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While the Matty's inventions may seem silly and frivolous, they signal something huge. He prototyped 350 physical inventions in 3 years. Thats roughly 3 days p

While the Matty's inventions may seem silly and frivolous, they signal something huge. He prototyped 350 physical inventions in 3 years. Thats roughly 3 days per item. When compared to how hard this was a decade ago, the cost to build physical prototypes has effectively fallen to 0. This is both in terms of the money and time. I really believe we'll see a renaissance of physical goods in the next decade. Previously you'd need to find a factory and contract with them to manufacture a minimum number of items. It would cost several thousand dollars at least and take weeks if not months to get your product. Once you have the physical item in your hand, you can start the testing process which feeds into the next iteration cycle.

sandworm101 4y ago
>> it would cost several thousand dollars at least and take weeks if not months to get your product. Or you made it out of wood. Or metal. Or clay. Or carved it by hand out of a block of plastic. Building and testing three or four versions of a tool is just a normal day for a shop carpenter or metal worker. Many of this guy's "inventions" are just jigs for holding things. Youtube is full of metal shops fabricating and testing jigs for strange use cases.
- spenczar5 4y ago
  I don’t know what carpenters you know who make 3 or 4 jigs a day, but that does not match my professional experience in carpentry at all. Maybe you get this impression from YouTube but that is very different from everyday work, it is theater.
  - sandworm101 4y ago
    I used to work in film/tv/live entertainment. The shops pumping out scenery and stage devices are probably not normal, but every day was some sort of innovation. If you are building a different product every day, creating new jigs to make those products is a daily task. A new bit of metal to secure a bit of equipment to camera rig, aka a "camera cluster", was a very normal daily thing.
    - spenczar5 4y ago
      That is very cool. But yes, it is extremely unusual. That is, like, the opposite of what most businesses want, which is to standardize the tasks and labor. A cabinet shop has a set of jigs that they use over and over and over.
      - thrashh 4y ago
        Ok but your experience is totally unrelated. This thread is about making prototypes which are one time jigs. The reason businesses aren’t making 3-4 jigs a day isn’t because they can’t but because they don’t want to. But if you’re prototyping, you are literally trying to create jigs. And this sub-thread is whether you could create jigs before 3D printers existed and you definitely can. Of course, it’s great that now you have both options, speaking from someone with a woodworking shop and a 3D printer, but I wouldn’t say there was such a substantial innovation in physical prototyping. The purpose of the movie set example was to illustrate that, if you want to, you can create constructions out of wood really quick, not that it’s normal for a business to do. If anything, the biggest innovation in at-home prototyping was how cheap microprocessors got. Because building circuits is way more painful and expensive than just chucking in a microprocessor.
    - nickpeterson 4y ago
      Yeah but Hollywood carpenters are in another class. They hire Han Solo to build doors in Hollywood.
      - bryanrasmussen 4y ago
        Luke looks at door: "What a piece of junk!"
      - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
        I have a friend who was one. He'd get a kick from that comment. This is what he does in his spare time, these days: https://www.youtube.com/@jimkehoe6495 https://www.youtube.com/@jimkehoe6495
  - runnerup 4y ago
    GP said 3 days per item, not 3 items per day.
- jolmg 4y ago
  Still, there is truth to their comment. It's at least become a lot more accessible to get the tools to do that sort of work with Amazon. 3d printing has also become more convenient and accessible. YouTube sheds a lot of light for a lot of people into how things are made. I think setting up an online store has probably become a lot easier, too. These things are big changes of the last 10-15 years or so.
ghaff 4y ago
There are tools/technologies to make creating certain types of prototypes fast and cheap. I don't think you can generalize that to physical goods broadly. If I want to experiment with new battery designs, I'm not doing that at no cost in an afternoon.
cornholio 4y ago
> the cost to build physical prototypes has effectively fallen to 0. That's a bit of an exaggeration. The cost to build prototypes of soft plastic objects in unusual shapes has significantly diminished. The cost to build electronic prototypes has decreased only marginally, mechatronics, robotics and most types of actuation are still a big boys club etc.
- ghaff 4y ago
  While 3D printers have been very useful for certain types of prototyping, I'd have to say that overall the excitement/hype around 3D printing you saw 10 or so years ago has significantly diminished.
  - grogenaut 4y ago
    Yes it's definitelyoved out of the hype curve into the are where it's actually useful. Which means it's actually doing stuff people aren't talking about yet or don't need to show off. I use my printers all the time and I'm Im only slightly more hyped now then when I figure out a new web framework, or a cool new way of thinking I about pandas. Just cause it's not hype doesn't mean it's not useful. How sexy is rail freight? Power grids. I don't see tons of hypes on my towns water supply.
- nine_k 4y ago
  As long as an electronic prototype can be made digital, things improved a lot with wide availability of Arduino, RPi, and ESP32 boards, and very accessible development tools for them. Many analog things can be modeled and evaluated using a fast enough CPU, which are cheaply available; see software-defined radios, for instance.
- akiselev 4y ago
  > The cost to build electronic prototypes has decreased only marginally, mechatronics, robotics and most types of actuation are still a big boys club etc. I strongly disagree. Not only have the non-recurring expenses in EE cratered thanks to extensive part libraries and reference designs but the cost of fab & assembly is easily a tenth of what it was a decade or two ago thanks to Chinese manufacturers. Open reference designs with design files are more common than ever, allowing anyone with a little EE knowledge to bootstrap even complex designs. The equipment necessary to solder BGAs at home have fallen to the hundreds of dollars, cheaper than a decent used Metcal. 6DOF robotic arms isn't even a big boys club anymore with several open source versions available off the shelf with fast turn around part availability from McMaster/Misumi and really cheap high tech parts like linear encoders, motors, stages, controllers, etc from Alibaba/express. All of these vendors allow hobbyists to prototype full blown industrial automation, let alone individual products. Open source 3d printers, CNCs, pick and places, and so on abound with plenty of quality open source firmware. People are even starting to tackle linear motors for high precision actuators, the kind you'd find in semiconductor fabs.
weego 4y ago
cost to build physical prototypes has effectively fallen to 0 ignoring the initial outlay of 3d printing and materials Previously you'd need to find a factory and contract with them to manufacture a minimum number of items That's never how initial product prototypes have been made. His first versions may be less janky than historic prototyping, but I think we're risking rewriting history to make 3d printing more grandiose than it actually is.
- snovv_crash 4y ago
  10 years ago I was at a company prototyping a new widget. We had 3 day turnaround from the local 3d printer for something the size of a cellphone, it cost over $1000, and the quality was garbage. Once we did basic usability testing with this, we went to a low-volume manufacturing run using silicone molds in Shenzhen and FedExed back, turnaround time about 10 days. Price $15k+. Once we were happy with this we did alu molds in Shenzhen for a batch of 500, and you don't want to know the price. Today I can get 3 hour turnaround for items the same quality as the silicone molds, just by getting our own liquid printer for about $1k. This really does change things for prototyping.
dangerboysteve 4y ago
Also take note of the companies what have sprung up to supply low volume manufacturing at good prices to aid in prototyping and access to specialized machinery. https://jlcpcb.com https://jlcpcb.com https://sendcutsend.com https://sendcutsend.com https://www.pcbway.com https://www.pcbway.com https://www.knifeprint.com https://www.knifeprint.com
- stavros 4y ago
  I use JLCPCB for small runs of fabrication and assembly of PCBs (I just got ten the other day), and love them. I have to wait a few weeks, but the quality is fantastic, and it saves me from soldering all the small SMD parts, for very cheap.
samwillis 4y ago
Rapid prototyping (both additive 3d printing and subtractive machining) has been readily available for decades. What's "new" in the last 10 years is the accessibility and cost of it. 15 years ago I could place an order with a local rapid prototyping company at 3pm and have the part (3d printed) on my desk by lunchtime the next day for under £100 (or much less for very small parts). But those printers were tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. Now for well under 1k you can have a 3d printer yourself.
mediaman 4y ago
I'm a partner in a plastics manufacturing facility (injection molding, thermoforming). 3D printing has been big for us. No, we don't make money directly from it, or not very much. And it's extremely expensive per unit. But it allows us to design a part for injection molding, and then iterate it many times until we are happy with the functionality of it. Once we commit to an injection mold, it might be $15k or $30k to get it made, and it'll take 6 months. But we know that the fit will be nearly perfect by the time those first shots come out. Then we can roll with making thousands or hundreds of thousands of parts per day at the efficiency of scale. The way that 3D printing is used by hobbyists looks fairly different than the way it's used in industry. In industry, we're mostly still using traditional design-for-manufacturing principles for the prototype: for example, we're designing it so that it could be injection molded and ejected properly from a mold, even though the 3D print doesn't need that. That's because our intent is to merely confirm what we see in Solidworks in the real world, and to show a customer an idea in their hands in the shape and form it'd actually be produced at scale. I'm not compelled by the idea that 3D printing is going to make a big difference by allowing very small runs of parts (except for prototyping in the manner above). That's because like everything, there is a power law when it comes to parts. Nearly all the revenue comes from medium and higher volume products. Sure, it's useful in niche applications, and for things like jigs, but as much as people love to talk about the power of long tails, it rarely is as good a fit to the real world as the power law. But the idea that 3D printing is making a big difference in improving the design and innovation with those medium to higher volume products made with conventional manufacturing methods is absolutely true.
- hinkley 4y ago
  Why does it take so long to make molds? Has prototyping reduced the number of molds you have made? Has that decreased the wait time, or are more people making molds and so the wait time is now increased instead?
  - analog31 4y ago
    I've worked in the plastics industry. A lot depends on the kind of mold of course. A mold can be somewhat complex when all is said and done, and made from a combination of parts that have to be ordered, or materials that are difficult to work such as hardened steel. Producing multiple pieces that fit together correctly and aesthetically can be an art. Whether the mold actually works in your machine without problems depends on the quality of the mold maker. And it could boil down to the fact that mold making is a mature industry with a lot of established supply chain and lead time expectations, and nobody is trying to rock that boat. Of course you don't want to spend all of that time to get a mold that you can't use because you screwed up on your end and forgot to add a needed feature. The world has not moved away from the benefit of a physical object that you can hold in your hand and see that it's actually right. And the 3d printed prototype can also let you check other things while the mold is being made, such as the fit of things like circuit boards, buttons, and connectors.

sandworm101 4y ago

>> it would cost several thousand dollars at least and take weeks if not months to get your product. Or you made it out of wood. Or metal. Or clay. Or carved it by hand out of a block of plastic. Building and testing three or four versions of a tool is just a normal day for a shop carpenter or metal worker. Many of this guy's "inventions" are just jigs for holding things. Youtube is full of metal shops fabricating and testing jigs for strange use cases.

spenczar5 4y ago
I don’t know what carpenters you know who make 3 or 4 jigs a day, but that does not match my professional experience in carpentry at all. Maybe you get this impression from YouTube but that is very different from everyday work, it is theater.
- sandworm101 4y ago
  I used to work in film/tv/live entertainment. The shops pumping out scenery and stage devices are probably not normal, but every day was some sort of innovation. If you are building a different product every day, creating new jigs to make those products is a daily task. A new bit of metal to secure a bit of equipment to camera rig, aka a "camera cluster", was a very normal daily thing.
  - spenczar5 4y ago
    That is very cool. But yes, it is extremely unusual. That is, like, the opposite of what most businesses want, which is to standardize the tasks and labor. A cabinet shop has a set of jigs that they use over and over and over.
    - thrashh 4y ago
      Ok but your experience is totally unrelated. This thread is about making prototypes which are one time jigs. The reason businesses aren’t making 3-4 jigs a day isn’t because they can’t but because they don’t want to. But if you’re prototyping, you are literally trying to create jigs. And this sub-thread is whether you could create jigs before 3D printers existed and you definitely can. Of course, it’s great that now you have both options, speaking from someone with a woodworking shop and a 3D printer, but I wouldn’t say there was such a substantial innovation in physical prototyping. The purpose of the movie set example was to illustrate that, if you want to, you can create constructions out of wood really quick, not that it’s normal for a business to do. If anything, the biggest innovation in at-home prototyping was how cheap microprocessors got. Because building circuits is way more painful and expensive than just chucking in a microprocessor.
  - nickpeterson 4y ago
    Yeah but Hollywood carpenters are in another class. They hire Han Solo to build doors in Hollywood.
    - bryanrasmussen 4y ago
      Luke looks at door: "What a piece of junk!"
    - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
      I have a friend who was one. He'd get a kick from that comment. This is what he does in his spare time, these days: https://www.youtube.com/@jimkehoe6495 https://www.youtube.com/@jimkehoe6495
- runnerup 4y ago
  GP said 3 days per item, not 3 items per day.
jolmg 4y ago
Still, there is truth to their comment. It's at least become a lot more accessible to get the tools to do that sort of work with Amazon. 3d printing has also become more convenient and accessible. YouTube sheds a lot of light for a lot of people into how things are made. I think setting up an online store has probably become a lot easier, too. These things are big changes of the last 10-15 years or so.

ghaff 4y ago

There are tools/technologies to make creating certain types of prototypes fast and cheap. I don't think you can generalize that to physical goods broadly. If I want to experiment with new battery designs, I'm not doing that at no cost in an afternoon.

cornholio 4y ago

> the cost to build physical prototypes has effectively fallen to 0. That's a bit of an exaggeration. The cost to build prototypes of soft plastic objects in unusual shapes has significantly diminished. The cost to build electronic prototypes has decreased only marginally, mechatronics, robotics and most types of actuation are still a big boys club etc.

ghaff 4y ago
While 3D printers have been very useful for certain types of prototyping, I'd have to say that overall the excitement/hype around 3D printing you saw 10 or so years ago has significantly diminished.
- grogenaut 4y ago
  Yes it's definitelyoved out of the hype curve into the are where it's actually useful. Which means it's actually doing stuff people aren't talking about yet or don't need to show off. I use my printers all the time and I'm Im only slightly more hyped now then when I figure out a new web framework, or a cool new way of thinking I about pandas. Just cause it's not hype doesn't mean it's not useful. How sexy is rail freight? Power grids. I don't see tons of hypes on my towns water supply.
nine_k 4y ago
As long as an electronic prototype can be made digital, things improved a lot with wide availability of Arduino, RPi, and ESP32 boards, and very accessible development tools for them. Many analog things can be modeled and evaluated using a fast enough CPU, which are cheaply available; see software-defined radios, for instance.
akiselev 4y ago
> The cost to build electronic prototypes has decreased only marginally, mechatronics, robotics and most types of actuation are still a big boys club etc. I strongly disagree. Not only have the non-recurring expenses in EE cratered thanks to extensive part libraries and reference designs but the cost of fab & assembly is easily a tenth of what it was a decade or two ago thanks to Chinese manufacturers. Open reference designs with design files are more common than ever, allowing anyone with a little EE knowledge to bootstrap even complex designs. The equipment necessary to solder BGAs at home have fallen to the hundreds of dollars, cheaper than a decent used Metcal. 6DOF robotic arms isn't even a big boys club anymore with several open source versions available off the shelf with fast turn around part availability from McMaster/Misumi and really cheap high tech parts like linear encoders, motors, stages, controllers, etc from Alibaba/express. All of these vendors allow hobbyists to prototype full blown industrial automation, let alone individual products. Open source 3d printers, CNCs, pick and places, and so on abound with plenty of quality open source firmware. People are even starting to tackle linear motors for high precision actuators, the kind you'd find in semiconductor fabs.

weego 4y ago

cost to build physical prototypes has effectively fallen to 0 ignoring the initial outlay of 3d printing and materials Previously you'd need to find a factory and contract with them to manufacture a minimum number of items That's never how initial product prototypes have been made. His first versions may be less janky than historic prototyping, but I think we're risking rewriting history to make 3d printing more grandiose than it actually is.

snovv_crash 4y ago
10 years ago I was at a company prototyping a new widget. We had 3 day turnaround from the local 3d printer for something the size of a cellphone, it cost over $1000, and the quality was garbage. Once we did basic usability testing with this, we went to a low-volume manufacturing run using silicone molds in Shenzhen and FedExed back, turnaround time about 10 days. Price $15k+. Once we were happy with this we did alu molds in Shenzhen for a batch of 500, and you don't want to know the price. Today I can get 3 hour turnaround for items the same quality as the silicone molds, just by getting our own liquid printer for about $1k. This really does change things for prototyping.

dangerboysteve 4y ago

Also take note of the companies what have sprung up to supply low volume manufacturing at good prices to aid in prototyping and access to specialized machinery. https://jlcpcb.com https://jlcpcb.com https://sendcutsend.com https://sendcutsend.com https://www.pcbway.com https://www.pcbway.com https://www.knifeprint.com https://www.knifeprint.com

stavros 4y ago
I use JLCPCB for small runs of fabrication and assembly of PCBs (I just got ten the other day), and love them. I have to wait a few weeks, but the quality is fantastic, and it saves me from soldering all the small SMD parts, for very cheap.

samwillis 4y ago

Rapid prototyping (both additive 3d printing and subtractive machining) has been readily available for decades. What's "new" in the last 10 years is the accessibility and cost of it. 15 years ago I could place an order with a local rapid prototyping company at 3pm and have the part (3d printed) on my desk by lunchtime the next day for under £100 (or much less for very small parts). But those printers were tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. Now for well under 1k you can have a 3d printer yourself.

mediaman 4y ago

I'm a partner in a plastics manufacturing facility (injection molding, thermoforming). 3D printing has been big for us. No, we don't make money directly from it, or not very much. And it's extremely expensive per unit. But it allows us to design a part for injection molding, and then iterate it many times until we are happy with the functionality of it. Once we commit to an injection mold, it might be $15k or $30k to get it made, and it'll take 6 months. But we know that the fit will be nearly perfect by the time those first shots come out. Then we can roll with making thousands or hundreds of thousands of parts per day at the efficiency of scale. The way that 3D printing is used by hobbyists looks fairly different than the way it's used in industry. In industry, we're mostly still using traditional design-for-manufacturing principles for the prototype: for example, we're designing it so that it could be injection molded and ejected properly from a mold, even though the 3D print doesn't need that. That's because our intent is to merely confirm what we see in Solidworks in the real world, and to show a customer an idea in their hands in the shape and form it'd actually be produced at scale. I'm not compelled by the idea that 3D printing is going to make a big difference by allowing very small runs of parts (except for prototyping in the manner above). That's because like everything, there is a power law when it comes to parts. Nearly all the revenue comes from medium and higher volume products. Sure, it's useful in niche applications, and for things like jigs, but as much as people love to talk about the power of long tails, it rarely is as good a fit to the real world as the power law. But the idea that 3D printing is making a big difference in improving the design and innovation with those medium to higher volume products made with conventional manufacturing methods is absolutely true.

hinkley 4y ago
Why does it take so long to make molds? Has prototyping reduced the number of molds you have made? Has that decreased the wait time, or are more people making molds and so the wait time is now increased instead?
- analog31 4y ago
  I've worked in the plastics industry. A lot depends on the kind of mold of course. A mold can be somewhat complex when all is said and done, and made from a combination of parts that have to be ordered, or materials that are difficult to work such as hardened steel. Producing multiple pieces that fit together correctly and aesthetically can be an art. Whether the mold actually works in your machine without problems depends on the quality of the mold maker. And it could boil down to the fact that mold making is a mature industry with a lot of established supply chain and lead time expectations, and nobody is trying to rock that boat. Of course you don't want to spend all of that time to get a mold that you can't use because you screwed up on your end and forgot to add a needed feature. The world has not moved away from the benefit of a physical object that you can hold in your hand and see that it's actually right. And the 3d printed prototype can also let you check other things while the mold is being made, such as the fit of things like circuit boards, buttons, and connectors.