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This gets the current state of 3D printers half right. I wrote the same thing seven months ago http://hackaday.com/2016/04/28/the-makerbot-obituary/ http://hack
by wanderingjew 10y ago
This gets the current state of 3D printers half right. I wrote the same thing seven months ago http://hackaday.com/2016/04/28/the-makerbot-obituary/ http://hackaday.com/2016/04/28/the-makerbot-obituary/, and yes, the downfall of Makerbot was due to going closed source and shipping faulty 'smart' extruders.
However, the author gets it completely wrong by not looking at any of the other companies shipping reprap designs. https://www.lulzbot.com/ https://www.lulzbot.com/ has seen consistent yearly growth, from tens of thousands a month when the first MakerBots came out to tens of millions per month today. http://prusaprinters.org/ http://prusaprinters.org/ is experiencing the same growth, and that's despite an obscene number of clones of their machine on the market. The growth of 3D printing never stopped. If you look at the well-respected companies in the field, they're seeing consistent, increasing revenue.
The trouble with the industry is Makerbot. They burned their community with the change to closed source, they killed their industrial/educational market with the Smart Extruder problems, but they were the darling of the media. When Makerbot laid off employees, it made headlines. When manufacturing was outsourced to China, tech bloggers stumbled over themselves to get a post out. As Makerbot went south, so went the perception of the industry.
3D printing is still a growing industry, and the tech in low-end printers is getting really, really good. It'll never be a printer on every desk, but if you find a household with a circular saw or a soldering iron, you'll probably also find a 3D printer. That's what it should be, anyway: a tool, and not a fetishized technology.
- desireco42 10y agoI think the main issue is that there is no killer app. Anything that would make me want to buy one. Once that is figured out, everything else will fall into place.
- jacobolus 10y agoHow about Henry Segerman’s math sculptures? https://amzn.com/142142035X https://amzn.com/142142035X (Or you could just have Shapeways do the printing.)
- sdenton4 10y agoHaha, as a mathematician, the notion that math sculptures are the killer app to bring 3d printing to the masses is pretty suspect. Ultimately, these printers are one tool in an arsenal of tools for making things; they don't stand alone. There article gets it right that these are more likely to be tools for hobbyists and professionals who need lots of physical prototypes and (maybe) schools. These aren't trivial markets at all, but also aren't all of the people in the world, either.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- desireco42 10y agoIt's a good one (not sure why you deleted your comment). Thank you for this pointer.
- diyseguy 10y agoI envision Crayola being the first to put out a consumer grade 3d printer aimed at kids. Their creativity product line is pushing the envelope in refreshing new ways every time I pass that aisle in the stores.
- rebootthesystem 10y agoWell, the issue with 3D printing as I see it is 3D modeling. Anyone can fire-up a word processor and produce interesting looking documents and flyers. A lot less people can fire-up a paint program and produce interesting images. A lot less people than that can fire-up a 2D CAD program and produce 2D mechanical or architectural drawings. And yet a lot less people than that can run a 3D modeling program and product much beyond trivial trinkets. Beyond "Look! I printed this tiny Statue of Liberty from a file I got online" and "Check out the letter A I made!" lies real mechanical design. This is where mechanical things start to become useful. At that level you now need far better understanding of how to design multi-component mechanical assemblies, materials, etc. Anyone can do a little pyramid in Sketchup. Not everyone can design a full robotic hand with differential drive and force compliance. I imagine most folks buy 3D printers, print a few things they can get online and that's the end of it. A very few are inspired to learn some more and do some basic modeling. I can only see a very, very few go all out, learn advanced modeling and mechanical design and start to extract value out of their 3D printers.
- maturz 10y agoIt's pretty easy to create some useful things with https://www.tinkercad.com/ https://www.tinkercad.com/ I had no trouble using it with no previous 3d modeling experience.
- badsock 10y agoThis is one area where I think VR will produce a solid win. IMO the steepest parts of the modelling learning curve are the result of the complexity required to manipulate a 3D world using 2D interfaces. With VR, both the input and output interfaces have the same dimensionality as what you're building - I think that'll have a big impact on how easy it is to get into, and consequently how much content is created.
- ffwacom 10y agoThe interface to cad programs is trivial to learn, mechanical design isn't. It's like saying the hardest part about programming is using the IDE.