I knew someone who recycled paper printers into a home brew 3D printer and then a 2D shopbot style CNC.
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?
#22It was invented but protected by patents, so it wasn't until those patents expired that companies and hobbyists started to experiment. Early 3D printers hadn't figured out things like layer adhesion yet so parts tended to be too weak to be very useful. It wasn't clear that this was an area for improvement rather than a fundamental downside of the technology.
It's also easy to underestimate how much computation is involved and how little there was in the 70s. The 3D printer slicers generally require several seconds on modern hardware to calculate their final path. The resulting files are in the several megabytes. My Bambu 3D printer is all but festooned with sensors and is constantly adjusting things, but even the simple ones have more to their firmware than meets the eye…
Also 3D modeling software and hardware to run it.
Re: Ask HN: Why did consumer 3D printing take so long to be invented?
#23It was the polymers that needed to be invented. In the 1990s we used to order quick-turn prototype 3D prints for parts to check fit before committing to tooling for hard materials, but we only had 3 days to work with it before it fell apart into a puddle of goo.
Re: Ask HN: Why did consumer 3D printing take so long to be invented?
#24It was invented but protected by patents, so it wasn't until those patents expired that companies and hobbyists started to experiment. Early 3D printers hadn't figured out things like layer adhesion yet so parts tended to be too weak to be very useful. It wasn't clear that this was an area for improvement rather than a fundamental downside of the technology.
That's also my understanding. The 3D printing boom started when the patents expired.
Re: Ask HN: Why did consumer 3D printing take so long to be invented?
#25I think it's probably correct that few people *really* cared until the Reprap project showed a real DIY 3D printer was possible.
Early machines were industrial machines with huge price tags, proper linear motion systems, complicated extrusion systems and so on. There is a bit of a mental leap to go from seeing $100k+ machine and dreaming to design something that can be built for $200-500.
The problems were: no "reference designs", no tried and true go-to mechanical parts (like cheap chinese linear motion rails), extruders (they were DIYd!) or heated beds (early models were just PCBs) and so on - imo it just took someone to get this rolling and that may have well taken 30 years.
I think Reprap was first publicly shown around 2005. From then on it was taken on by more and more makers and refined. It culminated in the early 2010s hype with Makerbots and its contemporaries but they still cost > $1500 and were far from set-and-forget appliances, like 50% reliable and slow - we had one at work and I got fascinated but it printed at 5-20mm/s so parts would just take forever and often fail due to bed adhesion, clogs, ...
The last 10-15 years then have seen the popularization of 3d printers through the Prusa i3 and its clones (Ender and other cartesians Bambu imo got in at just the right time and refined everything that had culminated up to this point into a solid appliance. Imo their genius was more in the industrial design, making it reliable and affordable manufacturing than anything else.
Re: Ask HN: Why did consumer 3D printing take so long to be invented?
#26Is it actually better than homes built by other methods? The most expensive part of home is general the land it's built on.
It's actually that and dealing with permitting. The actual problem of creating some kind of durable, comfortable, shelter isn't all that hard from a technical point of view. Getting permission to build a house though is. Society kind of forces you into debt for a mortgage just to have a place that you can live in. The alternative of paying high rent is not a great alternative as you permanently lose the money.
There are all sorts of restrictions and rules that create this artificial scarcity. Even something as simple as buying a plot of land and parking a trailer on it is not legal in most places except in designated trailer parks. You can get a trailer for next to nothing. And lots of people live in them. But try finding a place where it is legal to put one down and live in one. If it were legal, lots of people would do that. Land plots are scarce and once you have one, you can't just do what you want with it in most places.
I'm just using trailers as an example here. Think prefab buildings and raw material cost. This isn't rocket science. We've been building shelters since the stone age.
There are of course good arguments for this to be made in big cities because of a lack of space. But it's equally frowned upon in areas where there's plenty of space.
Re: Ask HN: Why did consumer 3D printing take so long to be invented?
#273D printers were first invented in the 80s. There's a combination of several factors why they took off in the 2010s: 1. Cheap stepper motors and electronics from China 2. Expiration of Stratasys patents in 2009 3. Widespread availability of CAD software and desktop computers powerful enough to run it 4. Reprap project made it easy for companies (and individuals!) to develop their own printers
Number 1 is huge, it's also the primary driver of the shift from "model planes" to quadcopter drones with enormous capabilities. The crucial parts were brushless motors and ESCs. The Chinese scale brought the pricing down from ~3-4 figures to under 3 figures which was a watershed moment for hobbyist and commercial use cases.
Re: Ask HN: Why did consumer 3D printing take so long to be invented?
#28I think it's probably correct that few people *really* cared until the Reprap project showed a real DIY 3D printer was possible. Early machines were industrial machines with huge price tags, proper linear motion systems, complicated extrusion systems and so on. There is a bit of a mental leap to go from seeing $100k+ machine and dreaming to design something that can be built for $200-500. The problems were: no "refer…
Bannister Effect
Re: Ask HN: Why did consumer 3D printing take so long to be invented?
#29Some observations that I didn't see in the other comments:
- Home 3D printing is often more of a hobby than a traditional prototyping or engineering discipline. People view it as a skill to have, and a fun use of free time. Note how the cheapest and most finicky ones are popular; they can be made to work well through careful operation, troubleshooting, procedures, customization etc. They are not set-and-forget, and I think the userbase likes that.
- Home 3D printer parts (the motors, frames, electronics etc) are almost exclusively sourced from China. We live in an AliBaba world; that wasn't always the case.
Re: Ask HN: Why did consumer 3D printing take so long to be invented?
#30Micro-stepping controller chips. Before that, the precision available without gearing and feedback wasn't sufficient. There were systems but they were order of magnitude more complicated and several orders more expensive.
How do you reconcile that claim with the existence of cheap consumer paper printers and hard drives?