, it's a slow way to make prototype plastic parts that are inferior to injection-moulded ABS. Injection moulding requires machining a die, which is a big job, but then the production rate is high and the cost is very low.
The higher end printers have much better quality and more material options, but the machine cost is high and the process is slow. The really high end printers, the ones Space-X and Lockheed use to print aerospace parts, are very impressive, but still slow.
Talking about 3D printers sure is mainstream, though.
3D printing languished in obscurity in large part due to patents. As patents are expiring, low cost 3D printers are becoming available: fused deposition, stereolithography, laser sintering. It will take a few more years for the market to catch up now that the core patents largely have expired, although that's probably only the beginning of patent trolling and other legal issues.
Naw, you can slice on a rpi if you want. it's just slow is all.
Considering the print itself can take hours, it hardly matters if the initial calculation takes a couple milliseconds, or minutes...
It's not a printer. It's a machine that fabricates/manufactures something out of component material which has been around for a LONG time. Why the hell do we still use this braindead term "3d printer" and why do we think it's anything special? So we've brought a damn manufacturing tool to the average person and allowed some fancy programming tricks to make it do what we want. Doesn't change the fact that it's the exact same thing as industry has had for longer than most people can remember.
And for what? Cheap, simple items that look like they came out of a gumball machine.
The garbage we think is "great new technology" these days is anything but. It's all slick marketing by companies that want to make easy money from suckers.
like something out of Waterworld
I actually thought that movie was okay, but even I know it's not much good as a pop-culture reference.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
"With the space of the past few years, the public conversation has shifted drastically, from questions aimed at 3D printing CEOs about whether machines would be useful for creating anything beyond plastic tchotchkes"
If the past is any indication, something like 3-D printed custom dildos will be the breakthrough must-have product that will bring a 3D printer into every home . . .
Patents don't matter for making a printer for your own use.
They can matter if you build a business on them, like by selling objects built using them.
Especially if they improve make your process cheaper, easier, more convenient, flat-out possible, or produce a better part. (And if there ARE cheaper, etc. ways to do it, why are you using the patented tech anyhow? B-) )
Patents in the US were about increasing innovation by making first mover advantage truump second mover advantage: Giving the little guy with the bright idea time to set up manufacturing, make back his costs, reap some benefits, and get established enough to compete with existing large companies once they expire. Without them, it was thought, the existing big guys with the infrastructure in place could quickly clone the little guy's new invention and out-compete him in the market, but they wouldn't bother until the little guy had proved it was worth the effort. This would suck the incentive out of the little guys, the big guys would have little incentive to improve, and progress would be slow-to-stalled. The short-term inhibition on others deploying the invention was seen as less of an impediment to progress than having most inventions not be deployed, or even made, at all.
The idea was to set the time limit to maximize progress to the benefit of all/the country, and make manufacturing and technology grow like yeast (ala silicon valley B-) ). Part of the intent was to bias it toward innovators and make established processes free to use, because when the country was getting started the established players were owned by foreign interests. The founders wanted the country to develop its own industry, rather than being dependent on, and sending most of the profit to, big businesses in Europe.
But the time was set for heavy manufacturing at the pace of the period. It's a horrible mismatch for, say, software: With the availability of general purpose computing platforms, able to make distributable copies at electronic speed and copyright to prevent verbatim cloning, a person or company with a new software product can go from steath-mode program development to market establishment, profitibility, and even market dominance in a matter of months, before competitors can engineer their own version. So patents aren't necessary to promote innovation, leaving just their retarding effect holding down the blaze of creativity. (Then there's open source, with its alternitive monitization and/or reward strategies. But that's a "new invention". B-) )
It seems to me that:
- The expiration of patents on stereolithography did help produce the initial explosion of new, and often inexpensive, devices and the improvements in what can be made, how accurately, and how inespensively.
- The availability of machines suitable for practical industrial prototyping - even before the cheap machine explosion - pretty much forced the high-end CAD software producers to include some form of stereolithography output format, while an open output format made the choice obvious. That's a big benefit to the toolmaker for a small effort. The availability in the high-grade commercial tools is a great synergy and helps a lot. But the hobby machines needed CAD tools and open source was already up to the task: Had the big players not gone along it still would have been done, and those big players not "with the program" would be experiencing major competitive pressure from open source tools and competitors that did provide such output.
And here's the key:
- The availabitiy of these rapid general-purpose maufacturing tools will bring (is already bringing!) software's high-speed innovation and entrepenurial models to the manufacture of physical objects. Patents could be shortened in term or reduced to "design patents" - the manufacturing equivalent of copyright - and produce a physical-product explosion comparable to the computer revolution. (Or patents, like "content" copyright, could become the tool of obsoleted established players in the suppression of the competing business models.)
Brace yourself for either the physical-manufacture ramp-up to science-fiction's "singularity" or an ongoing RIAA / MPAA / conglomerate - style legal battle.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
3D printing was the result of a lot of researchers working on a lot of parts, and when the dust settled, none of them could build a really practical printer without paying off all the other patent holders, most of whom were playing dog-in-the-manger with their patents while trying to elbow out the competition.
You see that with a lot of inventions. They may go through several cycles of invention / related invention / non-conbination / wait / patent expiration until enough necessary parts of the technology are patent-expired that the remaining necessary inventions can be assembled in a single company's product and the technology finally deployed.
Thermoacoustics, for instance, just had its second round of patent expiration and is in its third round of innovation. The basic idea is to make a reasonably efficient heat-engine and/or refrigerator (or a machine that combines, for instance, one of each) with no moving parts except a gas. Mechanical power in the form of high-energy sound inside a pipe is extracted from, or used to create, temperature differences.
There are some really nice gadgets coming out of it, built mainly out of plumbing comparable to automotive exhaust systems and tuned manifolds, maybe with some industrial-grade loudspeakers built in, or their miniaturized or micro-minaturized equivalent. (Example: A hunk of pluming with a gas burner, about 12 feet high and maybe eight feet on a side. Oil fields often produce LOTS natural gas in regions, like big deserts, where it's uneconomic to ship it to market. It gets burned off and vented. (CO2 is weaker greenhouse gas than CH4, by a factor of several). Pipe the gas into the plumbing, light the burner, and it burns part of it to get the power to cool and liquify the rest. As a liquid it's economic to ship and sell it. Then you get to use much of the otherwise wasted energy, displacing other fuel supples and reducing overall carbon emssion.
I hope this is the cycle where things hit the market.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way