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Ask HN: Why did consumer 3D printing take so long to be invented?

"Today I saw an old paper printer, it has all the pieces for 3D printing except the plastic. Computer sends it data, it moves in 1D to print the image on paper using ink. A 3D printer is just 3 of these moving pieces from a paper printer with a melting plastic and thin pipe and software to connect it all. All the pieces existed to make a working 3D printer existed even in 1970! and relatively cheaply. So why has it taken so long for [at home] 3D printing to actually become a thing? Is it because of the internet somehow? Did just no one care in the 1970-2010s? Like there aren't even prototypes from 1970 from garage hobbyists for 3D printing. What was wrong?!" - omgsoftcats

refulgentis 2y ago
Computers in 1970 were so slow we hacked in saying lightness, a scientific measure of color, was the average of the two highest color channels.
LarsAlereon 2y ago
It was invented but protected by patents, so it wasn't until those patents expired that companies and hobbyists started to experiment. Early 3D printers hadn't figured out things like layer adhesion yet so parts tended to be too weak to be very useful. It wasn't clear that this was an area for improvement rather than a fundamental downside of the technology.
- WillPostForFood 2y ago
  Yes! The fused deposition modeling (additive printing) patents expired in 2009, which triggered the wave of innovation and home 3d printing. https://futurism.com/expiring-patents-set-to-improve-3d-world https://futurism.com/expiring-patents-set-to-improve-3d-worl...
- jerf 2y ago
  It's also easy to underestimate how much computation is involved and how little there was in the 70s. The 3D printer slicers generally require several seconds on modern hardware to calculate their final path. The resulting files are in the several megabytes. My Bambu 3D printer is all but festooned with sensors and is constantly adjusting things, but even the simple ones have more to their firmware than meets the eye. Even assuming that they'd use some simpler algorithms and data structures, you're looking at vast computation times, and most likely, vastly simpler objects being printed. Even something that seems as simple as "sous vide" cooking, which is basically a heater hooked to a thermocouple, took a lot of little innovations to make practical to hand to the masses. And then, there's the general improvement in motors speed, precision, and cost, along with any number of advancements here and there and everywhere to make it practical. Could someone thrust back to the 1970s and given a fairly substantial budget make some kind of 3D printer? Probably. But it's slow, extremely expensive, and can print various sizes of plastic bricks and spheres and other very algorithmically simple objects, and in rather low quality without many, many years further development. I can think of many ways of bodging on various improvements, but they're all going to have their own compromises, not be garden paths to what we now think of as modern 3D printing. (For example, someone could bodge together a machine that offsets a rod on the printer head, and then in the offset space, has an object to be "copied", by basically banging into the object with a very crude sensor, so there's no generation of geometry at all. But this is going to be clumsy, inaccurate, and full of very complex and disheartening limitations.) You're not going to be printing Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson's face embedded into a toilet [1] or anything, at 1MB of geometry. It will be commercially useless and inaccessible to hobbyists. [1]: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6436138/files https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6436138/files
  - etrautmann 2y ago
    Also 3D modeling software and hardware to run it.
  - silvestrov 2y ago
    AirFryers are even simpler than "sous vide cooking". No reason they couldn't have been invented in the 50s - 60s when kitchens had good electrical supply.
    - creaturemachine 2y ago
      Air fryers are just convection ovens packaged differently.
      - jdietrich 2y ago
        Sort of, but not really. Air fryers have a much faster rate of airflow than any convection oven, which results in significantly faster and more even cooking. The air fryer really is a meaningful technological development.
        knowitnone 2y ago
        if you consider adding a fan as "meaningful technological development"
        ozim 2y ago
        Well it is. We had electrical ovens without fan that were great. We had electrical ovens with a fan that were great. Air fryer has much more advanced fan with much more power than earlier. For me this is how meaningful technological progress happens. It is not like someone one day wakes up and suddenly has rocket that reached space caught back on landing by mechanical arms.
        ProllyInfamous 2y ago
        I just purchased my first air fryer summer 2023 — it has changed my cooking life, allowing me to rarely ever "eat out" without much meal prep. "Just adding a fan" is actually an extremely meaningful tech development.
- fxtentacle 2y ago
  That's also my understanding. The 3D printing boom started when the patents expired.
  - scotty79 2y ago
    Wonderful illustration of how terrible patents are for technological developments of humanity and for consumers in general.
    - fxtentacle 2y ago
      You're not wrong. But at the same time, I feel like a patent is roughly the only thing that could stop a wealthy international corporation from just copying my new product and then out-competing me with their generous marketing budget. If the expected payout is large enough, a patent will then also help me find a law firm who's willing to work purely on commission, meaning it causes one of those rare instances where I might be able to meet an international corp at eye level, even if I'm a solo inventor.
      - scotty79 2y ago
        Try it. It's not. The best case scenario it might make some huge corporation generously throw you some peanuts for your patent so it can use it for protection against other's creativity and to extort them. Other corps will just use your invention and just skip the markets where you have a patent. And yet their product will find its way there organically. Many individual inventors that got patents openly talk about how useless and expensive they are.
lawlessone 2y ago
Is it actually better than homes built by other methods? The most expensive part of home is general the land it's built on.
- cynicalsecurity 2y ago
  He means just regular 3D printers used at home. But yeah, the title is confusing.
  - superconduct123 2y ago
    Ya I've updated the title to consumer to be clearer
  - IIAOPSW 2y ago
    Nonetheless the misinterpreted question is also interesting. The technical hurdles people are citing for why small scale 3d printers didn't happen earlier are completely different than those of the large scale "home printers". Why didn't we have automatic concrete wall making machines much earlier?
    - regularfry 2y ago
      The bits of home printing that a machine can do aren't the hard bits, except for very specific buildings where the wall shape is odd, which there's limited demand for. You end up where the choice is a complicated, failure-prone robot in a hostile environment vs a human or three who can do the job quicker once you factor in machine setup.
- jillesvangurp 2y ago
  It's actually that and dealing with permitting. The actual problem of creating some kind of durable, comfortable, shelter isn't all that hard from a technical point of view. Getting permission to build a house though is. Society kind of forces you into debt for a mortgage just to have a place that you can live in. The alternative of paying high rent is not a great alternative as you permanently lose the money. There are all sorts of restrictions and rules that create this artificial scarcity. Even something as simple as buying a plot of land and parking a trailer on it is not legal in most places except in designated trailer parks. You can get a trailer for next to nothing. And lots of people live in them. But try finding a place where it is legal to put one down and live in one. If it were legal, lots of people would do that. Land plots are scarce and once you have one, you can't just do what you want with it in most places. I'm just using trailers as an example here. Think prefab buildings and raw material cost. This isn't rocket science. We've been building shelters since the stone age. There are of course good arguments for this to be made in big cities because of a lack of space. But it's equally frowned upon in areas where there's plenty of space.
cynicalsecurity 2y ago
Are many people going to buy a home 3D printer? It's not a profitable business.
- JohnFen 2y ago
  You don't have to have a large market in order to have a profitable business. That said, the market for 3D printers at home is larger than many assume, especially as printers get closer to being simple one-button-push kinds of things. They will probably never be the sort of thing that exists in every home, but they could very well be the sort of thing that exists in every home workshop.
- Legend2440 2y ago
  Huh? There are millions of people with a 3D printer in their home. They're so cheap now that people buy them for their grandkids.
dekhn 2y ago
I don;t think anybody was really doing FDM/FFF until the 90s and it didn't really take off until the 2000s. It was quite expensive, required a high level of expertise in both mech E and CS, and existing subtractive methods (like CNC and lathe) were very effective.
vel0city 2y ago
One thing to think about is you'd need quite a beefy machine to even properly render the gcode in the 70s and 80s. In this age of printers computers often didn't even have fonts, they were ROM cartridges your printer would take. And even into the 90s there were accelerator cards for printing documents and talking to the printer in alternative ways than parallel ports. So really, for an average hobbyist the idea of a 3D printer controllable from a home PC wouldn't really be possible until like the mid 90s. So you really need to start your look at why it wasn't a thing at some point in history I'd start the digging there, not the 1970s.
- kragen 2y ago
  If by "render the gcode" you mean "interpret the G-code" then, no, G-code dates from 01963 and is easier to interpret than the BASIC that home computers used in the 01970s. If by "render the gcode" you mean "produce the G-code" then it depends on the geometry you're producing G-code for, and the algorithms you're using to do it, but potentially being able to do it overnight gives you a lot of flexibility there. People were doing computer numerical control with the APT language already in 01959.
  - vel0city 2y ago
    I mean "render the gcode" as in going from a 3D model to the gcode you want your tool to follow. Following the gcode would be generally pretty simple; I agree. However, I doubt most home hobbyists had computers in their house in 00000000001959 capable of manipulating 3D graphics in a meaningful way that would really be approachable to a general hobbyist. Wikipedia suggests 1960s CNC's were often controlled by a PDP-8 or similar minicomputer. When the PDP-8 first came out in 00000000001965 they cost $000,0018,500, almost $000,180,000 today. I dunno about what kind of home you grew up in but a machine like that wasn't exactly a home PC available to spend all night rendering the output for a CNC machine which probably also several thousand dollars. And that's just the computer driving the CNC, not even thinking about the machines and knowledge it took to actually code the designs and curves and 3D patterns. I'm well aware of computerized CNC machines from at least the 80s. I had family who owned a machine shop. They were not really hobbyist accessible things.
h2odragon 2y ago
Micro-stepping controller chips. Before that, the precision available without gearing and feedback wasn't sufficient. There were systems but they were order of magnitude more complicated and several orders more expensive.
- foxglacier 2y ago
  How do you reconcile that claim with the existence of cheap consumer paper printers and hard drives?
  - h2odragon 2y ago
    paper printers only needed such accuracy in one axis of motion, and had gearing to provide it. hard drives use voice coils, a completely different technology. The circuitry that does that evolved and certainly influenced the creation of microstepper controllers: the neat trick they do is treat the stepper motor as a voice coil in between full steps.
    - flimsypremise 2y ago
      I have several 2-axis microscope stages from the 80s/90s that are driven by brushed motors with position feedback, and they are all capable of higher accuracy than any stepper motor I have. The capability was there, it was just pricey. Hell, CNC machines existed back then too.
    - kragen 2y ago
      At the time, hard drives used stepper motors, but didn't use microstepping. Paper printers like the MX-80 used stepper motors too, it's true, but didn't use microstepping either. Gearing makes your step size smaller but adds backlash, so it can be the enemy of precision; position feedback like current inkjet printers use is much more precise.
  - observationist 2y ago
    Microcontrollers and software for consumer PCs and the like could have been produced, probably, but there are a lot of areas of deep specialization. You'd have had to bring together all sorts of different disciplines and technologies the old, hard way - universities and libraries and researching manually. The internet allowed all of those things to coalesce easily, and novice level people gained access to high quality information and research at the click of a mouse. The patents, compute, research access, and dozens of other relatively small barriers created a thicket of challenges and no obvious way to reconcile them, even if you had all the right ideas and inspiration. I think the internet would have been needed in order for all those ideas to come together in the right way.
deleted 2y ago
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Legend2440 2y ago
3D printers were first invented in the 80s. There's a combination of several factors why they took off in the 2010s: 1. Cheap stepper motors and electronics from China 2. Expiration of Stratasys patents in 2009 3. Widespread availability of CAD software and desktop computers powerful enough to run it 4. Reprap project made it easy for companies (and individuals!) to develop their own printers
- Onavo 2y ago
  Number 1 is huge, it's also the primary driver of the shift from "model planes" to quadcopter drones with enormous capabilities. The crucial parts were brushless motors and ESCs. The Chinese scale brought the pricing down from ~3-4 figures to under 3 figures which was a watershed moment for hobbyist and commercial use cases.
  - dghlsakjg 2y ago
    The other big one for drones was sensors and the processing to run them. Trivially small cheap gyro position sensors, accelerometers, GPS, pressure sensors, etc... needed to exist since quadcopters are more or less incapable of flying without a computer in the loop.
jkingsman 2y ago
I don't know that I'd argue that "consumer" 3D printing, as in a printer at home that just churns out a part when you want it, is even really hear yet, certainly not in the way that a dishwasher or lawnmower is. You need to do your own slicing, thinking through supports and brims and layer height, and the printers themselves need no small amount of troubleshooting that is much more than "turn it on and off again". So, I'd argue it's still a hobbyist realm than a consumer one.
- Legend2440 2y ago
  The big limiting factor IMO is CAD skills - otherwise you're just printing parts off thingiverse.
  - OJFord 2y ago
    Don't underestimate the number of people that do that though.
    - jimnotgym 2y ago
      Until they have a little boat in each colour... and put the printer in the back of the garage to collect dust. CAD skills are essential, and it turns out not as hard as you might have thought!
      - OJFord 2y ago
        I do, I've never printed one of those boats, but not everyone's interested. If you think of it as functional/decorative categorisation first of all, obviously some people will overlap but broadly speaking I think people are interested for one or the other, then within the 'decorative' camp you can go a hell of a lot further without and I think it's more obviously reasonable to not care about designing your own models. You never wanted to design your own toys, but there's appeal in printing things not available on Amazon, unofficial merch for a film you like, or whatever. Not to say there isn't functional stuff (which I exclusively print) on these sites, but often it won't be quite what I want, so yeah I end up in Fusion. (And typically starting from scratch eventually, because for some reason people don't share source, and working with imported STLs is hellish.)
paulorlando 2y ago
Patents do explain some of this delay.... Fused Deposition Modeling or FDM (1989, expired in 2009), Liquid-Based Stereolithography or SLA (1986, expired in 2006), Selective Laser Sintering or SLS (1992, expired in 2012), metal processes like Selective Laser Melting (SLM) and Direct Metal Laser Sintering (DMLS) (1996, expired 2016).
legitster 2y ago
What needs would home 3D printing fill in the 70s? A complete set of woodworking or metalworking tools was a lot cheaper than a home computer. And there were entire magazines dedicated to proliferating free or easily obtained schematics/designs. Labor was also cheaper, and people had more time for hobbies. I would also argue the point that it would have been relatively cheap. We are used to the ubiquity of cheap DC motors and precision parts being a click away. But if you were to rummage through a vintage Radio Shack to cobble together a home printer, I think you would struggle to construct anything precise enough with consumer available parts. > a melting plastic Don't sleep on the chemistry of filament. It has to be extremely precise and consistent. We benefit from the massive economies of scale today, but this was small batch stuff 20-30 years ago. And if we are talking about the 1970s the plastics were really primitive by today's standards.
spacecadet 2y ago
I knew someone who recycled paper printers into a home brew 3D printer and then a 2D shopbot style CNC.
cyberax 2y ago
> All the pieces existed to make a working 3D printer existed even in 1970! and relatively cheaply. So why has it taken so long for 3D home printing to actually become a thing? Easy. The printing process itself is not that hard. It's the model _design_ that is tricky. We needed home computers to become powerful enough to run 3D CAD software, and enough people to get proficient with it. RepRap started in 2005. Realistically, we could have had it maybe a few years earlier. But not _much_ earlier.
jeffbee 2y ago
It was the polymers that needed to be invented. In the 1990s we used to order quick-turn prototype 3D prints for parts to check fit before committing to tooling for hard materials, but we only had 3 days to work with it before it fell apart into a puddle of goo.
- foxglacier 2y ago
  I don't think that's a reason. PLA and ABS were invented before the 1990's. What was this self-destructing material, and why?
  - kragen 2y ago
    A surprising number of popular plastics are chemically unstable to one or another extent.
    - foxglacier 2y ago
      But not 3 days! That sounds like food or ballistic gel, which is also food, I guess.
      - kragen 2y ago
        Well, not the formulations you buy in off-the-shelf products. But in many cases those require extensive purification and stabilization in order to be suitable for such use. PVC in particular was discovered decades before anyone figured out how to make products out of it.
sottol 2y ago
I think it's probably correct that few people *really* cared until the Reprap project showed a real DIY 3D printer was possible. Early machines were industrial machines with huge price tags, proper linear motion systems, complicated extrusion systems and so on. There is a bit of a mental leap to go from seeing $100k+ machine and dreaming to design something that can be built for $200-500. The problems were: no "reference designs", no tried and true go-to mechanical parts (like cheap chinese linear motion rails), extruders (they were DIYd!) or heated beds (early models were just PCBs) and so on - imo it just took someone to get this rolling and that may have well taken 30 years. I think Reprap was first publicly shown around 2005. From then on it was taken on by more and more makers and refined. It culminated in the early 2010s hype with Makerbots and its contemporaries but they still cost > $1500 and were far from set-and-forget appliances, like 50% reliable and slow - we had one at work and I got fascinated but it printed at 5-20mm/s so parts would just take forever and often fail due to bed adhesion, clogs, ... The last 10-15 years then have seen the popularization of 3d printers through the Prusa i3 and its clones (Ender and other cartesians < $300) and steady refinement of reliability through better materials. Then the last ~5years or so significantly bumped up the speeds through better linear motion components, motion systems and input shaping + firmware and ecosystems like Klipper. Bambu imo got in at just the right time and refined everything that had culminated up to this point into a solid appliance. Imo their genius was more in the industrial design, making it reliable and affordable manufacturing than anything else.
- alexathrowawa9 2y ago
  Bannister Effect
- grogenaut 2y ago
  There's also an economy of scale going on that snowballed a ton. In 2014 I got my first printer off Craigslist. The bom was like $1200. Steppers were like $80 ea, a ramps board without controllers was 80-120, the controllers were 20-40 each, the heated bed was a huge PCB so also not cheap. Cheap PCB houses were nascent at the time. Arduinos we're $50+. Power supplies like 40-150. Now you can get the steppers from Amazon for $8, a control board with stepper controllers for $20 with a built in 32 bit MCU. At scale if you're building a lot of them those parts are going to be even cheaper maybe even another order of magnitude. For a while it was difficult to actually even comprehend how much cheaper stuff was getting and what that lets you do. And then you see a resin printer for $140 and realize it's a cast-off I found screen one stepper and some extruded parts.
the__alchemist 2y ago
Some observations that I didn't see in the other comments: - Home 3D printing is often more of a hobby than a traditional prototyping or engineering discipline. People view it as a skill to have, and a fun use of free time. Note how the cheapest and most finicky ones are popular; they can be made to work well through careful operation, troubleshooting, procedures, customization etc. They are not set-and-forget, and I think the userbase likes that. - Home 3D printer parts (the motors, frames, electronics etc) are almost exclusively sourced from China. We live in an AliBaba world; that wasn't always the case.
- superconduct123 2y ago
  That's a really good point Those AliExpress clone kits were really popular in the community in the beginning
- whatusername 2y ago
  I'm not sure how true that first statement is anymore. Most of the recommendations I see now are "just get a Bambu labs one". We are much closer to 3D printing as a utility as opposed to 3D printing as a hobby than we were ~3 years ago.
  - the__alchemist 2y ago
    Great news! Given that time frame, my info is indeed out of date.
syntaxing 2y ago
A mixture of patent protection, China’s (lack of) precision manufacturing at scale at that time, and software immaturity. LM8UU around 15 years ago when I started my 3D printing journey was upwards of $15 PER PIECE. You need at least 8 for a Mendel or i3 style printer during the reprap boom. Just the bearings alone would have cost you, $100 or so. Then factor in chrome rods, stepper motor, stepper motor drivers (Pololu just released their A4988 boards), you’re looking at almost $1K just for the parts. The software like slicers and even gcode interpreters weren’t even made yet. Merlin wasn’t even a big thing until about 10 years ago. We take for granted how much work the community has put into 3D printers to get us where we are today.
- regularfry 2y ago
  I don't think you can underestimate the development of efficient slicing algorithms. It might just have been something that would have happened anyway with other parts of the story in place, but there was a point in time when slicing anything complicated was very painful.
  - tjoff 2y ago
    You don't start with anything complicated though. You start with cubes, make fixtures etc. And with waiting 5 hours to print it isn't unreasonable to wait an hour or two for the slicer either.
iamgopal 2y ago
Short answer is, there is no need. Personal computer were sold to make nice printed paper. Here there is no specific application.
evoke4908 2y ago
Part of it is technological advancement. It wasnt until the last 15 years or so that embedded processors became cheap and powerful enough to run a 3D printer at consumer prices. There's also the problem of 3D modeling and slicing. Again up until quite recently, 3D CAD was out of reach for most consumers. Either due to hardware capabilities or cost of the software. Slicing is its own entire branch of 3D processing and it took time to develop all the techniques we use today that make it fast and reliable. Slicing software could only exist after the printers were common. As well, I expect the availability and materials science of the plastics we use needed some further development. As I recall, 3D printers rose to prominence at about the same time and speed as we started getting genuinely powerful personal computers. You really needed a fast CPU, and printing became more accessible as the early I5/I7 generations became cheaply available. While you absolutely could build an FDM printer with 80s technology, I don't think it could ever be practical or affordable. Even if someone invented all the computational techniques for slicing, the compute available back then was not even close. It would literally take an actual supercomputer to slice your model. It'd take many, many hours on any consumer computer. This would hold true until the early 2000s. At a random guess, I'd say the tipping point would have been around the Pentium 4. So, same as most technologies we take for granted these days. Enabled almost exclusively by the speed and capacity of computer available to consumers.
nkrisc 2y ago
When I started my Industrial Design degree in 2007 the workshop there already had several large, commercial 3D printers for student use. Mind you they were nothing like the tabletop consumer ones we have today. They were about the same of a large American refrigerator. Since it was not really any special or amazing for us to have several of them, I have to imagine that industrial 3D printing capabilities were well established by the point. Edit: as I recall they were mostly used to make parts which could be given a nice surface finish and then from which silicone molds could be made.
jeffreyrogers 2y ago
There weren't good CAD tools to send the designs to the machine until recently. Early CAD tools mostly produced drawings and it was a separate step to manufacture from there. The way inkjet and laser printers work is also quite different from the way a 3d printer works. The similarity is mostly in the gantry, so there was nontrivial innovation required here. To some extent 3d printing is probably also a reaction to decreased access to domestic manufacturing. It doesn't make a lot of sense to produce most parts in plastic if you can get a cast or milled part quickly and cheaply.
zoklet-enjoyer 2y ago
Patents
cityofdelusion 2y ago
The pieces did NOT exist in the 1970s. Fast microcontrollers, stepper motors, precision miniaturized manufacturing, reliable and cheap miniaturized DC electronics, and far far more technology was non-existent at any kind of affordable price point. Look at kitchen appliances or metal/wood shop machinery from this era, still heavily analog, mostly made from sheet steel, mostly non-computerized. The 80s would bring better microprocessors but even the simple Nintendo was an inflation adjusted $450. For comparison the first RepRaps used a full power PC as their host machine and their materials cost roughly $1000 in today USD and needed parts from a commercial stratasys machine. Some of the greatest and most under appreciated technological achievements in the last 40 years have been in materials science and miniaturization.
- kragen 2y ago
  Microcontrollers and stepper motors were already controlling 2-D printers in the 01970s and early 01980s at higher speeds and similar powers to currently popular 3-D printers. The first RepRaps did not "use a full-power PC as their host machine"; they were controlled by AVRs, just like Arduino (which didn't exist yet). Generating motor control waveforms on a full-power PC is a nightmare nowadays, and was already a nightmare in 02005. The LinuxCNC people would do it by running Linux under a real-time hypervisor. The first CNC machining was done in the 01950s with IBM 704s, comparable in power to an Intel 8008. The 6502 used by the Commodore 64 to drive its floppy drive would have worked fine, though it is much slower than the AVR and doesn't have built-in PWM generation hardware. I agree that the pieces did not exist in the 01970s, but the missing pieces weren't the computation.
  - actionfromafar 2y ago
    Now I'm very tempted to build a 3D printer with an 8-bit home computer and vintage parts.
    - dcminter 2y ago
      That sounds like a delightful project! This contemporary book from Usborne demonstrates the point that basic stepper controls from an 8-bit computer were well within hobbyist reach: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bxv0SsvibDMTZ2tQMmpyOWtsRFk/view?resourcekey=0-zt3ZcOMMA30T_LJlUEzoDQ https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bxv0SsvibDMTZ2tQMmpyOWtsRFk... I do think that the limitations of memory (and disk) will require some ingenuity in 3D printing more than the most trivial procedurally defined objects!
deleted 2y ago
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Findecanor 2y ago
In my experience, it really took off when PLA filament became commonplace. ABS and UV-cured epoxy emitted noxious fumes which required separate ventilation systems and weren't really suitable to be used at home. Early home 3D-printers also required more of the user. It took a lot of tweaking to make them produce decent prints.
declan_roberts 2y ago
The answer to this is the same reason why flying cars aren't ubiquitous. Inventory and discovery is often the easy part.
K0balt 2y ago
The magic ingredients were inexpensive microcontrollers, massively paralleled mosfet transistors (also a product of large scale integrated circuits, since they are actually millions of tiny mosfets working together), and the expiration of several key patents that made it possible to have a commercial explosion around the reprap scene. The patents expiring was a big deal, since the main patent was on the fused deposition process itself. The other factor was that normal desktop computers had become powerful enough to run sophisticated 3d modeling programs and make machine motion computations from 3d design files.
kens 2y ago
You could buy a 3-D printer from Stratasys in 1990, but it cost $178,000! The printing unit was $130,000 and the Silicon Graphics workstation with slicing software to run it was $48,000 more. So the technology was there, but two orders of magnitude too expensive for the consumer market. Patents account for part of the cost, but the computer to control it was also way too expensive, as well as the custom (vs commoditized) mechanical components. Link: https://books.google.com/books?id=0bqdMvDMv74C&pg=PA32&dq=stratasys https://books.google.com/books?id=0bqdMvDMv74C&pg=PA32&dq=st...
snakeyjake 2y ago
3DBenchy.stl, the little boat that everyone prints as a benchmark during 3d printer reviews, is 10MB. A 10MB hard drive cost $3,000-4,000 in 1980. That's $12k-15k today. Just opening the .stl file and having it render (USABLY) on screen in high-resolution was probably not economical until the late 1990s-early 2000s. I am used to computing tasks being human-perception instant. It takes tens of seconds to run repairs on 3d models, which means it would have taken tens of hours to do that same thing, if there was even enough RAM, in the 90s.
kragen 2y ago
It took that long because nobody was working on it, because it wasn't obvious that a low-cost 3-D printer was feasible. The 3-D printers you're seeing today are basically the series of RepRap designs, named after famous scientists who studied self-reproduction: Darwin, Mendel, and Huxley. The RepRap project, which started in 02005, is the reason this happened. For the first several years, it was about half a dozen people: Rhys Jones, Patrick Haufe, Ed Sells, Pejman Iravani, Vik Olliver, Chris Palmer (aka NopHead) and Adrian Bowyer. The last three of these did most of the early work. Once they got it basically working, after many years of work, a lot of other people got involved. There were a series of developments that had to happen together to get a working low-cost printer. They had to use PLA, because the plastics conventionally used (mostly ABS) had such a high thermal coefficient of expansion that they needed a heated build chamber. They had to design their own electronics, because Arduino didn't exist. They had to figure out how to build a hotend that wouldn't break itself after a few hours. They had to write a slicer. They had to write a G-code interpreter. They weren't industrial engineers, so they didn't know about Kapton. They wasted a lot of time trying to make it work without even a heated bed, to keep costs down. They improvised leadscrews out of threaded rod and garden hose. They made rotational couplings from aquarium tubing. Lots and lots of inventions were needed to get the cost down from US$60k to US$0.3k, and lots and lots of time was wasted on figuring out how to get the resulting janky machines to be reliable enough to be usable at all. Starting in the mid-90s, Don Lancaster was excited about 3-D printers, which he called "Santa Claus machines" https://www.tinaja.com/santa01.shtml https://www.tinaja.com/santa01.shtml, when he could see that they were possible. He wrote lots of technical articles about building what he called "flutterwumpers": "low cost machines that spit or chomp". https://www.tinaja.com/flut01.shtml https://www.tinaja.com/flut01.shtml. For example, in https://www.tinaja.com/glib/muse140.pdf https://www.tinaja.com/glib/muse140.pdf in 01999, he describes Gordon Robineau's low-cost PCB drill driven by MS-DOS software over a serial port, with a schematic. (The fishing-line cable drive sounds imprecise, since this was years before Spectra braided fishing line.) But nobody listened. I don't know if he ever built so much as a sign cutting machine himself. Journalists like to talk about the patents, maybe because they're legible to nontechnical people in a way that difficulties with your retraction settings aren't, but when I was obsessively reading the RepRap blogs in the period 02005–02010, I can't recall that they ever mentioned the patents. They were just constantly hacking on their software, fixing their machines, having then break again after a few more hours of printing, and trying new stuff all the time. I don't think the patents even existed in their countries, and they were researchers, anyway, and generally patents don't prevent research. Maybe there's a vast dark-matter bulk of for-profit hackers who would have gotten involved and started up profitable consumer 3-D printing companies before 02005 if it hadn't been for the patents, but who never got interested because of the patents. But what I saw was that businesspeople started commercializing RepRaps once the open-source RepRap hackers got them to work somewhat reliably. Before that, they mostly weren't thinking about it. After that, most of them spent a lot of years shipping very slightly tweaked RepRap designs. Josef Prusa got involved in the RepRap project and redesigned Ed Sells's Mendel, and everybody copied him, and he famously started selling it himself, very successfully. https://reprap.org/wiki/The_incomplete_RepRap_Prusa_Mendel_beginner%27s_guide#What_is_RepRap.3F https://reprap.org/wiki/The_incomplete_RepRap_Prusa_Mendel_b... And more recently Bambu Labs has apparently gotten the machines to be much easier to use.
Animats 2y ago
Have you ever seen 1970s CNC gear? I came across a 1970s CNC lathe in a surplus store once. The thing was the size of a small car. The electronics box was the size of two racks. Inside were cards that handled one bit of one register. Input was from a paper tape. No CPU; all special purpose electronics. Directly controlling industrial machines from a microprocessor was very rare before the 1980s.
mmmlinux 2y ago
1. Patents. 2. CAD software was HUGELY expensive for a long time. 3. Parts were expensive. economy of scale on things like linear bearings made this crazy. I recently took apart my first gen printrbot (it cost me ~$600 and was one of the cheapest ones at the time) and it was all brand name VXB bearings. because that's basically all that existed.
aaron695 2y ago
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al2o3cr 2y ago
Equivalent statement: "A flying car is just a car with wings, what's so difficult about that???"
eigenvalue 2y ago
Just having a computer that could handle working with relatively complex 3D models, not even visually but just via the terminal, would have been a tall order in the 80s. Even getting the data from the computer to the printer would be tough. Floppies wouldn't store enough data for even modestly complex 3D model files. Parallel port? Would be painfully slow. But even if you get around those issues, the algorithms for transforming the 3D model into 2D layers that could be printed with the proper support structures and with minimal material used are extremely complicated and involved a lot of intermediate data during the calculations. Most machines then wouldn't have had even close the amount of RAM needed to do that in any reasonable amount of time.
LargoLasskhyfv 2y ago
Stratasys patents.
simne 2y ago
Working 3D printers existed long time, but only SLS and very expensive. Only in 2000s appear things important for cheap 3D printer: 1. Cheap power semiconductors. 2. Cheap 32-bit microcontrollers. 3. Powerful computers, to run slicer, and free slicer. 4. For photo-sensitive resin appear large 2nd market of powerful semiconductor lasers and light-modulators (from DLP projectors). To be more exact, FIRST powerful transistors appear in 1970s, but become cheap in 1990s; microcontrollers similar, but before 2000s cheap 32-bit does not existed; microcomputers become enough powerful for 3D printing in late 1990s and appeared home CNC motion; lasers are still grow, they now have something like Moore law. So to conclude, yes, sum of technologies need for cheap 3D printer appeared around Y2K, but then few years spend by fans to construct practice equipment and make first shipment to customer (Prusa made his design around 2009).
jamaicanindian 2y ago
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scyzoryk_xyz 2y ago
My father was an industrial design professor and I remember him showing me a 3D printed element in the early 00’s. He explained at the time that it’s the future but just way way too expensive and unstable for actual use cases. Chicken or egg sort of thing - I agree that it took the internet to exist
Ccecil 2y ago
1. Patents 2. Cheap CAD 3. Arduino (IMHO...before this it wasn't easy to interface to USB/PC for anyone who wasn't EE) 4. Surge of DIY online (Forums, mailing lists, instructables, pinterest) 5. Reprap leading the way with recycled parts as well as cheap imported motors and controllers. 6. Lack of interest- Machinists could usually do the same thing but better using subtractive. Additive was seen as "useless" for real world items even after reprap. There are probably a couple other things I am missing...and what order you place my list probably doesn't matter. It took everything at once happening.
- simne 2y ago
  > 3. Arduino (IMHO...before this it wasn't easy to interface to USB/PC for anyone who wasn't EE) I seen CNC of late 90s, which use x86 desktop computer as controller, and in Usenet stored lengthy talks about which boards are suitable for this task (as they made PWM by software on LPT port). Sure, LPT was not connected to stepper motors directly, but using opto-coupling. To be informative, Arduino is used to protect from copy printer by Chinese, as directly driven via LPT is not protected at all, but on Arduino you could set read-protect bits for mc flash and it will be not easy to read it (even when Western hackers regularly show read protected flash, it is not regularly happen). ..And from marketing view, it is good, that printer with Arduino could work from flash card, without working computer near.
kg08854 2y ago
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kg08854 2y ago
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scotty79 2y ago
Memory? We take 1GB for granted. In the old time is 4kB was expensive achievement. And you need a lot of memory to store g code for useful 3d model.

refulgentis 2y ago

Computers in 1970 were so slow we hacked in saying lightness, a scientific measure of color, was the average of the two highest color channels.

LarsAlereon 2y ago

It was invented but protected by patents, so it wasn't until those patents expired that companies and hobbyists started to experiment. Early 3D printers hadn't figured out things like layer adhesion yet so parts tended to be too weak to be very useful. It wasn't clear that this was an area for improvement rather than a fundamental downside of the technology.

WillPostForFood 2y ago
Yes! The fused deposition modeling (additive printing) patents expired in 2009, which triggered the wave of innovation and home 3d printing. https://futurism.com/expiring-patents-set-to-improve-3d-world https://futurism.com/expiring-patents-set-to-improve-3d-worl...
jerf 2y ago
It's also easy to underestimate how much computation is involved and how little there was in the 70s. The 3D printer slicers generally require several seconds on modern hardware to calculate their final path. The resulting files are in the several megabytes. My Bambu 3D printer is all but festooned with sensors and is constantly adjusting things, but even the simple ones have more to their firmware than meets the eye. Even assuming that they'd use some simpler algorithms and data structures, you're looking at vast computation times, and most likely, vastly simpler objects being printed. Even something that seems as simple as "sous vide" cooking, which is basically a heater hooked to a thermocouple, took a lot of little innovations to make practical to hand to the masses. And then, there's the general improvement in motors speed, precision, and cost, along with any number of advancements here and there and everywhere to make it practical. Could someone thrust back to the 1970s and given a fairly substantial budget make some kind of 3D printer? Probably. But it's slow, extremely expensive, and can print various sizes of plastic bricks and spheres and other very algorithmically simple objects, and in rather low quality without many, many years further development. I can think of many ways of bodging on various improvements, but they're all going to have their own compromises, not be garden paths to what we now think of as modern 3D printing. (For example, someone could bodge together a machine that offsets a rod on the printer head, and then in the offset space, has an object to be "copied", by basically banging into the object with a very crude sensor, so there's no generation of geometry at all. But this is going to be clumsy, inaccurate, and full of very complex and disheartening limitations.) You're not going to be printing Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson's face embedded into a toilet [1] or anything, at 1MB of geometry. It will be commercially useless and inaccessible to hobbyists. [1]: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6436138/files https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6436138/files
- etrautmann 2y ago
  Also 3D modeling software and hardware to run it.
- silvestrov 2y ago
  AirFryers are even simpler than "sous vide cooking". No reason they couldn't have been invented in the 50s - 60s when kitchens had good electrical supply.
  - creaturemachine 2y ago
    Air fryers are just convection ovens packaged differently.
    - jdietrich 2y ago
      Sort of, but not really. Air fryers have a much faster rate of airflow than any convection oven, which results in significantly faster and more even cooking. The air fryer really is a meaningful technological development.
      - knowitnone 2y ago
        if you consider adding a fan as "meaningful technological development"
        ozim 2y ago
        Well it is. We had electrical ovens without fan that were great. We had electrical ovens with a fan that were great. Air fryer has much more advanced fan with much more power than earlier. For me this is how meaningful technological progress happens. It is not like someone one day wakes up and suddenly has rocket that reached space caught back on landing by mechanical arms.
        ProllyInfamous 2y ago
        I just purchased my first air fryer summer 2023 — it has changed my cooking life, allowing me to rarely ever "eat out" without much meal prep. "Just adding a fan" is actually an extremely meaningful tech development.
fxtentacle 2y ago
That's also my understanding. The 3D printing boom started when the patents expired.
- scotty79 2y ago
  Wonderful illustration of how terrible patents are for technological developments of humanity and for consumers in general.
  - fxtentacle 2y ago
    You're not wrong. But at the same time, I feel like a patent is roughly the only thing that could stop a wealthy international corporation from just copying my new product and then out-competing me with their generous marketing budget. If the expected payout is large enough, a patent will then also help me find a law firm who's willing to work purely on commission, meaning it causes one of those rare instances where I might be able to meet an international corp at eye level, even if I'm a solo inventor.
    - scotty79 2y ago
      Try it. It's not. The best case scenario it might make some huge corporation generously throw you some peanuts for your patent so it can use it for protection against other's creativity and to extort them. Other corps will just use your invention and just skip the markets where you have a patent. And yet their product will find its way there organically. Many individual inventors that got patents openly talk about how useless and expensive they are.

lawlessone 2y ago

Is it actually better than homes built by other methods? The most expensive part of home is general the land it's built on.

cynicalsecurity 2y ago
He means just regular 3D printers used at home. But yeah, the title is confusing.
- superconduct123 2y ago
  Ya I've updated the title to consumer to be clearer
- IIAOPSW 2y ago
  Nonetheless the misinterpreted question is also interesting. The technical hurdles people are citing for why small scale 3d printers didn't happen earlier are completely different than those of the large scale "home printers". Why didn't we have automatic concrete wall making machines much earlier?
  - regularfry 2y ago
    The bits of home printing that a machine can do aren't the hard bits, except for very specific buildings where the wall shape is odd, which there's limited demand for. You end up where the choice is a complicated, failure-prone robot in a hostile environment vs a human or three who can do the job quicker once you factor in machine setup.
jillesvangurp 2y ago
It's actually that and dealing with permitting. The actual problem of creating some kind of durable, comfortable, shelter isn't all that hard from a technical point of view. Getting permission to build a house though is. Society kind of forces you into debt for a mortgage just to have a place that you can live in. The alternative of paying high rent is not a great alternative as you permanently lose the money. There are all sorts of restrictions and rules that create this artificial scarcity. Even something as simple as buying a plot of land and parking a trailer on it is not legal in most places except in designated trailer parks. You can get a trailer for next to nothing. And lots of people live in them. But try finding a place where it is legal to put one down and live in one. If it were legal, lots of people would do that. Land plots are scarce and once you have one, you can't just do what you want with it in most places. I'm just using trailers as an example here. Think prefab buildings and raw material cost. This isn't rocket science. We've been building shelters since the stone age. There are of course good arguments for this to be made in big cities because of a lack of space. But it's equally frowned upon in areas where there's plenty of space.

cynicalsecurity 2y ago

Are many people going to buy a home 3D printer? It's not a profitable business.

JohnFen 2y ago
You don't have to have a large market in order to have a profitable business. That said, the market for 3D printers at home is larger than many assume, especially as printers get closer to being simple one-button-push kinds of things. They will probably never be the sort of thing that exists in every home, but they could very well be the sort of thing that exists in every home workshop.
Legend2440 2y ago
Huh? There are millions of people with a 3D printer in their home. They're so cheap now that people buy them for their grandkids.

dekhn 2y ago

I don;t think anybody was really doing FDM/FFF until the 90s and it didn't really take off until the 2000s. It was quite expensive, required a high level of expertise in both mech E and CS, and existing subtractive methods (like CNC and lathe) were very effective.

vel0city 2y ago

One thing to think about is you'd need quite a beefy machine to even properly render the gcode in the 70s and 80s. In this age of printers computers often didn't even have fonts, they were ROM cartridges your printer would take. And even into the 90s there were accelerator cards for printing documents and talking to the printer in alternative ways than parallel ports. So really, for an average hobbyist the idea of a 3D printer controllable from a home PC wouldn't really be possible until like the mid 90s. So you really need to start your look at why it wasn't a thing at some point in history I'd start the digging there, not the 1970s.

kragen 2y ago
If by "render the gcode" you mean "interpret the G-code" then, no, G-code dates from 01963 and is easier to interpret than the BASIC that home computers used in the 01970s. If by "render the gcode" you mean "produce the G-code" then it depends on the geometry you're producing G-code for, and the algorithms you're using to do it, but potentially being able to do it overnight gives you a lot of flexibility there. People were doing computer numerical control with the APT language already in 01959.
- vel0city 2y ago
  I mean "render the gcode" as in going from a 3D model to the gcode you want your tool to follow. Following the gcode would be generally pretty simple; I agree. However, I doubt most home hobbyists had computers in their house in 00000000001959 capable of manipulating 3D graphics in a meaningful way that would really be approachable to a general hobbyist. Wikipedia suggests 1960s CNC's were often controlled by a PDP-8 or similar minicomputer. When the PDP-8 first came out in 00000000001965 they cost $000,0018,500, almost $000,180,000 today. I dunno about what kind of home you grew up in but a machine like that wasn't exactly a home PC available to spend all night rendering the output for a CNC machine which probably also several thousand dollars. And that's just the computer driving the CNC, not even thinking about the machines and knowledge it took to actually code the designs and curves and 3D patterns. I'm well aware of computerized CNC machines from at least the 80s. I had family who owned a machine shop. They were not really hobbyist accessible things.

h2odragon 2y ago

Micro-stepping controller chips. Before that, the precision available without gearing and feedback wasn't sufficient. There were systems but they were order of magnitude more complicated and several orders more expensive.

foxglacier 2y ago
How do you reconcile that claim with the existence of cheap consumer paper printers and hard drives?
- h2odragon 2y ago
  paper printers only needed such accuracy in one axis of motion, and had gearing to provide it. hard drives use voice coils, a completely different technology. The circuitry that does that evolved and certainly influenced the creation of microstepper controllers: the neat trick they do is treat the stepper motor as a voice coil in between full steps.
  - flimsypremise 2y ago
    I have several 2-axis microscope stages from the 80s/90s that are driven by brushed motors with position feedback, and they are all capable of higher accuracy than any stepper motor I have. The capability was there, it was just pricey. Hell, CNC machines existed back then too.
  - kragen 2y ago
    At the time, hard drives used stepper motors, but didn't use microstepping. Paper printers like the MX-80 used stepper motors too, it's true, but didn't use microstepping either. Gearing makes your step size smaller but adds backlash, so it can be the enemy of precision; position feedback like current inkjet printers use is much more precise.
- observationist 2y ago
  Microcontrollers and software for consumer PCs and the like could have been produced, probably, but there are a lot of areas of deep specialization. You'd have had to bring together all sorts of different disciplines and technologies the old, hard way - universities and libraries and researching manually. The internet allowed all of those things to coalesce easily, and novice level people gained access to high quality information and research at the click of a mouse. The patents, compute, research access, and dozens of other relatively small barriers created a thicket of challenges and no obvious way to reconcile them, even if you had all the right ideas and inspiration. I think the internet would have been needed in order for all those ideas to come together in the right way.

deleted 2y ago

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Legend2440 2y ago

3D printers were first invented in the 80s. There's a combination of several factors why they took off in the 2010s: 1. Cheap stepper motors and electronics from China 2. Expiration of Stratasys patents in 2009 3. Widespread availability of CAD software and desktop computers powerful enough to run it 4. Reprap project made it easy for companies (and individuals!) to develop their own printers

Onavo 2y ago
Number 1 is huge, it's also the primary driver of the shift from "model planes" to quadcopter drones with enormous capabilities. The crucial parts were brushless motors and ESCs. The Chinese scale brought the pricing down from ~3-4 figures to under 3 figures which was a watershed moment for hobbyist and commercial use cases.
- dghlsakjg 2y ago
  The other big one for drones was sensors and the processing to run them. Trivially small cheap gyro position sensors, accelerometers, GPS, pressure sensors, etc... needed to exist since quadcopters are more or less incapable of flying without a computer in the loop.

jkingsman 2y ago

I don't know that I'd argue that "consumer" 3D printing, as in a printer at home that just churns out a part when you want it, is even really hear yet, certainly not in the way that a dishwasher or lawnmower is. You need to do your own slicing, thinking through supports and brims and layer height, and the printers themselves need no small amount of troubleshooting that is much more than "turn it on and off again". So, I'd argue it's still a hobbyist realm than a consumer one.

Legend2440 2y ago
The big limiting factor IMO is CAD skills - otherwise you're just printing parts off thingiverse.
- OJFord 2y ago
  Don't underestimate the number of people that do that though.
  - jimnotgym 2y ago
    Until they have a little boat in each colour... and put the printer in the back of the garage to collect dust. CAD skills are essential, and it turns out not as hard as you might have thought!
    - OJFord 2y ago
      I do, I've never printed one of those boats, but not everyone's interested. If you think of it as functional/decorative categorisation first of all, obviously some people will overlap but broadly speaking I think people are interested for one or the other, then within the 'decorative' camp you can go a hell of a lot further without and I think it's more obviously reasonable to not care about designing your own models. You never wanted to design your own toys, but there's appeal in printing things not available on Amazon, unofficial merch for a film you like, or whatever. Not to say there isn't functional stuff (which I exclusively print) on these sites, but often it won't be quite what I want, so yeah I end up in Fusion. (And typically starting from scratch eventually, because for some reason people don't share source, and working with imported STLs is hellish.)

paulorlando 2y ago

Patents do explain some of this delay.... Fused Deposition Modeling or FDM (1989, expired in 2009), Liquid-Based Stereolithography or SLA (1986, expired in 2006), Selective Laser Sintering or SLS (1992, expired in 2012), metal processes like Selective Laser Melting (SLM) and Direct Metal Laser Sintering (DMLS) (1996, expired 2016).

legitster 2y ago

What needs would home 3D printing fill in the 70s? A complete set of woodworking or metalworking tools was a lot cheaper than a home computer. And there were entire magazines dedicated to proliferating free or easily obtained schematics/designs. Labor was also cheaper, and people had more time for hobbies. I would also argue the point that it would have been relatively cheap. We are used to the ubiquity of cheap DC motors and precision parts being a click away. But if you were to rummage through a vintage Radio Shack to cobble together a home printer, I think you would struggle to construct anything precise enough with consumer available parts. > a melting plastic Don't sleep on the chemistry of filament. It has to be extremely precise and consistent. We benefit from the massive economies of scale today, but this was small batch stuff 20-30 years ago. And if we are talking about the 1970s the plastics were really primitive by today's standards.

spacecadet 2y ago

I knew someone who recycled paper printers into a home brew 3D printer and then a 2D shopbot style CNC.

cyberax 2y ago

> All the pieces existed to make a working 3D printer existed even in 1970! and relatively cheaply. So why has it taken so long for 3D home printing to actually become a thing? Easy. The printing process itself is not that hard. It's the model _design_ that is tricky. We needed home computers to become powerful enough to run 3D CAD software, and enough people to get proficient with it. RepRap started in 2005. Realistically, we could have had it maybe a few years earlier. But not _much_ earlier.

jeffbee 2y ago

It was the polymers that needed to be invented. In the 1990s we used to order quick-turn prototype 3D prints for parts to check fit before committing to tooling for hard materials, but we only had 3 days to work with it before it fell apart into a puddle of goo.

foxglacier 2y ago
I don't think that's a reason. PLA and ABS were invented before the 1990's. What was this self-destructing material, and why?
- kragen 2y ago
  A surprising number of popular plastics are chemically unstable to one or another extent.
  - foxglacier 2y ago
    But not 3 days! That sounds like food or ballistic gel, which is also food, I guess.
    - kragen 2y ago
      Well, not the formulations you buy in off-the-shelf products. But in many cases those require extensive purification and stabilization in order to be suitable for such use. PVC in particular was discovered decades before anyone figured out how to make products out of it.

sottol 2y ago

I think it's probably correct that few people *really* cared until the Reprap project showed a real DIY 3D printer was possible. Early machines were industrial machines with huge price tags, proper linear motion systems, complicated extrusion systems and so on. There is a bit of a mental leap to go from seeing $100k+ machine and dreaming to design something that can be built for $200-500. The problems were: no "reference designs", no tried and true go-to mechanical parts (like cheap chinese linear motion rails), extruders (they were DIYd!) or heated beds (early models were just PCBs) and so on - imo it just took someone to get this rolling and that may have well taken 30 years. I think Reprap was first publicly shown around 2005. From then on it was taken on by more and more makers and refined. It culminated in the early 2010s hype with Makerbots and its contemporaries but they still cost > $1500 and were far from set-and-forget appliances, like 50% reliable and slow - we had one at work and I got fascinated but it printed at 5-20mm/s so parts would just take forever and often fail due to bed adhesion, clogs, ... The last 10-15 years then have seen the popularization of 3d printers through the Prusa i3 and its clones (Ender and other cartesians < $300) and steady refinement of reliability through better materials. Then the last ~5years or so significantly bumped up the speeds through better linear motion components, motion systems and input shaping + firmware and ecosystems like Klipper. Bambu imo got in at just the right time and refined everything that had culminated up to this point into a solid appliance. Imo their genius was more in the industrial design, making it reliable and affordable manufacturing than anything else.

alexathrowawa9 2y ago
Bannister Effect
grogenaut 2y ago
There's also an economy of scale going on that snowballed a ton. In 2014 I got my first printer off Craigslist. The bom was like $1200. Steppers were like $80 ea, a ramps board without controllers was 80-120, the controllers were 20-40 each, the heated bed was a huge PCB so also not cheap. Cheap PCB houses were nascent at the time. Arduinos we're $50+. Power supplies like 40-150. Now you can get the steppers from Amazon for $8, a control board with stepper controllers for $20 with a built in 32 bit MCU. At scale if you're building a lot of them those parts are going to be even cheaper maybe even another order of magnitude. For a while it was difficult to actually even comprehend how much cheaper stuff was getting and what that lets you do. And then you see a resin printer for $140 and realize it's a cast-off I found screen one stepper and some extruded parts.

the__alchemist 2y ago

Some observations that I didn't see in the other comments: - Home 3D printing is often more of a hobby than a traditional prototyping or engineering discipline. People view it as a skill to have, and a fun use of free time. Note how the cheapest and most finicky ones are popular; they can be made to work well through careful operation, troubleshooting, procedures, customization etc. They are not set-and-forget, and I think the userbase likes that. - Home 3D printer parts (the motors, frames, electronics etc) are almost exclusively sourced from China. We live in an AliBaba world; that wasn't always the case.

superconduct123 2y ago
That's a really good point Those AliExpress clone kits were really popular in the community in the beginning
whatusername 2y ago
I'm not sure how true that first statement is anymore. Most of the recommendations I see now are "just get a Bambu labs one". We are much closer to 3D printing as a utility as opposed to 3D printing as a hobby than we were ~3 years ago.
- the__alchemist 2y ago
  Great news! Given that time frame, my info is indeed out of date.

syntaxing 2y ago

A mixture of patent protection, China’s (lack of) precision manufacturing at scale at that time, and software immaturity. LM8UU around 15 years ago when I started my 3D printing journey was upwards of $15 PER PIECE. You need at least 8 for a Mendel or i3 style printer during the reprap boom. Just the bearings alone would have cost you, $100 or so. Then factor in chrome rods, stepper motor, stepper motor drivers (Pololu just released their A4988 boards), you’re looking at almost $1K just for the parts. The software like slicers and even gcode interpreters weren’t even made yet. Merlin wasn’t even a big thing until about 10 years ago. We take for granted how much work the community has put into 3D printers to get us where we are today.

regularfry 2y ago
I don't think you can underestimate the development of efficient slicing algorithms. It might just have been something that would have happened anyway with other parts of the story in place, but there was a point in time when slicing anything complicated was very painful.
- tjoff 2y ago
  You don't start with anything complicated though. You start with cubes, make fixtures etc. And with waiting 5 hours to print it isn't unreasonable to wait an hour or two for the slicer either.

iamgopal 2y ago

Short answer is, there is no need. Personal computer were sold to make nice printed paper. Here there is no specific application.

evoke4908 2y ago

Part of it is technological advancement. It wasnt until the last 15 years or so that embedded processors became cheap and powerful enough to run a 3D printer at consumer prices. There's also the problem of 3D modeling and slicing. Again up until quite recently, 3D CAD was out of reach for most consumers. Either due to hardware capabilities or cost of the software. Slicing is its own entire branch of 3D processing and it took time to develop all the techniques we use today that make it fast and reliable. Slicing software could only exist after the printers were common. As well, I expect the availability and materials science of the plastics we use needed some further development. As I recall, 3D printers rose to prominence at about the same time and speed as we started getting genuinely powerful personal computers. You really needed a fast CPU, and printing became more accessible as the early I5/I7 generations became cheaply available. While you absolutely could build an FDM printer with 80s technology, I don't think it could ever be practical or affordable. Even if someone invented all the computational techniques for slicing, the compute available back then was not even close. It would literally take an actual supercomputer to slice your model. It'd take many, many hours on any consumer computer. This would hold true until the early 2000s. At a random guess, I'd say the tipping point would have been around the Pentium 4. So, same as most technologies we take for granted these days. Enabled almost exclusively by the speed and capacity of computer available to consumers.

nkrisc 2y ago

When I started my Industrial Design degree in 2007 the workshop there already had several large, commercial 3D printers for student use. Mind you they were nothing like the tabletop consumer ones we have today. They were about the same of a large American refrigerator. Since it was not really any special or amazing for us to have several of them, I have to imagine that industrial 3D printing capabilities were well established by the point. Edit: as I recall they were mostly used to make parts which could be given a nice surface finish and then from which silicone molds could be made.

jeffreyrogers 2y ago

There weren't good CAD tools to send the designs to the machine until recently. Early CAD tools mostly produced drawings and it was a separate step to manufacture from there. The way inkjet and laser printers work is also quite different from the way a 3d printer works. The similarity is mostly in the gantry, so there was nontrivial innovation required here. To some extent 3d printing is probably also a reaction to decreased access to domestic manufacturing. It doesn't make a lot of sense to produce most parts in plastic if you can get a cast or milled part quickly and cheaply.

zoklet-enjoyer 2y ago

Patents

cityofdelusion 2y ago

The pieces did NOT exist in the 1970s. Fast microcontrollers, stepper motors, precision miniaturized manufacturing, reliable and cheap miniaturized DC electronics, and far far more technology was non-existent at any kind of affordable price point. Look at kitchen appliances or metal/wood shop machinery from this era, still heavily analog, mostly made from sheet steel, mostly non-computerized. The 80s would bring better microprocessors but even the simple Nintendo was an inflation adjusted $450. For comparison the first RepRaps used a full power PC as their host machine and their materials cost roughly $1000 in today USD and needed parts from a commercial stratasys machine. Some of the greatest and most under appreciated technological achievements in the last 40 years have been in materials science and miniaturization.

kragen 2y ago
Microcontrollers and stepper motors were already controlling 2-D printers in the 01970s and early 01980s at higher speeds and similar powers to currently popular 3-D printers. The first RepRaps did not "use a full-power PC as their host machine"; they were controlled by AVRs, just like Arduino (which didn't exist yet). Generating motor control waveforms on a full-power PC is a nightmare nowadays, and was already a nightmare in 02005. The LinuxCNC people would do it by running Linux under a real-time hypervisor. The first CNC machining was done in the 01950s with IBM 704s, comparable in power to an Intel 8008. The 6502 used by the Commodore 64 to drive its floppy drive would have worked fine, though it is much slower than the AVR and doesn't have built-in PWM generation hardware. I agree that the pieces did not exist in the 01970s, but the missing pieces weren't the computation.
- actionfromafar 2y ago
  Now I'm very tempted to build a 3D printer with an 8-bit home computer and vintage parts.
  - dcminter 2y ago
    That sounds like a delightful project! This contemporary book from Usborne demonstrates the point that basic stepper controls from an 8-bit computer were well within hobbyist reach: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bxv0SsvibDMTZ2tQMmpyOWtsRFk/view?resourcekey=0-zt3ZcOMMA30T_LJlUEzoDQ https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bxv0SsvibDMTZ2tQMmpyOWtsRFk... I do think that the limitations of memory (and disk) will require some ingenuity in 3D printing more than the most trivial procedurally defined objects!

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Findecanor 2y ago

In my experience, it really took off when PLA filament became commonplace. ABS and UV-cured epoxy emitted noxious fumes which required separate ventilation systems and weren't really suitable to be used at home. Early home 3D-printers also required more of the user. It took a lot of tweaking to make them produce decent prints.

declan_roberts 2y ago

The answer to this is the same reason why flying cars aren't ubiquitous. Inventory and discovery is often the easy part.

K0balt 2y ago

The magic ingredients were inexpensive microcontrollers, massively paralleled mosfet transistors (also a product of large scale integrated circuits, since they are actually millions of tiny mosfets working together), and the expiration of several key patents that made it possible to have a commercial explosion around the reprap scene. The patents expiring was a big deal, since the main patent was on the fused deposition process itself. The other factor was that normal desktop computers had become powerful enough to run sophisticated 3d modeling programs and make machine motion computations from 3d design files.

kens 2y ago

You could buy a 3-D printer from Stratasys in 1990, but it cost $178,000! The printing unit was $130,000 and the Silicon Graphics workstation with slicing software to run it was $48,000 more. So the technology was there, but two orders of magnitude too expensive for the consumer market. Patents account for part of the cost, but the computer to control it was also way too expensive, as well as the custom (vs commoditized) mechanical components. Link: https://books.google.com/books?id=0bqdMvDMv74C&pg=PA32&dq=stratasys https://books.google.com/books?id=0bqdMvDMv74C&pg=PA32&dq=st...

snakeyjake 2y ago

3DBenchy.stl, the little boat that everyone prints as a benchmark during 3d printer reviews, is 10MB. A 10MB hard drive cost $3,000-4,000 in 1980. That's $12k-15k today. Just opening the .stl file and having it render (USABLY) on screen in high-resolution was probably not economical until the late 1990s-early 2000s. I am used to computing tasks being human-perception instant. It takes tens of seconds to run repairs on 3d models, which means it would have taken tens of hours to do that same thing, if there was even enough RAM, in the 90s.

kragen 2y ago

It took that long because nobody was working on it, because it wasn't obvious that a low-cost 3-D printer was feasible. The 3-D printers you're seeing today are basically the series of RepRap designs, named after famous scientists who studied self-reproduction: Darwin, Mendel, and Huxley. The RepRap project, which started in 02005, is the reason this happened. For the first several years, it was about half a dozen people: Rhys Jones, Patrick Haufe, Ed Sells, Pejman Iravani, Vik Olliver, Chris Palmer (aka NopHead) and Adrian Bowyer. The last three of these did most of the early work. Once they got it basically working, after many years of work, a lot of other people got involved. There were a series of developments that had to happen together to get a working low-cost printer. They had to use PLA, because the plastics conventionally used (mostly ABS) had such a high thermal coefficient of expansion that they needed a heated build chamber. They had to design their own electronics, because Arduino didn't exist. They had to figure out how to build a hotend that wouldn't break itself after a few hours. They had to write a slicer. They had to write a G-code interpreter. They weren't industrial engineers, so they didn't know about Kapton. They wasted a lot of time trying to make it work without even a heated bed, to keep costs down. They improvised leadscrews out of threaded rod and garden hose. They made rotational couplings from aquarium tubing. Lots and lots of inventions were needed to get the cost down from US$60k to US$0.3k, and lots and lots of time was wasted on figuring out how to get the resulting janky machines to be reliable enough to be usable at all. Starting in the mid-90s, Don Lancaster was excited about 3-D printers, which he called "Santa Claus machines" https://www.tinaja.com/santa01.shtml https://www.tinaja.com/santa01.shtml, when he could see that they were possible. He wrote lots of technical articles about building what he called "flutterwumpers": "low cost machines that spit or chomp". https://www.tinaja.com/flut01.shtml https://www.tinaja.com/flut01.shtml. For example, in https://www.tinaja.com/glib/muse140.pdf https://www.tinaja.com/glib/muse140.pdf in 01999, he describes Gordon Robineau's low-cost PCB drill driven by MS-DOS software over a serial port, with a schematic. (The fishing-line cable drive sounds imprecise, since this was years before Spectra braided fishing line.) But nobody listened. I don't know if he ever built so much as a sign cutting machine himself. Journalists like to talk about the patents, maybe because they're legible to nontechnical people in a way that difficulties with your retraction settings aren't, but when I was obsessively reading the RepRap blogs in the period 02005–02010, I can't recall that they ever mentioned the patents. They were just constantly hacking on their software, fixing their machines, having then break again after a few more hours of printing, and trying new stuff all the time. I don't think the patents even existed in their countries, and they were researchers, anyway, and generally patents don't prevent research. Maybe there's a vast dark-matter bulk of for-profit hackers who would have gotten involved and started up profitable consumer 3-D printing companies before 02005 if it hadn't been for the patents, but who never got interested because of the patents. But what I saw was that businesspeople started commercializing RepRaps once the open-source RepRap hackers got them to work somewhat reliably. Before that, they mostly weren't thinking about it. After that, most of them spent a lot of years shipping very slightly tweaked RepRap designs. Josef Prusa got involved in the RepRap project and redesigned Ed Sells's Mendel, and everybody copied him, and he famously started selling it himself, very successfully. https://reprap.org/wiki/The_incomplete_RepRap_Prusa_Mendel_beginner%27s_guide#What_is_RepRap.3F https://reprap.org/wiki/The_incomplete_RepRap_Prusa_Mendel_b... And more recently Bambu Labs has apparently gotten the machines to be much easier to use.

Animats 2y ago

Have you ever seen 1970s CNC gear? I came across a 1970s CNC lathe in a surplus store once. The thing was the size of a small car. The electronics box was the size of two racks. Inside were cards that handled one bit of one register. Input was from a paper tape. No CPU; all special purpose electronics. Directly controlling industrial machines from a microprocessor was very rare before the 1980s.

mmmlinux 2y ago

1. Patents. 2. CAD software was HUGELY expensive for a long time. 3. Parts were expensive. economy of scale on things like linear bearings made this crazy. I recently took apart my first gen printrbot (it cost me ~$600 and was one of the cheapest ones at the time) and it was all brand name VXB bearings. because that's basically all that existed.

aaron695 2y ago

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al2o3cr 2y ago

Equivalent statement: "A flying car is just a car with wings, what's so difficult about that???"

eigenvalue 2y ago

Just having a computer that could handle working with relatively complex 3D models, not even visually but just via the terminal, would have been a tall order in the 80s. Even getting the data from the computer to the printer would be tough. Floppies wouldn't store enough data for even modestly complex 3D model files. Parallel port? Would be painfully slow. But even if you get around those issues, the algorithms for transforming the 3D model into 2D layers that could be printed with the proper support structures and with minimal material used are extremely complicated and involved a lot of intermediate data during the calculations. Most machines then wouldn't have had even close the amount of RAM needed to do that in any reasonable amount of time.

LargoLasskhyfv 2y ago

Stratasys patents.

simne 2y ago

Working 3D printers existed long time, but only SLS and very expensive. Only in 2000s appear things important for cheap 3D printer: 1. Cheap power semiconductors. 2. Cheap 32-bit microcontrollers. 3. Powerful computers, to run slicer, and free slicer. 4. For photo-sensitive resin appear large 2nd market of powerful semiconductor lasers and light-modulators (from DLP projectors). To be more exact, FIRST powerful transistors appear in 1970s, but become cheap in 1990s; microcontrollers similar, but before 2000s cheap 32-bit does not existed; microcomputers become enough powerful for 3D printing in late 1990s and appeared home CNC motion; lasers are still grow, they now have something like Moore law. So to conclude, yes, sum of technologies need for cheap 3D printer appeared around Y2K, but then few years spend by fans to construct practice equipment and make first shipment to customer (Prusa made his design around 2009).

jamaicanindian 2y ago

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scyzoryk_xyz 2y ago

My father was an industrial design professor and I remember him showing me a 3D printed element in the early 00’s. He explained at the time that it’s the future but just way way too expensive and unstable for actual use cases. Chicken or egg sort of thing - I agree that it took the internet to exist

Ccecil 2y ago

1. Patents 2. Cheap CAD 3. Arduino (IMHO...before this it wasn't easy to interface to USB/PC for anyone who wasn't EE) 4. Surge of DIY online (Forums, mailing lists, instructables, pinterest) 5. Reprap leading the way with recycled parts as well as cheap imported motors and controllers. 6. Lack of interest- Machinists could usually do the same thing but better using subtractive. Additive was seen as "useless" for real world items even after reprap. There are probably a couple other things I am missing...and what order you place my list probably doesn't matter. It took everything at once happening.

simne 2y ago
> 3. Arduino (IMHO...before this it wasn't easy to interface to USB/PC for anyone who wasn't EE) I seen CNC of late 90s, which use x86 desktop computer as controller, and in Usenet stored lengthy talks about which boards are suitable for this task (as they made PWM by software on LPT port). Sure, LPT was not connected to stepper motors directly, but using opto-coupling. To be informative, Arduino is used to protect from copy printer by Chinese, as directly driven via LPT is not protected at all, but on Arduino you could set read-protect bits for mc flash and it will be not easy to read it (even when Western hackers regularly show read protected flash, it is not regularly happen). ..And from marketing view, it is good, that printer with Arduino could work from flash card, without working computer near.

kg08854 2y ago

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kg08854 2y ago

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scotty79 2y ago

Memory? We take 1GB for granted. In the old time is 4kB was expensive achievement. And you need a lot of memory to store g code for useful 3d model.