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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?

#91

Post by TuringTourist »

actionfromafar wrote: post #74
kragen wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microcontrollers and stepper motors were already controlling 2-D printers in the 01970s and early 01980s at higher speeds and similar powers to currently popular 3-D printers. The first RepRaps did not "use a full-power PC as their host machine"; they were controlled by AVRs, just like Arduino (which didn't exist yet). Generating motor control waveforms on a full-power PC is a nightmare nowadays, and was already a ni…

Now I'm very tempted to build a 3D printer with an 8-bit home computer and vintage parts.

Make your own 8-bit computer on breadboard a la Ben Eater for bonus points

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

#92

Post by slantyyz »

eesmith wrote: post #62
foxglacier wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you reconcile that claim with the existence of cheap consumer paper printers and hard drives?

"cheap consumer paper printers and hard drives" was not a 1970s thing. I mean, towards the end of the decade was something like the ImageWriter, which let you do bitmapped graphics, as a row of 9 dots at a time. At https://www.folklore.org/Thunderscan.html?sort=date you can read about the difficulties of turning it into a scanner. (Like, 'We could almost double the speed if we scanned in both directions, but it was h…

The Thunderscan, for the time, was pretty awesome though. I remember borrowing one from a classmate to make some scans. Given how we keep a document scanner in our pocket these days, the whole notion of sticking a scanner into a printer seems so antiquated and kinda crazy.

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

#93

Post by ForHackernews »

mongol wrote: post #86
inglor_cz wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An offtopic question: how do you manage to write all the years consistently with 0 at the start (I know why, but how ), when everyone around you uses a different standard. If I decided, IDK, to write "cnow" instead of "know", or "J" instead of "I", I wouldn't be able to do so consistently. Not in a world that massively uses the other word. Or it would take me twice as much time to double-check everything that I have…

I don't even know the why. Why?

I assume they're a fan of https://longnow.org/

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

#94

Post by superconduct123 »

kragen wrote: post #71

It took that long because nobody was working on it, because it wasn't obvious that a low-cost 3-D printer was feasible. The 3-D printers you're seeing today are basically the series of RepRap designs, named after famous scientists who studied self-reproduction: Darwin, Mendel, and Huxley. The RepRap project, which started in 02005, is the reason this happened. For the first several years, it was about half a dozen pe…

Its interesting to me that a lot of products the R&D comes from some big company

But for at home 3D printers it seemed like it was the hobbyists who did most of the R&D, then the companies came in later

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

#95

Post by Palomides »

kragen wrote: post #71

It took that long because nobody was working on it, because it wasn't obvious that a low-cost 3-D printer was feasible. The 3-D printers you're seeing today are basically the series of RepRap designs, named after famous scientists who studied self-reproduction: Darwin, Mendel, and Huxley. The RepRap project, which started in 02005, is the reason this happened. For the first several years, it was about half a dozen pe…

not talking about patents at the time was intentional, nobody was ignorant of the situation

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

#96

Post by dv35z »

johnny_canuck wrote: post #53
sottol wrote: post #25

I 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.

Check to see if there is a community maker-space in your area - including libraries & universities. One of the benefits of using those machines are that they are well-maintained and frequently used & tuned. Also, you can meet other 3D printing experts who can help you with any project - its a good vibe, and a great way to get back into making without a large investment...

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

#97

Post by whatusername »

the__alchemist wrote: post #29

Some 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…

I'm not sure how true that first statement is anymore. Most of the recommendations I see now are "just get a Bambu labs one". We are much closer to 3D printing as a utility as opposed to 3D printing as a hobby than we were ~3 years ago.

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

#98

Post by dghlsakjg »

Onavo wrote: post #27
Legend2440 wrote: post #12

3D 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.

The other big one for drones was sensors and the processing to run them. Trivially small cheap gyro position sensors, accelerometers, GPS, pressure sensors, etc... needed to exist since quadcopters are more or less incapable of flying without a computer in the loop.

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

#99

Post by dghlsakjg »

OJFord wrote: post #61
jimnotgym wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

I do, I've never printed one of those boats, but not everyone's interested. If you think of it as functional/decorative categorisation first of all, obviously some people will overlap but broadly speaking I think people are interested for one or the other, then within the 'decorative' camp you can go a hell of a lot further without and I think it's more obviously reasonable to not care about designing your own models…

Resin printers are HUGELY popular for people that paint miniatures and do tabletop stuff. Most of them never design characters and just buy the cad models to print.

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

#100

Post by mmmlinux »

1. Patents. 2. CAD software was HUGELY expensive for a long time. 3. Parts were expensive. economy of scale on things like linear bearings made this crazy. I recently took apart my first gen printrbot (it cost me ~$600 and was one of the cheapest ones at the time) and it was all brand name VXB bearings. because that's basically all that existed.
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