How 3D Printers Went Mainstream After Decades In Obscurity 69
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.
3d printing is legit (Score:4, Funny)
Re:3d printing is legit (Score:4, Informative)
I think those were injection molded.
You put your money in, it shot plastic into a mold. When it cooled, it popped out of the slot.
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You can also print out little toy solders for your kids if you have them. Why stop there? Need a certain Lego part for that extra special project? Model and print your own.
China won't like this (Score:2)
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And a home injection moulder is impossible why? Bed of pistons on one side (doesn't' need to be high res), attached to a stretchy surface (even a high temperature stretchy surface if you need one - graphite felt can tolerate most molten metals). Exact same thing on the other side. Thus they can make a mold shaped like any object. Your system can spray release agent or whatever else is needed. Hollows can be made either by inflation of an air bag inside the mold; casting and releasing an inner, re-applying r
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What "extraordinary claim" is being made?
What praytell is so unreasonable about discussing technological possibilities? Is this not Slashdot? If there's something ridiculous about technological speculations on something that they do not currently have the time or resources to work more on, then almost all all of modern technology was at some point ridiculous.
Why exactly do you think that 3d printers must inherently always be glorified hot glue guns? Wht is so unreasonable about the concept that there could
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Or perhaps I'm misunderstanding you - are you saying that there's something extraordinary about the concept of thermal spraying to lay down material? Perhaps you should look it up [fwgts.com]. Usually it's only used for high performance coatings, but there's no reason that with computer control you couldn't lay down whole objects, rate is (mainly) only limited by nozzle size, so you can trade off between speed and precision.
3D plotter (Score:3)
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.
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What kind of machine is it?
I agree a teacup should not require support, unless the handle has a loop that dips below the attachment point. But even then only the underside of that loop would need support.
The layering can leave stripes, but a nice material with good print settings on a well made and tuned machine it's more of a texture than actual visual artifacts. They're like grooves on a record; you can feel the individual grooves but unless you look closely or get the light at just the right angle it jus
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I'm willing to bet that machine costs more than $1000 complete, and probably doesn't use belt drives for the axes.
Also, 230mm/sec is 13.8 meters per minute. And that's while extruding - I'd be genuinely impressed to see a mill that can do a cutting operation (not just move) at that speed.
=Smidge=
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They've been an incredibly useful tool in engineering for decades because having a three-dimensional representation of
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Still a long way to go - they are still just a toy.
I'm always amazed at how dismissive people are of other's work. Yes they hae a long way to go but plenty of people use the for actual stuff. They are a long way away from being mere toys.
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 tea
How it happened? Easy: PATENTS expired. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:How it happened? Easy: PATENTS expired. (Score:5, Insightful)
Except no ONE person invented it. 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.
Anybody remember that scene in "A Beautiful Mind" where Nash points out that if everybody goes after the beautiful girl they block each other and nobody gets the girl? Patents on complicated devices are like that. Everybody ends up blocking everybody else and nobody can do much with the technology until the patents expire.
You see that with thermoacoustics. (Score:2)
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 a
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actually, reading this made me wonder what other patent expiries resulted in products going mainstream which otherwise couldn't have because of the ridiculous licensing...
Personally, I'm waiting for Sony's folding LCD patent to expire so I can have a 60" monitor that fits in my pocket.
Re:How it happened? Easy: PATENTS expired. (Score:5, Insightful)
Watching this space, what I think is interesting is how the open source community has helped proliferate the technology, the result has been an explosion of a very wide but shallow market (lots of companies each with a handful of not very perfected features, each with only a few customers). However only in the last year have those products been refined into printers that could be consider something that may make it into consumers hands.
It is a replay of the 1970 computer hobbyist scene. We are waiting for a few companies like an Apple, Microsoft or IBM to narrow the market again and get deeper penetration. This isn't a bad thing, as the expectations congeal around a minimum feature set (multicolor, automatic dissolvable scaffolding, WYSIWYG software, variable resolution to improve speeds, improved detail using feed-back loops, etc), only a few companies will be able to compete with the kind of hit-a-button-and-get-a-perfect-print-everytime experience that will take this from a garage experiment to a practical user experience. Those companies will get more mindshare, and be able to sell deeper into the market at a mass-produced price point.
Still most of the printer has pretty variable results. It turns out it takes a while to perfect the little details. It is the normal arc of technology, not just patents expiring.
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Your analogy is deeper than you realise.
We have the hit-a-button-and-get-a-perfect-print-every-time systems, however much like the computing scene of the 1980's (I'd say the 3D printers have now moved from 1970s to 1980s in computer terms) those machines are obscenely expensive to the point where no hobbyist, home or even small business user (unless they REALLY have to) considers them as a viable option.
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If it's a secret project, real skunk-works, then American companies don't care either. They only have to worry about patents for things that they sell publicly to the masses. If it's secret, and only for use in-house, or to select customers (like the CIA or mafia) then you really don't care about patents. Patents exist to keep inventors from being squirreled away with trade secrets, not talking about what they've invented. Patents are supposed to encourage innovation and people sharing each others work. If
Speaking of Patents ... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:How it happened? Easy: gigabytes of RAM (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Considering the print itself can take hours, it hardly matters if the initial calculation takes a couple milliseconds, or minutes...
They can matter if you sell what you make on it. (Score:2)
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
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No, the availability of cheap parts did.
The 80s and 90s were marked by a distinct downturn in the "maker" movement, or rather, hobbyists who would tinker for fun. You can see it in the magazines - former hobbyist mags started turning into consumer electronics extravaganzas as people cared less about soldering bits together and assembling PCs and doing all sorts of nifty software stuff with them. Interfacing things became a whole lot less interesting.
The 2000s changed all that when people started getting in
So were tablets (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Newton message pad?
Actually, you have to go back all the way to 1968 for the concept. ;-)
Next up: Desktop 3D Scanning (Score:1)
Tested In-Depth: Desktop 3D Scanning [youtube.com]
Don Lancaster, again and again and again (Score:1)
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
Making stuff to make stuff (Score:4, Informative)
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... [robots-everywhere.com]
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That is what I see too. Actually I see orings and gaskets as the first market. Why ship a tiny bag of 10 orings across the country to get a machine up and running when a local guy can print the orings and install them in an hour.
After that will be tiny replacement plastic pieces. and maybe some simple metal pieces.
in 30 odd years every car dealer will have a printer to replace body panels.
It may take 50-100 years before we start printing things like electronics but even just solid panels and fittings wou
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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.
It will be better to order the part from a 3D copy shop which can afford better equipment and processes, and have sufficient volume to justify the expense.
Guns (Score:1)
I bought my first 3D printed parts 4 vinyl cutter (Score:2)
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
Possibilities emerging... (Score:2)
Simple. They got affordable. (Score:2)
entire article (Score:2)
not one single picture of the machine or the cup it produced, fucking awesome
The 3D printing revolution isn't quite here yet. (Score:2)
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 highe
They Aren't (Score:2)
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Talking about 3D printers sure is mainstream, though.
But you can buy them on Amazon.... So... they must be mainstream... just because you didn't get one for Christmas... (grin)
patents (Score:2)
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.
Waterwhat? (Score:2)
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.