Last week I ordered a 3D printer (MakerBot's Replicator 2) for my home, to allow my daughters (6 and 8) to grow up being able to model and print out their own toys. Playing the game Minecraft has provided them the eye to see and create shapes in 3D. I'm eager to see what they will create when I provide them with the transition from virtual to physical. I want them to be pioneers of their generation.
To be honest I think that 20 years from now people won't look back and say "3D printing, ahah! that was the revolutionary invention" but it will be a part of a larger set of inventions and innovations which will revolutionize manufacturing.
For example, I think 3D printing as a method to rapidly make metal casting and injection molds (either directly printing the molds or via lost-material casting) is potentially more impactful to manufacturing than direct 3D printing. The truly big innovation of 3D printing and, say, "table top manufacturing / fabrication" systems won't come because such devices will be immanently practical for home use. Instead what I think is more likely is that the ability of hobbyists and tinkerers to experiment with them will lead to an explosion of innovation. Meaning: better tools and techniques for automating and simplifying the process of transitioning from design to manufacturing.
I think 3d printing has a lot in common with 2d printing. And I have not had a printer for since collage, and I tend to go months between printing something at work.
Of course if were talking about a 3d printer that can print me up a soda or an iPad that's a different story. But, if it's just little plastic objects well, that's stuck in the realm of knickknacks / Junk IMO. And I suspect most people will quickly get to that point after the first cheap 3d printer shows up.
if it's just little plastic objects well, that's stuck in the realm of knickknacks / Junk IMO. And I suspect most people will quickly get to that point after the first cheap 3d printer shows up.
It could really revolutionise some things, like home appliances. The little plastic latch on your appliance break? Print out a new one. The plastic flap that keeps your battery in on your digital camera break? Print out a new one. Suddenly a lot of devices might be much more 'repairable' now.
For things like appliances most manufacturers already sell replacement parts for cheaper than you could "print" them yourself, without the problems associated with printing it yourself.
For things like consumer level electronics, the manufacturers could sell replacement parts, but they'd prefer people replace the entire item. If the camera manufacturer won't sell a replacement flap, it's unlikely they'll give out the original CAD files for people to print their own.
> I think 3d printing has a lot in common with 2d printing.
In terms of the process, sure. But the product is vastly different; '2D' printing just generates a new encoding of the same information you've already got stored electronically, and when everyone has PCs and smartphones and tablets, a physical encoding of information is rarely a necessity.
But 3D printing actually creates a functional physical object that corresponds to a design; it's not merely a re-encoding of the information itself, so there's a huge value-add with 3D printing that isn't at all present in document printing, even if the current iteration of the technology is limited to producing small-scale uniformly plastic parts.
But will we ever get to the point where the general consumer will be able to print something as complex as an iPad with as good fit and finish as one from apple?
Or alternately how long will it take until we can print an iPad?
That is Jetson's stuff now. Current 3D printing processes have about as much to do with demonstrating real progress toward printing iPads as 2D printing processes do.
Hitting print and having a fully-assumbled iPad put on the platter is definitely Jetson stuff, but we do have the technology to print plastics, glass, and even circuit boards. The remaining components needed to build an iPad-like device can be sourced from your favourite electronics supplier. Having all the building blocks to build a tablet at your disposal is still really amazing.
I drive an old Mitsubishi and parts are often impossible to come by even at the junkyard. I look forward to the day when a local machine shop can download the mold and make me my part even if expensive because the alternative is rigging a part from another vehicle.
Another effect: prototyping is surely the most labor-intensive part of the manufacturing process. This will reduce the share of employment attributed to manufacturing while possibly increase output.
I agree, There's definetly a lot of new tools for simplifying prototyping and manufacturing. And that's a long trend seen in many fields.
But this pushed hard on testing processes. Industries like software, that can avoid testing(through bugs and reuse and good testing tools) seen an innovation boom.
But industries where testing is hard, seen troubles in innovation. Pharma is a good example of this with the small amount of new drugs in the pipeline, even thought there's tons of "prototypes".
So i wonder,is there a need, and how can we automate and simplyfy the need of physical product testing ?
Several people have commented on how this will change appliances and toys.
Let's look at this popular hundred dollar coffee maker: http://amzn.com/B004SOZVQ2 which one could order within seconds and have it delivered within two days.
Just from the picture, one can see it has at least two dozen parts made from seven different materials ranging from injected molded plastic, stainless steel, glass, as well as electronic components.
It would be incredibly time consuming and wasteful to print each of these pieces with a 3D printer.
As others suggested, you could print a custom injection mold for each component, but then you would need the injection molding machine, several different kinds of raw plastics, and some means to get rid of the unused, potentially toxic, materials.
Again from the picture one can see seventeen different pieces all different colors and at least three types of plastic and a least one metal spring.
This gun could be made with 3D printing technology, but it would waste an incredible amount of material and would take a fair amount of time. You would still have to order the darts and spring separately.
I could see someone wanting to make this themselves; those who like legos, model trains etc.
3D printing can be world changing for hobbyists. The rest of us have already had our world changed by modern manufacturing, global supply chains, and online retail.
3d printers will print designs optimized for them, rather than ones optimized for mass production.
Spend 100$ and wait a few days, or spend a few bucks and wait a few hours?
The question is whether a coffee maker can be made from less materials in a way compatible with cheap 3d printing, and there is no reason to believe it won't be possible.
The fantasy of desktop manufacturing may not ever come to be, but 3D printing will likely be part of an even more astounding revolution in manufacturing coming in the next few decades.
And that is fully automated and quickly reconfigurable manufacturing.
Today, to manufacture something like an iphone or a car you have to set up an assembly line, you have to spend a lot of time designing the manufacturing processes of the device. The process of creating a whole supply chain and an assembly line to make thousands of devices is very, very different from what it would take for someone to make a single prototype. And this is why there aren't millions of companies making phones and cars and whatnot, it takes a lot of effort and a lot of resources to manufacture anything.
But this will change. As manufacturing becomes more automated and as the tooling for automated manufacturing improves the interface between manufacturing sub-contractor and product designer (say, foxconn vs. apple) can potentially become purely software. Meaning that instead of having to hire a bunch of people to oversee setting up a manufacturing facility you simply upload a few files containing CAD diagrams, specs, wiring info, etc. And instead of being optimized for producing many thousands of products after extensive reconfiguring of the manual labor intensive assembly line the factories can be optimized for producing as few as a handful of finished items.
How does that change things? Well, it might mean that manufacturing can be more closely located near consumers. If you have a dozen identical automated factories spread across the world then you can simply produce the same item out of each of them. Also, if there is less latency in spinning up / spinning down the production of a given item then it could mean that production could be more "on demand" than the norm today. If a factory only a few hundred kilometers away can be spun up in a matter of hours in order to produce some item and can add thousands of units that could be on the shelves in a matter of hours then it's much less necessary to overproduce.
Also, if a tiny company can leverage automated manufacturing firms for production then this could result in a sea change for all manufactured goods. Boutique manufactured goods could become the norm rather than the universal, mass produced goods of today. What happens when a company could crowd source a new smart phone model for only a few tens of thousands of dollars with a team of only a few designers and engineers and still produce hundreds or even thousands of devices with the same production quality as apple's iphones? And, of course, what happens when you can start revving the design of an item not just on the scale of years or months but on the scale of weeks or days?
And, of course. What happens when you start making factories that can produce factories?
All of these things are near certainties within the next 5 decades if not far sooner.
In the long term (30-50 years), "replicator" technologies could appear, and then game over there's some major disruption coming.
However, for the type of machines today, better democratization means easier prototyping, which combines with hackerspaces / TechShop, open hardware, etc. are already allowing hardware startups to emerge - a movement that's gaining steam rapidly.
For the mid-term, cheaper prints comparable cost/materials-wise with injection molding, this could still do some pretty amazing stuff with flexible production, but we'll still need assembly lines with chips, etc.
Maybe if we can get conductive inks to be responsive enough for digital electronics, we could print circuit board inside and just pick-n-place the ICs. Also, by this time we may have a more modular approach to hardware where only a few thousand components are needed to make 99% of devices - then Kinkos-scale production would be possible. Timeframe: 10-20 years?
That would be great, but I think the time frame isn't realistic unless we already have the technology to do this but it is not out of the lab yet so to speak.
If we do, then perhaps it is possible to make the manufacturing processes simple enough within this time frame to bring the costs down to the point where these types of companies would be commercially feasible.
The whole electronics supply chain is optimized towards volume manufacturing. There's a second supply chain for small volumes, but it's expensive: boards instead of chips or more expensive chips and boards(due to volume breaks), complex development, testing. The assembly costs are relatively minor.
I think the first step for the kinko[1] vision would be to largely automate the development and test costs. Maybe arduino is one path to this.
[1]I think it would make more sense as a centralized source who prints designs coupled with rapid shipping, not as a kinko.
Yea, it's true on supply but this is a structural problem (i.e. minimum stocking sizes at 4K units, etc.) that would change if the demand was there.
Agree with [1] - that's partially already here with ProtoMold, Sunstone Circuits, Ponoko, etc. - centralized makes sense when you have economies of scale, but my comment was that this scale can actually be driven lower via technology.
I think that development / test costs are a big deal, but maybe the "automate" part is more in the EDA sense of the term - than "sudo make me a sandwich" where your design is compiled directly.
I got a 'creepy crawly maker' for Christmas when I was a kid. It was cool. But after I'd made all the bugs and run out of juice, it went in the closet.
3D printing is a toy so far. I don't see how it will ever be more than that.
Sure, folks promise better materials soon. But its actually hard to make metal things well. That's why its done in large factories with expensive presses and stamps and things. You're not going to recapitulate that in your living room.
I'd love to be wrong. But so far, lumpy plastic toys is what we see. Why? Because that's possible at low temps/pressures and with cheap tooling.
Design and manufacturing engineers have been using 3D printing for some time now and while it hasn't revolutionized anything 3D printing has certainly made the discipline more efficient and lowered the bar for prototyping. We now have a fully established rapid prototyping flow that allows an ME to"print" a part without even fiddling with the actual printer or stereolith machine.
The only flipside is that customers can see the real thing much earlier and do not understand that at least two or three more engineering disciplines are involved in turning a prototype into a product.
I think the potential for the home user and tinkerer is enormous and that can only be good. Companies that can afford in-house 3D printing are also the ones least likely to address niche markets or crazy ideas.
Star Trek's replicator is the obvious long term outcome if we can can get nanotechnology cheap enough, so anyone can buy such a machine in their own homes. Then we'd go to supermarkets (or maybe get them sent home) to buy only raw materials like protein and such.
Maybe we'd just have "feed lines" of raw molecules to our homes like in The Diamond Age. Also, if this technology interests you and you haven't read that book, I highly recommend it. It is my favorite Neal Stephenson book.
To start I think 3D printing is just making it easier for hobbyists and small professionals to manufacture products, lowering cost for the consumer and increasing competition. In time they'll start to come into the home if we can find further compelling reasons for them.
More plastic shit to print more plastic shit into the world. I can only see this "changing" things in a negative way, at least environmentally. I hope this doesn't take off, unless it is able to actually counteract the way things are going with plastic right now
ABS and PLA are common plastics home desktop 3D printers use. PLA is widely known for being corn based, and PLA is recyclable at recycling plants. ABS can be melted more than once, and people are working on machines that can take your broken ABS parts, and remelt it back into plastic filament you can use for your 3D printer.
There are metal 3D printers, but the process is a lot more complex right now, and they are more expensive. But in time I'm sure some innovations will appear to make it as easy as printing plastic objects.
