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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?

#41

Post by observationist »

foxglacier wrote: post #30
h2odragon wrote: post #9

Micro-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?

Microcontrollers and software for consumer PCs and the like could have been produced, probably, but there are a lot of areas of deep specialization. You'd have had to bring together all sorts of different disciplines and technologies the old, hard way - universities and libraries and researching manually. The internet allowed all of those things to coalesce easily, and novice level people gained access to high quality information and research at the click of a mouse.

The patents, compute, research access, and dozens of other relatively small barriers created a thicket of challenges and no obvious way to reconcile them, even if you had all the right ideas and inspiration. I think the internet would have been needed in order for all those ideas to come together in the right way.

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

#42

Post by OJFord »

Legend2440 wrote: post #34
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…

The big limiting factor IMO is CAD skills - otherwise you're just printing parts off thingiverse.

Don't underestimate the number of people that do that though.

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

#43

Post by silvestrov »

jerf wrote: post #19
LarsAlereon wrote: post #2

It 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…

AirFryers are even simpler than "sous vide cooking". No reason they couldn't have been invented in the 50s - 60s when kitchens had good electrical supply.

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

#44

Post by regularfry »

IIAOPSW wrote: post #14
cynicalsecurity wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He means just regular 3D printers used at home. But yeah, the title is confusing.

Nonetheless the misinterpreted question is also interesting. The technical hurdles people are citing for why small scale 3d printers didn't happen earlier are completely different than those of the large scale "home printers". Why didn't we have automatic concrete wall making machines much earlier?

The bits of home printing that a machine can do aren't the hard bits, except for very specific buildings where the wall shape is odd, which there's limited demand for. You end up where the choice is a complicated, failure-prone robot in a hostile environment vs a human or three who can do the job quicker once you factor in machine setup.

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

#45

Post by regularfry »

h2odragon wrote: post #9

Micro-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.

I don't think it needed microstepping. The first reprap board bit-banged H-bridges with a PIC, and even later boards only used A3982 drivers. Microstepping helps, but it came later.

You can look at early calibration settings descriptions and they're still talking about e.g. "The number of X stepper-motor steps needed to move 1 mm for the PIC."

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

#46

Post by evoke4908 »

Part of it is technological advancement. It wasnt until the last 15 years or so that embedded processors became cheap and powerful enough to run a 3D printer at consumer prices.

There's also the problem of 3D modeling and slicing. Again up until quite recently, 3D CAD was out of reach for most consumers. Either due to hardware capabilities or cost of the software. Slicing is its own entire branch of 3D processing and it took time to develop all the techniques we use today that make it fast and reliable. Slicing software could only exist after the printers were common.

As well, I expect the availability and materials science of the plastics we use needed some further development.

As I recall, 3D printers rose to prominence at about the same time and speed as we started getting genuinely powerful personal computers. You really needed a fast CPU, and printing became more accessible as the early I5/I7 generations became cheaply available.

While you absolutely could build an FDM printer with 80s technology, I don't think it could ever be practical or affordable. Even if someone invented all the computational techniques for slicing, the compute available back then was not even close. It would literally take an actual supercomputer to slice your model. It'd take many, many hours on any consumer computer. This would hold true until the early 2000s. At a random guess, I'd say the tipping point would have been around the Pentium 4.

So, same as most technologies we take for granted these days. Enabled almost exclusively by the speed and capacity of computer available to consumers.

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

#47

Post by regularfry »

syntaxing wrote: post #35

A mixture of patent protection, China’s (lack of) precision manufacturing at scale at that time, and software immaturity. LM8UU around 15 years ago when I started my 3D printing journey was upwards of $15 PER PIECE. You need at least 8 for a Mendel or i3 style printer during the reprap boom. Just the bearings alone would have cost you, $100 or so. Then factor in chrome rods, stepper motor, stepper motor drivers (Polo…

I don't think you can underestimate the development of efficient slicing algorithms. It might just have been something that would have happened anyway with other parts of the story in place, but there was a point in time when slicing anything complicated was very painful.

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

#48

Post by nkrisc »

When I started my Industrial Design degree in 2007 the workshop there already had several large, commercial 3D printers for student use.

Mind you they were nothing like the tabletop consumer ones we have today. They were about the same of a large American refrigerator.

Since it was not really any special or amazing for us to have several of them, I have to imagine that industrial 3D printing capabilities were well established by the point.

Edit: as I recall they were mostly used to make parts which could be given a nice surface finish and then from which silicone molds could be made.

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

#49

Post by jimnotgym »

OJFord wrote: post #42
Legend2440 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big limiting factor IMO is CAD skills - otherwise you're just printing parts off thingiverse.

Don't underestimate the number of people that do that though.

Until they have a little boat in each colour... and put the printer in the back of the garage to collect dust.

CAD skills are essential, and it turns out not as hard as you might have thought!

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

#50

Post by jeffreyrogers »

There weren't good CAD tools to send the designs to the machine until recently. Early CAD tools mostly produced drawings and it was a separate step to manufacture from there.

The way inkjet and laser printers work is also quite different from the way a 3d printer works. The similarity is mostly in the gantry, so there was nontrivial innovation required here.

To some extent 3d printing is probably also a reaction to decreased access to domestic manufacturing. It doesn't make a lot of sense to produce most parts in plastic if you can get a cast or milled part quickly and cheaply.

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