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I've been watching Ken Burns documentaries on American presidents while building and calibrating a Prusa i3v RepRap 3D printer so I can build a functional proto

I've been watching Ken Burns documentaries on American presidents while building and calibrating a Prusa i3v RepRap 3D printer so I can build a functional prototype for a hardware product I'm building. I find a lot of wisdom and courage in the biographies of people who have done great things. Teddy Roosevelt and his father suffered from bouts of depression, and the remedy they found was constant movement. They had a saying they would repeat, "Get action, be sane". Keep moving. It's the striving that counts more than the results. You've probably heard this one before but its fitting upon the death of a dream: "It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat" - Teddy Roosevelt So I raise a glass to Sonar, and all the (wo)men in the arena, whether they find victory or defeat. And in the final counting it's not a defeat, it's a strategic retreat. They will fall back, consolidate their position and go once more into the breach.

kzhahou 12y ago
I don't know man, I'm not a fan of inspiration by once-in-a-generation leaders. Not everyone's a Roosevelt waiting to emerge, and that's ok. I feel that HN tries to be very supportive, but inadvertently sets expectations too high, and then we see the depressed founders who keep banging their heads against a wall. Kudos to the team for trying and to the author for writing it up.
- nosuchthing 12y ago
  Is it okay to say cynicism kills? No one is claiming everyone can do anything they want. Kudos to anyone who exerts effort in their great attempts and ambitions, rather than sit off to the side and make nonconstructive remarks about the failures of others.
  - kzhahou 12y ago
    I edited to clarify my position, which is not based on cynicism but rather concern for the mental well-being of the community.
- NhanH 12y ago
  The thing is, we see the depressed head-bangers because head-bangers are visible. We do not know if there are people depressed because they never try, or they gave up.
- willholloway 12y ago
  You are right, there is a dark side to entrepreneurial ambition and Pollyanna should be tarred and feathered. You see it in the father that sinks hundreds of thousands into a franchise and loses the family house or the founder banging their head against the wall. That's where ambition crosses over into obsession, or addiction. Fail fast is a good motto. We all can't and don't want to achieve greatness, but striving for something is one of the best tools we have for dealing with the predicament of being a human on a still primitive earth. The thing that impressed me most about TR was that he became a once-in-a-generation leader through sheer force of will, a demand to have fun, to be free, a desire to experience new and dangerous things, and a righteous absence of fear of death. All this despite treacherous fate cursing him to be a sickly child, with severe asthma at a time when there were no good medicines for it. His brother was the heir apparent, but TR had a lust for life, he wanted it more. I want to want it more.
Trombone12 12y ago
From the same speech about how a citizen should be, a page down or so[1], a passage that gives a slightly different flavour to the above quote. "There are a few people in every country so born that they can lead lives of leisure. These fill a useful function if they make it evident that leisure does not mean idleness; [...] But the average man must earn his own livelihood. He should be trained to do so, and he should be trained to feel that he occupies a contemptible position if he does not do so; that he is not an object of envy if he is idle, at whichever end of the social scale he stands, but an object of contempt, an object of derision." further down[2] the nuance is again changed: "The citizen must have high ideals, and yet he must be able to achieve them in practical fashion. No permanent good comes from aspirations so lofty that they have grown fantastic and have become impossible and indeed undesirable to realize. The impractical visionary is far less often the guide and precursor than he is the embittered foe of the real reformer, of the man who, with stumblings and shortcoming, yet does in some shape, in practical fashion, give effect to the hopes and desires of those who strive for better things." [1] Page 5, http://design.caltech.edu/erik/Misc/Citizenship_in_a_Republic.pdf http://design.caltech.edu/erik/Misc/Citizenship_in_a_Republi... [2] Page 8, ibid
jacquesm 12y ago
> while building and calibrating a Prusa i3v RepRap 3D printer so I can build a functional prototype for a hardware product I'm building. You'll learn a ton of stuff about RepRaps but you're going to be behind on your hardware product at some point, if the goal is your hardware product maybe wood or farming out the parts to people that already have 3D printers would be a short-cut time wise and depending on what you do also precision and finish wise? I'm all for a good round of Yak shaving though so don't let me distract you from your mission ;) But if you're serious about your hardware product and attempting a start-up speed is somewhat of an essential thing.
- willholloway 12y ago
  I have thought the same thing many times, and wondered whether this decision would be my battle of Waterloo, that is very good advice! I wanted to not just build a manufactured product, I wanted to build a kit, like the RepRap, that could be fabricated by ordinary people out of a combination of printed and mostly commodity parts. I wanted to build a new kind of hardware product, one where the lead time of tooling and manufacturing could be cut out, at least for the kit version, I plan a full normal manufacturing process as well. So building was us eating our own dog food. It's an experiment to see if the RepRap model can be extended to other areas. It's an experiment to see if 3D printers can live up to their hype. The hype is incomplete, as small plastic parts are only so useful. But I think plastic parts in combination with circuit boards, arduinos, laser cut wood parts and commodity manufactured parts is incredibly powerful. This was my thinking on building vs buying a 3D printer when I made the decison: I needed a large build area, and so the 12" Prusa for $650 seemed a good choice, compared to a $1300 Solidoodle that I read bad reviews of, saying that it did not work well, or a $2000+ Makerbot that I just did not have the money for on my bootstrapping budget. When I bought the kit the seller advertised a build time of 3+ hours. I thought that's nothing, we can do it in one or two evenings and it won't set us back at all. It took much longer, but what really took time was the fine calibration and the learning curve of designing 3D parts that are able to be printed one layer at a time. The instructional videos were outdated in many places, on older iterations of the kit. We had a heated bed short out, and we had no experience with RepRaps. The parts didn't come labelled and just figuring out what was what took a while. I didn't realize until the end that Colin at MakerFarm provides heroic, incredibly responsive email support and so many of the questions that stumped us for a while could have been answered almost instantaneously with a quick email. Despite that, Makerfarm still makes a really great RepRap kit that I highly recommend and Colin is seriously a standup guy that replaced the shorted out heated bed for free. I considered farming the parts out, but knew I would need to print multiple iterations and I would not get it right on the first or second or third attempts and it would slow down our OODA loop. I can't wait to show the world what we have been doing but we are just not quite ready yet, still in super secret g14 classified startup mode.

kzhahou 12y ago

I don't know man, I'm not a fan of inspiration by once-in-a-generation leaders. Not everyone's a Roosevelt waiting to emerge, and that's ok. I feel that HN tries to be very supportive, but inadvertently sets expectations too high, and then we see the depressed founders who keep banging their heads against a wall. Kudos to the team for trying and to the author for writing it up.

nosuchthing 12y ago
Is it okay to say cynicism kills? No one is claiming everyone can do anything they want. Kudos to anyone who exerts effort in their great attempts and ambitions, rather than sit off to the side and make nonconstructive remarks about the failures of others.
- kzhahou 12y ago
  I edited to clarify my position, which is not based on cynicism but rather concern for the mental well-being of the community.
NhanH 12y ago
The thing is, we see the depressed head-bangers because head-bangers are visible. We do not know if there are people depressed because they never try, or they gave up.
willholloway 12y ago
You are right, there is a dark side to entrepreneurial ambition and Pollyanna should be tarred and feathered. You see it in the father that sinks hundreds of thousands into a franchise and loses the family house or the founder banging their head against the wall. That's where ambition crosses over into obsession, or addiction. Fail fast is a good motto. We all can't and don't want to achieve greatness, but striving for something is one of the best tools we have for dealing with the predicament of being a human on a still primitive earth. The thing that impressed me most about TR was that he became a once-in-a-generation leader through sheer force of will, a demand to have fun, to be free, a desire to experience new and dangerous things, and a righteous absence of fear of death. All this despite treacherous fate cursing him to be a sickly child, with severe asthma at a time when there were no good medicines for it. His brother was the heir apparent, but TR had a lust for life, he wanted it more. I want to want it more.

Trombone12 12y ago

From the same speech about how a citizen should be, a page down or so[1], a passage that gives a slightly different flavour to the above quote. "There are a few people in every country so born that they can lead lives of leisure. These fill a useful function if they make it evident that leisure does not mean idleness; [...] But the average man must earn his own livelihood. He should be trained to do so, and he should be trained to feel that he occupies a contemptible position if he does not do so; that he is not an object of envy if he is idle, at whichever end of the social scale he stands, but an object of contempt, an object of derision." further down[2] the nuance is again changed: "The citizen must have high ideals, and yet he must be able to achieve them in practical fashion. No permanent good comes from aspirations so lofty that they have grown fantastic and have become impossible and indeed undesirable to realize. The impractical visionary is far less often the guide and precursor than he is the embittered foe of the real reformer, of the man who, with stumblings and shortcoming, yet does in some shape, in practical fashion, give effect to the hopes and desires of those who strive for better things." [1] Page 5, http://design.caltech.edu/erik/Misc/Citizenship_in_a_Republic.pdf http://design.caltech.edu/erik/Misc/Citizenship_in_a_Republi... [2] Page 8, ibid

jacquesm 12y ago

> while building and calibrating a Prusa i3v RepRap 3D printer so I can build a functional prototype for a hardware product I'm building. You'll learn a ton of stuff about RepRaps but you're going to be behind on your hardware product at some point, if the goal is your hardware product maybe wood or farming out the parts to people that already have 3D printers would be a short-cut time wise and depending on what you do also precision and finish wise? I'm all for a good round of Yak shaving though so don't let me distract you from your mission ;) But if you're serious about your hardware product and attempting a start-up speed is somewhat of an essential thing.

willholloway 12y ago
I have thought the same thing many times, and wondered whether this decision would be my battle of Waterloo, that is very good advice! I wanted to not just build a manufactured product, I wanted to build a kit, like the RepRap, that could be fabricated by ordinary people out of a combination of printed and mostly commodity parts. I wanted to build a new kind of hardware product, one where the lead time of tooling and manufacturing could be cut out, at least for the kit version, I plan a full normal manufacturing process as well. So building was us eating our own dog food. It's an experiment to see if the RepRap model can be extended to other areas. It's an experiment to see if 3D printers can live up to their hype. The hype is incomplete, as small plastic parts are only so useful. But I think plastic parts in combination with circuit boards, arduinos, laser cut wood parts and commodity manufactured parts is incredibly powerful. This was my thinking on building vs buying a 3D printer when I made the decison: I needed a large build area, and so the 12" Prusa for $650 seemed a good choice, compared to a $1300 Solidoodle that I read bad reviews of, saying that it did not work well, or a $2000+ Makerbot that I just did not have the money for on my bootstrapping budget. When I bought the kit the seller advertised a build time of 3+ hours. I thought that's nothing, we can do it in one or two evenings and it won't set us back at all. It took much longer, but what really took time was the fine calibration and the learning curve of designing 3D parts that are able to be printed one layer at a time. The instructional videos were outdated in many places, on older iterations of the kit. We had a heated bed short out, and we had no experience with RepRaps. The parts didn't come labelled and just figuring out what was what took a while. I didn't realize until the end that Colin at MakerFarm provides heroic, incredibly responsive email support and so many of the questions that stumped us for a while could have been answered almost instantaneously with a quick email. Despite that, Makerfarm still makes a really great RepRap kit that I highly recommend and Colin is seriously a standup guy that replaced the shorted out heated bed for free. I considered farming the parts out, but knew I would need to print multiple iterations and I would not get it right on the first or second or third attempts and it would slow down our OODA loop. I can't wait to show the world what we have been doing but we are just not quite ready yet, still in super secret g14 classified startup mode.