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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

by 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.
TaylorAlexander 2y ago
A few notes: The patents were a huge impediment. They did not expire till 2008 - before then printers cost $25k. They were expensive and stratasys had no incentive to make them $300 like they are today so volumes were limited. From their release in 1995 until 2008 stratasys sold like 13000 printers according to their company history web page. For a long time now Prusa has shipped more printers than that in a single month. The Reprap Darwin wasn’t built until late 2007, then makerbot and others followed. I bought an Ultimaker in 2011 and that’s when it feels to me like home printing started to become viable. Once anyone could build their own design, a community of hackers and engineers formed that continuously improved the designs with diverse ideas and experiments. That community is what made 3D printing what it is today. And it was illegal for them to do all of that (in many countries) until the patent expiration in 2008. That’s a big reason why it took so long. I think it’s interesting to consider whether this would have happened sooner if they had never been patented, though perhaps the expired patent created a legal safe haven where no one could take away the basic principles by patenting them. Anyway, patents play a big role in this story! Edit: Some cool history here: https://3dprintingindustry.com/news/interview-dr-adrian-bowyer-10th-anniversary-reprap-133841/ https://3dprintingindustry.com/news/interview-dr-adrian-bowy...
- kragen 2y ago
  Note that Bowyer doesn't mention the patents at all in this interview, so I question your assertion that the patents were a huge impediment to him. Possibly they dissuaded other people from starting a RepRap-like project years earlier, but I think the vast majority of such people didn't even imagine that an affordable 3-D printer was possible.
  - TaylorAlexander 2y ago
    Ah that’s a fair point. I asked him: https://bsky.app/profile/tlalexander.bsky.social/post/3laiw4kiyrp2k https://bsky.app/profile/tlalexander.bsky.social/post/3laiw4... I think I have heard that in the country he was living in, violating patents for personal use was okay. My understanding is that things are much more strict in the USA, where I believe you can’t help others violate patents so you can’t publish work the way Adrian did. I know that in the early days of 3D printing everyone wanted a belt printer, but users and hackers on the forum regularly expressed concern over MakerBot’s patent and the associated legal risk of violating it. That’s why today’s belt printers have the head at a 45 degree angle. It’s a patent workaround because MakerBot’s patent specified a belt that was parallel to the motion axes. At least that’s what I think Brook Drumm of Printrbot told me. So even if they didn’t affect Adrian, they certainly had a chilling effect. And I don’t think even under Adrian’s legal regime he would have been allowed to sell the work, so more expensive engineering development was prohibited. We didn’t get cheap 3d printers until companies could mass produce existing low cost open source designs, and that mass production was obviously prohibited by the patents. We didn’t get low cost machines until competition was allowed in to the space. And I’ve heard directly from 3D printer hacker developers that patents affected their decisions not to prototype certain new components. Sorry I can’t point you to a source directly but this would probably have been on the mailing list for the Bay Area Reprap club in 2010-2014, or the Ultimaker mailing list in the same timeframe.
PaulHoule 2y ago
I remember reading articles in hobby electronics magazines circa 1990 where people were talking about 3-d printing as a nascent technology.
johnny_canuck 2y ago
I'm curious how much better the printers are these days as I'd love to get another one. I had a Wanhao Duplicator i3 in 2015 and found it required a lot of tinkering and calibration every time I wanted to use it. I ended up selling it as it was so time consuming to get everything correctly set up that it just killed any interest I had in it.
- nameless912 2y ago
  Nowadays spending 500-1000 USD on a machine gets you something that can print almost anything (within size limitations) out of the box with no calibration. The BambuLab printers are nothing short of extraordinary for quite reasonable prices (the A1 mini is only like 300 bucks, but it's small). And their software stack is good enough that 3D printing is roughly as easy as 2D printing (with the same caveats that occasionally your machine will jam and you'll want to chuck it out a window).
- ben1040 2y ago
  I had a Makerbot 2X in 2014 and it required constant janitoring every time I wanted to print. I built a Prusa MK4 this spring; it calibrated itself and printed a great looking piece right from the get-go. The difference is night and day.
- criddell 2y ago
  Check out Bambu Lab printers if you want something more modern. They have several models available for less than $1000 and give good results with little messing around. I say this as someone who doesn’t want 3d-printing as a hobby. It’s just a tool I want to occasionally use in order to get something else done and the less time I have to spend tramming and calibrating, the better.
- ok_dad 2y ago
  I bought the cheapest printer available, the Kobra Go I believe, and with very little tweaking I had it running well enough that I don’t care to tweak more. I owned a delta printer ten years ago which I spent $1200 plus another $600 in custom parts and it ran about the same as my current one (though it was bigger) and my current one cost $150 plus shipping. I don’t suggest the cheapest one if you have the money but I only use mine once a month or less so it was the perfect price vs. functionality. I did build the old one from a kit and modified nearly every mechanism though, so I’m relatively confident with these machines. I do suggest the more expensive, better quality printers if you don’t want to tweak stuff much.
jdietrich 2y ago
The widespread commercial availability of polylactic acid was also a significant factor. It's one of the few plastics that can reliably print on an open-framed printer. The cheap i3 and Ender clones just wouldn't have taken off if we were stuck with ABS.
- Doxin 2y ago
  I think PETG would've also worked. Keep in mind neither of those plastics were rare at the time. The filament form factor was essentially nonexistent though, which makes the whole 3d printing business a lot trickier.
  - kragen 2y ago
    It depends on what you mean by "rare". Both PETG and PLA were commercially available when RepRap started, but they weren't very widely used. PLA's biggest use at the time was reabsorbable medical implants, for example. I don't know what people used PETG for in 02005. I'm not sure either of them existed in the 01970s.
    - simne 2y ago
      Nearly all plastic bottles under 10 metric liter are PET (many 10 liters produced from Poly(methyl methacrylate)). PETG is modified PET, so it depend on point of view - (glass semi-full or semi-empty). Any way, in Ukraine people recycle plastic bottles into filament, which is considered by printer software as PETG.
      - kragen 2y ago
        Yes, PET is the most common plastic!
    - Doxin 2y ago
      > PLA's biggest use at the time was reabsorbable medical implants And in disposable forks that liked to advertise compostability. It's no ABS but it isn't and wasn't a rare plastic. I'm not actually entirely sure how common PETG was in products back then, but it's by no means a new invention.

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

by sottol 2y ago

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.

TaylorAlexander 2y ago

A few notes: The patents were a huge impediment. They did not expire till 2008 - before then printers cost $25k. They were expensive and stratasys had no incentive to make them $300 like they are today so volumes were limited. From their release in 1995 until 2008 stratasys sold like 13000 printers according to their company history web page. For a long time now Prusa has shipped more printers than that in a single month. The Reprap Darwin wasn’t built until late 2007, then makerbot and others followed. I bought an Ultimaker in 2011 and that’s when it feels to me like home printing started to become viable. Once anyone could build their own design, a community of hackers and engineers formed that continuously improved the designs with diverse ideas and experiments. That community is what made 3D printing what it is today. And it was illegal for them to do all of that (in many countries) until the patent expiration in 2008. That’s a big reason why it took so long. I think it’s interesting to consider whether this would have happened sooner if they had never been patented, though perhaps the expired patent created a legal safe haven where no one could take away the basic principles by patenting them. Anyway, patents play a big role in this story! Edit: Some cool history here: https://3dprintingindustry.com/news/interview-dr-adrian-bowyer-10th-anniversary-reprap-133841/ https://3dprintingindustry.com/news/interview-dr-adrian-bowy...

kragen 2y ago
Note that Bowyer doesn't mention the patents at all in this interview, so I question your assertion that the patents were a huge impediment to him. Possibly they dissuaded other people from starting a RepRap-like project years earlier, but I think the vast majority of such people didn't even imagine that an affordable 3-D printer was possible.
- TaylorAlexander 2y ago
  Ah that’s a fair point. I asked him: https://bsky.app/profile/tlalexander.bsky.social/post/3laiw4kiyrp2k https://bsky.app/profile/tlalexander.bsky.social/post/3laiw4... I think I have heard that in the country he was living in, violating patents for personal use was okay. My understanding is that things are much more strict in the USA, where I believe you can’t help others violate patents so you can’t publish work the way Adrian did. I know that in the early days of 3D printing everyone wanted a belt printer, but users and hackers on the forum regularly expressed concern over MakerBot’s patent and the associated legal risk of violating it. That’s why today’s belt printers have the head at a 45 degree angle. It’s a patent workaround because MakerBot’s patent specified a belt that was parallel to the motion axes. At least that’s what I think Brook Drumm of Printrbot told me. So even if they didn’t affect Adrian, they certainly had a chilling effect. And I don’t think even under Adrian’s legal regime he would have been allowed to sell the work, so more expensive engineering development was prohibited. We didn’t get cheap 3d printers until companies could mass produce existing low cost open source designs, and that mass production was obviously prohibited by the patents. We didn’t get low cost machines until competition was allowed in to the space. And I’ve heard directly from 3D printer hacker developers that patents affected their decisions not to prototype certain new components. Sorry I can’t point you to a source directly but this would probably have been on the mailing list for the Bay Area Reprap club in 2010-2014, or the Ultimaker mailing list in the same timeframe.

PaulHoule 2y ago

I remember reading articles in hobby electronics magazines circa 1990 where people were talking about 3-d printing as a nascent technology.

johnny_canuck 2y ago

I'm curious how much better the printers are these days as I'd love to get another one. I had a Wanhao Duplicator i3 in 2015 and found it required a lot of tinkering and calibration every time I wanted to use it. I ended up selling it as it was so time consuming to get everything correctly set up that it just killed any interest I had in it.

nameless912 2y ago
Nowadays spending 500-1000 USD on a machine gets you something that can print almost anything (within size limitations) out of the box with no calibration. The BambuLab printers are nothing short of extraordinary for quite reasonable prices (the A1 mini is only like 300 bucks, but it's small). And their software stack is good enough that 3D printing is roughly as easy as 2D printing (with the same caveats that occasionally your machine will jam and you'll want to chuck it out a window).
ben1040 2y ago
I had a Makerbot 2X in 2014 and it required constant janitoring every time I wanted to print. I built a Prusa MK4 this spring; it calibrated itself and printed a great looking piece right from the get-go. The difference is night and day.
criddell 2y ago
Check out Bambu Lab printers if you want something more modern. They have several models available for less than $1000 and give good results with little messing around. I say this as someone who doesn’t want 3d-printing as a hobby. It’s just a tool I want to occasionally use in order to get something else done and the less time I have to spend tramming and calibrating, the better.
ok_dad 2y ago
I bought the cheapest printer available, the Kobra Go I believe, and with very little tweaking I had it running well enough that I don’t care to tweak more. I owned a delta printer ten years ago which I spent $1200 plus another $600 in custom parts and it ran about the same as my current one (though it was bigger) and my current one cost $150 plus shipping. I don’t suggest the cheapest one if you have the money but I only use mine once a month or less so it was the perfect price vs. functionality. I did build the old one from a kit and modified nearly every mechanism though, so I’m relatively confident with these machines. I do suggest the more expensive, better quality printers if you don’t want to tweak stuff much.

jdietrich 2y ago

The widespread commercial availability of polylactic acid was also a significant factor. It's one of the few plastics that can reliably print on an open-framed printer. The cheap i3 and Ender clones just wouldn't have taken off if we were stuck with ABS.

Doxin 2y ago
I think PETG would've also worked. Keep in mind neither of those plastics were rare at the time. The filament form factor was essentially nonexistent though, which makes the whole 3d printing business a lot trickier.
- kragen 2y ago
  It depends on what you mean by "rare". Both PETG and PLA were commercially available when RepRap started, but they weren't very widely used. PLA's biggest use at the time was reabsorbable medical implants, for example. I don't know what people used PETG for in 02005. I'm not sure either of them existed in the 01970s.
  - simne 2y ago
    Nearly all plastic bottles under 10 metric liter are PET (many 10 liters produced from Poly(methyl methacrylate)). PETG is modified PET, so it depend on point of view - (glass semi-full or semi-empty). Any way, in Ukraine people recycle plastic bottles into filament, which is considered by printer software as PETG.
    - kragen 2y ago
      Yes, PET is the most common plastic!
  - Doxin 2y ago
    > PLA's biggest use at the time was reabsorbable medical implants And in disposable forks that liked to advertise compostability. It's no ABS but it isn't and wasn't a rare plastic. I'm not actually entirely sure how common PETG was in products back then, but it's by no means a new invention.