Live data from Hacker News

3D-printed neighborhood nears completion in Texas

yahoo.com

91–100 of 121 posts

Re: 3D-printed neighborhood nears completion in Texas

#91
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It’s a gimmick" Early attempts always look gimmicki. Putting a camera in a phone, crazy, who needs it, just a gimmick. I use my phone to dial numbers and make calls. This looks like it has a lot of room to grow and adapt. Materials change. Just look at how 3d printers have changed in 10 years.

3d printers haven’t changed that much… they’ve gotten easier to use, sure, but the materials and quality we’re printing is about the same as 10 years ago.

Maybe it was 20? I just remember they took expense fluids, hard to keep, fragile. Then month ago I was in a Micro Center, and there were dozens of very fancy printers that could take dozens of types of line feeds.

Re: 3D-printed neighborhood nears completion in Texas

#92
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing you can’t do with classical drywall. Curved walls, ornamentation, patterns, integrated furniture… you name it. 3d printing has a huge limitation here - you need support to print over empty area. I am sure it’s not fun removing concrete support pieces from huge concrete structure without cracks.

> There is nothing you can’t do with classical drywall. Curved walls, ornamentation, patterns, integrated furniture… you name it Okay, I name compound curves. Can I do that with drywall?

Yes you can. It’s the frame behind drywall then. Probably CNC cut plywood construction. And it’s more art than anything you might get from standard construction company. And crazy decorative art can be made from gypsum and integrated into drywall.

Re: 3D-printed neighborhood nears completion in Texas

#93

I think everyone is missing the real reason for this. From TFA: > requires fewer workers what TFA didn't say, and which I'm sure is also true, is that the workers can also be less skilled. I found it fascinating that interior walls are also concrete, and wifi signals are blocked. I betcha cellular doesn't fare too well either, and not easily fixed with multiple access points.

I don’t care how many workers it takes if the result still costs $600k. Unless the houses can sell for half of traditional housing costs their main market will be building houses on the moon.

The builder cares. The buyer doesn't care too much either way what the construction technique is. They will be sold on the high insulation value, tornado resistance and so on. Not the fact that it costs less to build which is opaque anyway.

Re: 3D-printed neighborhood nears completion in Texas

#94
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It’s a gimmick" Early attempts always look gimmicki. Putting a camera in a phone, crazy, who needs it, just a gimmick. I use my phone to dial numbers and make calls. This looks like it has a lot of room to grow and adapt. Materials change. Just look at how 3d printers have changed in 10 years.

3d printers haven’t changed that much… they’ve gotten easier to use, sure, but the materials and quality we’re printing is about the same as 10 years ago.

Feels like 3D printers have changed. A slicer from 10 years ago is not going to generate as good a print as one from today. And it feels like the variety of filaments from 10 years ago has greatly changed.

Re: 3D-printed neighborhood nears completion in Texas

#95

Seems pointless and expensive, and it's concrete that doesn't lend itself to modification or repair. 3D printing in this case appears to be used as a tech gimmick rather than an actually-scalable process, or it would already be in-use everywhere. The most inherently sensible home would be protected from wind (derecho, hurricane, and the uncommon tornado), fire, flooding, and severe heat and cold (and associated clima…

I have toured the Icon houses at Wolf Ranch. I went through their show house, but I also went to some of the houses under construction and examined them and talked to the workers a bit. You couldn't approach them them while the printer was running -- note also, they have a next-gen printer that looks more like a cement pumper crane arm, these were the previous ones.

Anyway the modification of them is addressed in some of the videos in the show house. Essentially you use a circular saw with masonry teeth to cut new holes, they provide shade-matching grout to fill in an old hole. It's less flexible than sheetrock but about what modifying a cinder block wall would be. Unlike most cinder block commercial buildings, the wiring is inside the wall and not in an exposed conduit, there might have been one exception in a bathroom or something.

Over all, to my non-professional opinion, it seemed more expensive than traditional "stick built" but also higher quality, probably worth it if you wanted a high quality structure.

I have also visited their site in South Austin on St. Elmo, and the small "tiny houses" they built in the Community First village for the ex-homeless, but I wasn't able to go inside those.

My overall impression is that it's a great technology that will be used for more and more structures. Thus far I think they have been too traditional in their floor plans, they have been focusing on showing that they can build real up-to-code houses that banks will accept as collateral. Hopefully with their new cheaper printer, maybe in some area outside of HOAs and zoning, they can starting making some more interesting houses -- like round towers Victorian style, for example.

Re: 3D-printed neighborhood nears completion in Texas

#96

How would plumbing and wiring work? The article states that the wall is a semi-hollow, corduroy pattern, so do the printers leave openings in the walls so pipes/wiring get shoved into them after?

Yes. I visited that site and examined some of the partially constructed buildings, and talked to a couple of the workers.

They have videos discussing how you would add a light switch or remove one -- basically a mansonry hole saw, and matching grout to fill in.

It seemed slightly more trouble to do modifications than a cinder block wall, but the quality and strength was much higher. I went with low expectations but I was impressed.

I didn't see any walls at the stage of construction where I could see what the insulation was, whether is was expanding foam or fiberglass.

Re: 3D-printed neighborhood nears completion in Texas

#97
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It’s a gimmick" Early attempts always look gimmicki. Putting a camera in a phone, crazy, who needs it, just a gimmick. I use my phone to dial numbers and make calls. This looks like it has a lot of room to grow and adapt. Materials change. Just look at how 3d printers have changed in 10 years.

3d printers haven’t changed that much… they’ve gotten easier to use, sure, but the materials and quality we’re printing is about the same as 10 years ago.

3d printers have changed significantly. They used to be very finicky and hard to get a decent print. Lots of tweaking and it was different for every printer.

They have evolved into true click and forget machines.

Re: 3D-printed neighborhood nears completion in Texas

#98
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It’s a gimmick" Early attempts always look gimmicki. Putting a camera in a phone, crazy, who needs it, just a gimmick. I use my phone to dial numbers and make calls. This looks like it has a lot of room to grow and adapt. Materials change. Just look at how 3d printers have changed in 10 years.

3d printers haven’t changed that much… they’ve gotten easier to use, sure, but the materials and quality we’re printing is about the same as 10 years ago.

I tear apart medical and other machines to recycle parts. I do often see 3d printed parts inside commercial machines, probably because they are making so few of them and it's more economical to just print a couple specialized parts.

Re: 3D-printed neighborhood nears completion in Texas

#99
Lots of cynical takes here. Its cool. Time will tell if this method makes sense. One concern I have is in Texas the extreme weather and clay soil causes foundations to move. Lots of houses have foundation problems. Foundation shifts will likely translate into cracks.

Re: 3D-printed neighborhood nears completion in Texas

#100
post #64

If you have the ability to pump concrete, and a gantry across the whole site, why wouldn't you pick and place concrete blocks or other materials rather than concrete the whole thing on site? Also, aren't these walls significantly more CO2 unfriendly than lumber, and more difficult to renovate? What if I need to get a builder in to do repairs, is there a concrete wall guy who knows how to repair them? Can it print mul…

Is it purely that this robot never takes vacation and never asks for a raise? Feels a lot like this permits building a home largely without human labor, which I'm sure the VC class would be very excited about.

Not only that but also quality is consistent, more so than with human builders.

The quality of timber framed houses can vary considerably depending on who built them.

Post reply on HN