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The most realistic approach is probably to build an open-source printer which can drive proprietary cartridges (which would be refillable because the printer wo
by alpaca128 4y ago
The most realistic approach is probably to build an open-source printer which can drive proprietary cartridges (which would be refillable because the printer won't complain). People could even design different cartridge holders for a few different models.
It wouldn't be easy, but 3d printers also made immense progress despite technical challenges. I first heard about them in the reprap days and now we can buy well-engineered 3d printers with fancy features like resonance compensation ("input shaping").
- capableweb 4y agoPeople who are hacking in the free time often go towards hacking on things that are fun and interesting. When 3D printing appeared, it was (still is) immensely fun and interesting; "printing your own physical objects?!". On the other hand you have 2D printing on paper, which is nowhere near as fun and interesting, so you have less people gravitating towards hacking on 2D printing software and hardware. Granted, a few FOSS giants are obviously maintaining the stack, which is amazing. Same with programming languages for example. You give a developer unlimited free time to learn whatever language they want, they'll probably either go for a language that was newly released and hyped (like Rust) or something obscenely old (like COBOL), probably won't spend time learning PHP or Perl which are too old to be new but too new to be old.