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Ask HN: Why did consumer 3D printing take so long to be invented?

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Re: Ask HN: Why did consumer 3D printing take so long to be invented?

#191

Post by simne »

fragmede wrote: post #122
kragen wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's plausible that our current 3-D printing design workflow has grown up in the computationally intensive way that it did because all that computation was available; it's easier to just use a least-common-denominator but bulky file format like STL than to worry about the incompatibilities that would result from using more expressive files. People have been doing CAD/CAM since the 01950s. Boeing started using CNC in…

Computation for the printer was possible, but home computing definitely was not there enough to let someone model something up in fusion 360 like we think of today. That was the realm of srs workstations like the ones SGI made. I don't think that's a show stopper though. If we had had 3D printers in the 1970's and 1980's, sold at Sears, between the computers and the tools, you'd bring home a paper catalog from the 3d…

> That was the realm of srs workstations like the ones SGI made

Not exact. First, funny note, Seymour Cray admit, he used Macintosh to design Cray.

Second, existed activity of using Atari ST for 3D design, as sort of companion machine for special model of Commodore, which could process analog video. As I seen, they directly write frame-by-frame on Betacam.

Sure, rendering on ST with 68k was slow even with TV resolution, but they made lot of commercials on TV.

In late 90s, TV commercials made on MMX or Pentium-Pro with 16..32mb of RAM, and use PC frame grabber cards and RAID HDD. And that's history, how SGI become bankrupt - just when Maya was ported to x86 this become end.

Re: Ask HN: Why did consumer 3D printing take so long to be invented?

#192

Post by simne »

kragen wrote: post #152
fragmede wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Computation for the printer was possible, but home computing definitely was not there enough to let someone model something up in fusion 360 like we think of today. That was the realm of srs workstations like the ones SGI made. I don't think that's a show stopper though. If we had had 3D printers in the 1970's and 1980's, sold at Sears, between the computers and the tools, you'd bring home a paper catalog from the 3d…

I agree that you couldn't have done Fusion 360 on an Apple ][ or a Compaq Deskpro 386. But see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42087099 for my notes on what kind of 3-D graphics you could have done on hobbyist computers of that time period and how we actually did do 2-D CAD on them.

It was time of Moore law, and computers grow extremely quickly. I remember, I run 3D Max 2 on 486 with 4mb of RAM in 1996.

Models where severe limited, at most few thousands triangles per scene, but it was enough for talents to make crazy things.

Re: Ask HN: Why did consumer 3D printing take so long to be invented?

#193

Post by 082349872349872 »

defrost wrote: post #181
082349872349872 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

000oops 000sorry 0for 0my 0hand, I'm 0not 0using 0iambic 000or 000any other 0aids*. 0You, 0are 00059 0from 0000here. * If GenAI is good at poetic forms, could it be asked to generate sentences with a particular mono- vs multi-syllable word pattern? Or would this search better be done in Prolog/with a TTS db?

Tr0cheeGPT (if you don't mind leading stress) will get you fl0wing like P0e: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8Z0VynTR84

DactylGPT 4o mini fails to count to six, let alone meet the other constraints of a double dactyl: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_dactyl#:~:text=Long%2ds...

If I'd attempted to use this to generate an irregular pattern, it'd probably have wound up producing messages decoding to something like "Sammwich Hewix"...

Re: Ask HN: Why did consumer 3D printing take so long to be invented?

#194

Post by Doxin »

kragen wrote: post #151
Doxin wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think PETG would've also worked. Keep in mind neither of those plastics were rare at the time. The filament form factor was essentially nonexistent though, which makes the whole 3d printing business a lot trickier.

It depends on what you mean by "rare". Both PETG and PLA were commercially available when RepRap started, but they weren't very widely used. PLA's biggest use at the time was reabsorbable medical implants, for example. I don't know what people used PETG for in 02005. I'm not sure either of them existed in the 01970s.

> PLA's biggest use at the time was reabsorbable medical implants

And in disposable forks that liked to advertise compostability. It's no ABS but it isn't and wasn't a rare plastic. I'm not actually entirely sure how common PETG was in products back then, but it's by no means a new invention.

Re: Ask HN: Why did consumer 3D printing take so long to be invented?

#195

Post by jkingsman »

artificialLimbs wrote: post #82
jkingsman wrote: post #13

I don't know that I'd argue that "consumer" 3D printing, as in a printer at home that just churns out a part when you want it, is even really hear yet, certainly not in the way that a dishwasher or lawnmower is. You need to do your own slicing, thinking through supports and brims and layer height, and the printers themselves need no small amount of troubleshooting that is much more than "turn it on and off again". So…

Bro maybe 3-5 years ago. I pulled my Ender 3v3 out of the box and hit print and it's been running almost constantly for a month. I don't even know what 'bed leveling' is, because it self levels, whatever that means.

I also found my printer (Elegoo Neptune 3 Pro) to be flawless for about a month until it started needing more conscious levelling and bed cleaning between prints, started getting fussier about temperatures (ended up replacing a possibly faulty thermistor that was making my bed temp fluctuate), and dealing with waterlogged filament and needing to solve that with filament driers etc.

I'm not saying it /can't/ be smooth, but I contrast it to my dishwasher, which I expect to wash dishes, correctly and successfully, about 99/100 dishes (assuming I rinse them well), and then when it starts to decline in 3-5 years, that it's time for a new one. 3D printers are not to that level of reliability yet, nor are their support systems around slicing/supporting/etc.

Re: Ask HN: Why did consumer 3D printing take so long to be invented?

#196

Post by scotty79 »

fxtentacle wrote: post #190
scotty79 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wonderful illustration of how terrible patents are for technological developments of humanity and for consumers in general.

You're not wrong. But at the same time, I feel like a patent is roughly the only thing that could stop a wealthy international corporation from just copying my new product and then out-competing me with their generous marketing budget. If the expected payout is large enough, a patent will then also help me find a law firm who's willing to work purely on commission, meaning it causes one of those rare instances where…

Try it. It's not. The best case scenario it might make some huge corporation generously throw you some peanuts for your patent so it can use it for protection against other's creativity and to extort them.

Other corps will just use your invention and just skip the markets where you have a patent. And yet their product will find its way there organically.

Many individual inventors that got patents openly talk about how useless and expensive they are.

Re: Ask HN: Why did consumer 3D printing take so long to be invented?

#197

Post by Suppafly »

stevekemp wrote: post #149
kragen wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Floating-point was ubiquitous in the BASIC interpreters on early home computers. It was just slow. CP/M didn't really do paging, although you could read and write 128-byte records to disk. But CP/M disks were typically only 90 kibibytes, or maybe up to a mebibyte for 8-inch floppies. And a lot of hobbyist home computers omitted disk drives because they were too expensive.

Sure floating point is possible, but if you're thinking of something like a 6502 or Z80 you'd have to implement it yourself - no maths co-processor, or dedicated instructions for it. In terms of paging I was thinking of paging in later layers of data from disk, perhaps from a large file, perhaps from a series of files. But CP/M certainly did have support for paging RAM, in 3.x, if your hardware supported it. (My own…

Assuming you're using a pile of old hardware, you likely could dedicate some of it to just doing floating point math.

Re: Ask HN: Why did consumer 3D printing take so long to be invented?

#198

Post by Suppafly »

kragen wrote: post #161
Suppafly wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They wasted a lot of time trying to make it work without even a heated bed, to keep costs down. I'm not trying to downplay the reprap team and their work did lead to some of the innovations in home 3d printing, but I suspect a lot of the project is like this, losing time by ignoring things that already existed and trying to reinvent things using cheap household items by going down unnecessary rabbit holes. Thank god…

That's easy to say with the benefit of hindsight! But before going down the rabbit holes, we didn't know which ones were unnecessary. If you didn't go down any of the rabbit holes, you'd end up with a US$60k machine built around US$5k ballscrews and ABS and whatnot. The point at which people serious about making a shippable product got involved was already after it was no longer theoretical.

>If you didn't go down any of the rabbit holes, you'd end up with a US$60k machine built around US$5k ballscrews and ABS and whatnot.

Honestly that's the normal way to do product design, start with the expensive version that works and then slowly redevelop it to use cheaper parts, or make big enough purchases that the cost of the parts naturally comes down.

I get that you were involved in the project, and won't hear of any criticism, but people serious about shipping instead of tinkerers would have done things differently, and there is no reason to deny or get upset about that.

Re: Ask HN: Why did consumer 3D printing take so long to be invented?

#199

Post by 082349872349872 »

082349872349872 wrote: post #193
defrost wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tr0cheeGPT (if you don't mind leading stress) will get you fl0wing like P0e: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8Z0VynTR84

DactylGPT 4o mini fails to count to six, let alone meet the other constraints of a double dactyl: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_dactyl#:~:text=Long%2ds... If I'd attempted to use this to generate an irregular pattern, it'd probably have wound up producing messages decoding to something like "Sammwich Hewix"...

Direct ways offer an intermediate process coding a message. Unfortunately doing it oneself is astonishingly glacial; using a linebreak algorithm prolly would somehow help, nonetheless dyads & monads come slowly; difficulty besets the coding.

Re: Ask HN: Why did consumer 3D printing take so long to be invented?

#200

Post by kragen »

simne wrote: post #187
kragen wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on what you mean by "rare". Both PETG and PLA were commercially available when RepRap started, but they weren't very widely used. PLA's biggest use at the time was reabsorbable medical implants, for example. I don't know what people used PETG for in 02005. I'm not sure either of them existed in the 01970s.

Nearly all plastic bottles under 10 metric liter are PET (many 10 liters produced from Poly(methyl methacrylate)). PETG is modified PET, so it depend on point of view - (glass semi-full or semi-empty). Any way, in Ukraine people recycle plastic bottles into filament, which is considered by printer software as PETG.

Yes, PET is the most common plastic!
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