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What doomed MakerBot? The Osborne effect

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Re: What doomed MakerBot? The Osborne effect

#71

Post by copsarebastards »

MakerBot is still in business. Yes, a 20% layoff is not a good sign, but it's a little early to say MakerBot is "doomed".

Taking it one step further and saying that it's the Osborne effect which caused their troubles is even less valid. There are a ton of different possible causes for MakerBot's troubles. The only honest answer here is that we don't know why MakerBot is having trouble, although there are a number of very good guesses we could venture.

The OP seems to be frustrated with MakerBot going closed-source. I share that frustration, but let's call that what it is, a frustration with MakerBot going closed-source, rather than using MakerBot's failures as an excuse to gloat.

Re: What doomed MakerBot? The Osborne effect

#72

Post by stan_rogers »

dragontamer wrote: post #61
Animats wrote: post #18

The MakerBot's problem is simply that low-end extruder-type 3D printers don't work very well.[1] They're easy to make, so there are lots of variations on that theme. TechShop has, over time, had one or two of all the major flavors. They're useful for making relatively thin parts, but anything taller than 3cm or so usually founders on the basic fact that ABS has too big of a coefficient of expansion to build something…

> The frontier in 3D printing seems to be to get the cost down on the high-end processes, which are now very good. The Form1, the low-end stereolithography printer, is a nice little machine, and it's real. TechShop SF and Hacker Dojo in Mountain View both have one. Form1 charges $145/liter for the working fluid, so that's how they make their money. High quality desktop CNC Mills are out. http://carbide3d.com/ $3000 f…

Easy-to-use already exists, it's getting it at a reasonable cost that's missing. ArtCAM, for instance, will gladly sell you something in the automobile-priced, dongle-secured range, that can handle all of the toolpath calculations, tool swaps, etc. (so you don't need to be a machinist to understand what's going to break and what's going to burn, etc.) But if you need $10K software to turn a model into instructions for your $2K mill, there's a bit of a prohibitive imbalance there from a hobbyist's perspective.

Re: What doomed MakerBot? The Osborne effect

#73

Post by vonnieda »

bane wrote: post #63

I'm pretty tech savvy, and I honestly can't find a reason, other than tinkering, to buy a 3d printer. In almost every case, the thing the printer would be making for me, at huge effort in time and materials, is solvable with a cheap, sub-$1 Chinese made part or some other more convenient alternative. The lack of real use-case is what's killing consumer-level 3d printers. Most people just don't need to run off a coupl…

I was in the same boat, until very recently.

I am the founder of OpenPnP, an Open Source SMT pick and place platform. I eschewed 3D printing for my design work for several years thinking that it was not accurate enough, not strong enough, etc. Having experience with CNC mills I kept comparing 3D printed parts to ones cut accurately from aluminum and found them lacking.

What I recently came to realize is that the power of 3D printing is in it's instant turnaround and the ability to quickly iterate. Now, I design my parts for 3D printing. They look and function differently than they would if I had cut them from aluminum and I have to take the limitations of 3D printing into account, but they work. And most importantly, I can test a new design simply by hitting "Print" and waiting an hour or two.

I agree that much of the consumer market is dominated by people who buy a 3D printer and then use it to print trinkets until they get bored, but there are also a lot of people out there who are engineering new devices and machines using the ability to quickly test new designs on a 3D printer.

Re: What doomed MakerBot? The Osborne effect

#74

Post by nkurz »

vonnieda wrote: post #73
bane wrote: post #63

I'm pretty tech savvy, and I honestly can't find a reason, other than tinkering, to buy a 3d printer. In almost every case, the thing the printer would be making for me, at huge effort in time and materials, is solvable with a cheap, sub-$1 Chinese made part or some other more convenient alternative. The lack of real use-case is what's killing consumer-level 3d printers. Most people just don't need to run off a coupl…

I was in the same boat, until very recently. I am the founder of OpenPnP, an Open Source SMT pick and place platform. I eschewed 3D printing for my design work for several years thinking that it was not accurate enough, not strong enough, etc. Having experience with CNC mills I kept comparing 3D printed parts to ones cut accurately from aluminum and found them lacking. What I recently came to realize is that the powe…

Are there advantages to the 3D printing process besides the speed? That is, if a fool-proof CNC mill was available for the same price, would you switch back? Is the price difference of the consumables a significant factor?

I have trouble shaking the feeling that printing 3D parts with little dabs of plastic has a lot in common with putting ink on pages with a dot-matrix printer. While they were revolutionary for the time, you don't see many dot-matrix printers these days.

Re: What doomed MakerBot? The Osborne effect

#76

Post by dragontamer »

stan_rogers wrote: post #72
dragontamer wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The frontier in 3D printing seems to be to get the cost down on the high-end processes, which are now very good. The Form1, the low-end stereolithography printer, is a nice little machine, and it's real. TechShop SF and Hacker Dojo in Mountain View both have one. Form1 charges $145/liter for the working fluid, so that's how they make their money. High quality desktop CNC Mills are out. http://carbide3d.com/ $3000 f…

Easy-to-use already exists, it's getting it at a reasonable cost that's missing. ArtCAM, for instance, will gladly sell you something in the automobile-priced, dongle-secured range, that can handle all of the toolpath calculations, tool swaps, etc. (so you don't need to be a machinist to understand what's going to break and what's going to burn, etc.) But if you need $10K software to turn a model into instructions fo…

MeshCAM (what comes free with the Nomad 883) is easy to use... although speeds and feeds still need to be manually inputted. But still, if you break your block of wood because you feed was too high, you just drop down the feed (or increase those RPMs) and spend $5 on another 2x4 block of wood.

Or if your RPM was too high and you smell burning, you drop it down on the next run.

In the worst case, if you catastrophically fail at those numbers and break say an end-mill ($20 to $50), that's still not that big of a deal. A major mistake / catastrophe still is cheaper to deal with than regular maintenance of say... a Form 1 stereo lithography plastic that costs something like $150 per liter.

I'd bet you that MeshCAM (again, free with the Nomad, $200ish otherwise) will create more precise parts than your typical Makerbot stuff anyway. Waterfall + Pencil Finish is more than enough to get the majority of projects done. (Steriolithography from Form1 looks... very impressive though, but the running costs are absurd in comparison)

ArtCAM, and other professional toolsets, are probably much better suited for professional artists who need to keep track of the grain of wood and the cutting direction. But... you can ignore the details of wood-grain and still come up with something with far more detail and precision than anything Makerbot can ever hope to do.

Basically, you start to care about those minor details with CNC machines because you actually have a machine that has such accuracy that those details matter. Also, $5 wood blocks and $20 leather (Drag Knife on a CNC machine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMoRUZnvbXw) honestly feel more "artisan" than the $100+/liter plastic that comes out of a Form1.

Re: What doomed MakerBot? The Osborne effect

#77

Post by [deleted] »

stan_rogers wrote: post #72
dragontamer wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The frontier in 3D printing seems to be to get the cost down on the high-end processes, which are now very good. The Form1, the low-end stereolithography printer, is a nice little machine, and it's real. TechShop SF and Hacker Dojo in Mountain View both have one. Form1 charges $145/liter for the working fluid, so that's how they make their money. High quality desktop CNC Mills are out. http://carbide3d.com/ $3000 f…

Easy-to-use already exists, it's getting it at a reasonable cost that's missing. ArtCAM, for instance, will gladly sell you something in the automobile-priced, dongle-secured range, that can handle all of the toolpath calculations, tool swaps, etc. (so you don't need to be a machinist to understand what's going to break and what's going to burn, etc.) But if you need $10K software to turn a model into instructions fo…

[deleted]

Re: What doomed MakerBot? The Osborne effect

#78

Post by vonnieda »

nkurz wrote: post #74
vonnieda wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was in the same boat, until very recently. I am the founder of OpenPnP, an Open Source SMT pick and place platform. I eschewed 3D printing for my design work for several years thinking that it was not accurate enough, not strong enough, etc. Having experience with CNC mills I kept comparing 3D printed parts to ones cut accurately from aluminum and found them lacking. What I recently came to realize is that the powe…

Are there advantages to the 3D printing process besides the speed? That is, if a fool-proof CNC mill was available for the same price, would you switch back? Is the price difference of the consumables a significant factor? I have trouble shaking the feeling that printing 3D parts with little dabs of plastic has a lot in common with putting ink on pages with a dot-matrix printer. While they were revolutionary for the…

The primary advantage is that a 3D printer is truly able to create features in any orientation in 3D while a typical mill cannot. The price of consumables isn't really something I consider important, especially when prototyping.

The thing that a lot of people don't realize about traditional machining operations is just how long they take to set up. I didn't, myself, until I bought a CNC mill. I thought it was just a matter of sticking a big hunk of metal in it, hitting Go and then coming back when it's done.

The first problem is that for a typical 3D axis milling machine you have to find a way to mount the material you intend to cut without getting in the way of the cutter, and if your part is at all complex this can be very tricky. Different materials and thicknesses all require different methods of mounting, and learning how to mount and setup a part is an education in itself.

The second problem is that a 3 axis mill can really only cut down. That means if you want a hole in the up/down Z axis, you are fine. If you want one in the X/Y axes you are out of luck. You have to finish your Z axis operations, unmount the part, turn it, find a new way to mount it, zero the machine to the new part configuration and then do more operations. If you have a part that has, for instance, mounting holes on several sides you are looking at a LOT of manual work to complete that part. And each time you remount the part you have to be able to tell the machine exactly how the part is mounted so that everything lines up.

Industrial machine shops get around this by using 5 or more axis mills. These are insanely expensive and not really available to the home / hobby engineer, although I am quite interested in what http://www.pocketnc.com/ is doing.

3D printers, on the other hand, are truly 3D. You can have features in almost any configuration and it's no more difficult to print than a simple cube. It is literally a matter of starting it up and coming back when it's done.

I don't think 3D printing is the be all end all of machining, especially FFF, but for the home or hobby engineer it's an incredibly powerful and easy to use technology right now.

Re: What doomed MakerBot? The Osborne effect

#79

Post by bborud »

bane wrote: post #63

I'm pretty tech savvy, and I honestly can't find a reason, other than tinkering, to buy a 3d printer. In almost every case, the thing the printer would be making for me, at huge effort in time and materials, is solvable with a cheap, sub-$1 Chinese made part or some other more convenient alternative. The lack of real use-case is what's killing consumer-level 3d printers. Most people just don't need to run off a coupl…

If I had been born 10-15 years later I might have held that opinion too. But I was born in the early 1970s and I have seen computers, mobile phones, Internet and a few other things go from not being a clear consumer product to where the consumer sector completely dwarfs the corporate sector.

I'm not really disagreeing with you: right now it doesn't feel like 3D printers are a typical consumer item.

But experience tells me that this intuition is probably wrong.

As for "who needs it right now" I usually ask people if they own a plunge saw. Most people don't, but a lot of people do. In particular carpenters and DIY'ers. 3D printers are still unfamiliar territory for most people, but that'll change rapidly as they become better and cheaper.

In the future, as they become cheaper and better I don't see it as impossible that manufacturers of physical goods might use 3D printing to distribute spare parts and accessories for whatever they sell.

Re: What doomed MakerBot? The Osborne effect

#80

Post by Animats »

dragontamer wrote: post #61
Animats wrote: post #18

The MakerBot's problem is simply that low-end extruder-type 3D printers don't work very well.[1] They're easy to make, so there are lots of variations on that theme. TechShop has, over time, had one or two of all the major flavors. They're useful for making relatively thin parts, but anything taller than 3cm or so usually founders on the basic fact that ABS has too big of a coefficient of expansion to build something…

> The frontier in 3D printing seems to be to get the cost down on the high-end processes, which are now very good. The Form1, the low-end stereolithography printer, is a nice little machine, and it's real. TechShop SF and Hacker Dojo in Mountain View both have one. Form1 charges $145/liter for the working fluid, so that's how they make their money. High quality desktop CNC Mills are out. http://carbide3d.com/ $3000 f…

Carbide3D is still at "preorder". PocketNC has a very nice 5 axis machine for about $3K, but they were demoing two years ago and still aren't shipping. Roland has some nice machines starting around $5000, and those are real, shipping products.

I'd really like to see PocketNC deliver.

Milling software remains a problem. For 3-axis machines and simple work, there's the Cut2D/Vcarve/Aspire line, which is easy to use. Most work at TechShop uses that program. At the high end, there's Hypermill - $22,000 a seat, but you get your money's worth.[1] Look at the videos of it controlling a 5-axis machine, with long thin tools working deep through narrow openings, without screwing up. In the middle, there's SprutCam, from Russia, which is startup-grade software - clever, but buggy. (I've used it.) Since in the CNC business, bad software results in rejected parts and tool and machine damage, buyers are unwilling to buy bad software.

There's some open source software for CAM, but it's below Cut2D, which is considered entry level.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnIvhlKT7SY

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