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Ask HN: Why did consumer 3D printing take so long to be invented?
51–60 of 215 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why did consumer 3D printing take so long to be invented?
#52I 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…
I remember reading articles in hobby electronics magazines circa 1990 where people were talking about 3-d printing as a nascent technology.
Re: Ask HN: Why did consumer 3D printing take so long to be invented?
#53I 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…
I'm curious how much better the printers are these days as I'd love to get another one.
I had a Wanhao Duplicator i3 in 2015 and found it required a lot of tinkering and calibration every time I wanted to use it. I ended up selling it as it was so time consuming to get everything correctly set up that it just killed any interest I had in it.
Re: Ask HN: Why did consumer 3D printing take so long to be invented?
#54I 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…
I'm curious how much better the printers are these days as I'd love to get another one. I had a Wanhao Duplicator i3 in 2015 and found it required a lot of tinkering and calibration every time I wanted to use it. I ended up selling it as it was so time consuming to get everything correctly set up that it just killed any interest I had in it.
Nowadays spending 500-1000 USD on a machine gets you something that can print almost anything (within size limitations) out of the box with no calibration. The BambuLab printers are nothing short of extraordinary for quite reasonable prices (the A1 mini is only like 300 bucks, but it's small). And their software stack is good enough that 3D printing is roughly as easy as 2D printing (with the same caveats that occasionally your machine will jam and you'll want to chuck it out a window).
Re: Ask HN: Why did consumer 3D printing take so long to be invented?
#55The pieces did NOT exist in the 1970s. Fast microcontrollers, stepper motors, precision miniaturized manufacturing, reliable and cheap miniaturized DC electronics, and far far more technology was non-existent at any kind of affordable price point. Look at kitchen appliances or metal/wood shop machinery from this era, still heavily analog, mostly made from sheet steel, mostly non-computerized. The 80s would bring better microprocessors but even the simple Nintendo was an inflation adjusted $450. For comparison the first RepRaps used a full power PC as their host machine and their materials cost roughly $1000 in today USD and needed parts from a commercial stratasys machine.
Some of the greatest and most under appreciated technological achievements in the last 40 years have been in materials science and miniaturization.
Re: Ask HN: Why did consumer 3D printing take so long to be invented?
#56[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Why did consumer 3D printing take so long to be invented?
#57In my experience, it really took off when PLA filament became commonplace.
ABS and UV-cured epoxy emitted noxious fumes which required separate ventilation systems and weren't really suitable to be used at home.
Early home 3D-printers also required more of the user. It took a lot of tweaking to make them produce decent prints.
Re: Ask HN: Why did consumer 3D printing take so long to be invented?
#58I 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…
I'm curious how much better the printers are these days as I'd love to get another one. I had a Wanhao Duplicator i3 in 2015 and found it required a lot of tinkering and calibration every time I wanted to use it. I ended up selling it as it was so time consuming to get everything correctly set up that it just killed any interest I had in it.
I had a Makerbot 2X in 2014 and it required constant janitoring every time I wanted to print.
I built a Prusa MK4 this spring; it calibrated itself and printed a great looking piece right from the get-go. The difference is night and day.
Re: Ask HN: Why did consumer 3D printing take so long to be invented?
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Air fryers are just convection ovens packaged differently.
Re: Ask HN: Why did consumer 3D printing take so long to be invented?
#60The answer to this is the same reason why flying cars aren't ubiquitous. Inventory and discovery is often the easy part.