Why RepRap is failing

The RepRap project was founded in 2005 by Dr. Adrian Bowyer at the University of Bath. Its goal was a laudable one

Quote

What does Linux have, 3%? And actually declining, according to some estimates

Now that one is a blatant troll But moving swiftly on.

Quote

RepRap is failing. Designs diverge further from the standard on a daily basis

Where's the failure? I'm not seeing it. The heart of the reprap is the filament extruder and the techniques by which it might be used. Who cares what platform it is mounted on? As nophead has shown, there's plenty of work to be done on deposition techniques alone.

There's no point forcing a standard upon everyone whilst no-one is quite sure how the whole thing should actually look. More to the point, you can't *force* anyone to do anything. The project is diverging? Oh well. The core team still seems to be working on it. The loss and gain of public support for the project is tangential.

Quote

Nophead has been getting brilliant results ... So then why hasn

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/04/2008 03:50AM by Ru.

Quick edit: I missed the first reply while I was posting, so I'm reading it now.
Edit2: Hm. Ru, I found your post quite entertaining. It was a bit defensive though, and some of your response points were flawed (probably due to the emotions that controlled the reactions). No worries, though (it's apparent that your intentions were generally positive... plus, I'm human too ).
In any case, I think the OP is generally trying to figure out where the project is going to see whether or not he should spend his time working on it (poking at the dark logs with a stick to find the embers... something like that). Perhaps a sitrep is in order, not just for him, but for ourselves as well?
(end of edits)
--------------


Change? What exactly do you suggest? This past summer the RepRap project has seen many new RepRaps born. The community is constantly discussing and testing improvements (sometimes less of that "testing" part, but that's normal), and the project is moving forward.

Your comparison to Linux is a bad one; if someone made printers readily available, well documented, with nice interfaces, at a reasonable price (like Windows, for example, at least compared to Linux in the public eye)... I'd totally buy one. I don't see that possibility as a bad thing; that could very well be the best thing to happen since the internet. Unfortunately, I doubt this will happen any time soon or in a similar fashion.

I suspect that more progress will be made on the RepRap Project when passionate developers find more practical uses for the RepRap, beyond itself. The goal of reproducing itself is a bit of a double edged sword (if that's the right use of the phrase); it would be great to have a printer that could print itself, but this goal perhaps distracts the developer from coming up with and implementing practical (perhaps business- or research- oriented) uses for the device.

What allows a technology to thrive is its interconnection with other technologies. As a simple example, eraser technology would be useless without pencils. Without erasers, pencils would be almost fully replaced by pens. Pencils are then connected to the wood industry, the lead (graphite) industry, the metal industry (for the piece that holds the eraser on the end), the rubber industry (or whatever would be used for the eraser). These in turn are supplied by other industries and so forth. The pencils are also connected to education, etc.
[Perhaps that wasn't the best example, but oh well. I'm in a rush.]

So the technologies form a nice big web of suppliers and customers. It's called the economy, and it's just how it works. If we want RepRap to fit in somewhere there, we have to connect it to other existing (or new) techs.

Since it's an object creator... the obvious way of doing this would be to create objects with it. I don't mean around-the-house objects (like the coat-hanger ). I mean objects that can be used in profitable endeavours. In business. In the economy that you'd like to connect it to.

I won't suggest anything right now, because that would be premature (ideas take time to crystallize).

So I'll put the monkey back on your back; I ask you: you plead for change, but do you know what that means? Do you know what you're asking for? I don't, so it'd be nice if you could specify .

Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 08/04/2008 04:12AM by Joshua Merchant.

this is all nonconstructive criticism. if you want to help, then put some of your time into this community project.

btw, nophead does have a lot of amazing results, but keep in mind he's using a lot of expensive commercial stuff for his hydraraptor; xyz stages and motor controls are all high-end. this is no reprap, so technically we don't have a reprap that can reproduce commercial quality stuff and thus we need more development.

Korndog Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> this is all nonconstructive criticism.
I disagree; it made me think (and that stuff usually leads somewhere, eventually).
> if you want to help, then put some of your
> time into this community project.
It looks like he might be trying to gauge whether the project is worth his time at the moment. I, for one, wouldn't want to join a dying project unless I saw some evidence of a feasible recovery.

Though I don't think the project is dying, as he suggests, the rate of progression is that of a volunteer community, and anyone considering joining the project must consider whether this fits with them. It fits me just fine, that's why I'm ordering all my RepStrap parts today (yay!). It should also fit any hobbyist just fine, provided they have the budget ($300-$1000 is about what you need starting out; if you already have a lot of tools, you can drop that minimum value to around $250 or less) and the time.

In any case, there's no reason that we can't turn this "nonconstructive criticism" into a useful thread (well, there are a few reasons, but probability favors us in this instance).

One idea I got from this guy: maybe we could start some community projects where we all try to come up with ways of improving our RepRaps to create some specific machine, or part, etc. Something like this might lead to better organization of the community (and thus higher efficiency). I might post about this later if it pans out in my imagination. We do seem to be doing this to some extent (someone posts about an idea, and people start discussing it, like the granule extruder), but I have a feeling we could do it better. Well, I know we could do it better... you can always do better (it's usually a cost-benefit analysis that decides whether you actually do it better or not... aside from laziness and/or ignorance).

Anyway, it would be nice if we could organize the community a bit more, and that's one thing I didn't think about before this guy's post (there was other stuff, but I'm sleep deprived so I already forgot it).

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/04/2008 04:32AM by Joshua Merchant.

Okay; i'll keep it short:
So you call yourself reprapper to announce RepRap's failing... well chosen nick then

Nevermind.

As long as people are working on improvements a project CANNOT fail,
as soon as noone cares about it, it has failed.
There's nothing in between

fab@home has failed (unfortunately and mostly because of the price)
you can have a commercial machine for the same price by the end of this year.

You can have TEN RepRaps for that amount of money!
And that's why people are still working on improvements.
They ARE working on the project, so it CANNOT fail (see above)

'sid

please dont mistake 'lack of blogging' for 'lack of activity'.

i've been more active now than i have ever been in the project. here is a quick list of things i've been up to:

* making and filling RRRF orders
* designing the generation 3 electronics (Magnetic Rotary Encoder, new stepper driver, new Sanguino board, etc.)
* creating improved host software based on the Arduino host software.

not only that, but i've actually quit my job in order to pursue RepRap full time. maybe that will allow me to blog more so that the project 'appears' more active. trust me when i say that we're working very hard on this.

reprap is a hard project, and we're going where no other open source software has gone before. sometimes it is slow going, but its not from lack of work. you can rest assured that we will never give up.

for me, this is not some 'cool project'. reprap, and the idea of automated, desktop manufacturing is a dream. i am very passionate about that dream and i'm willing to go great lengths to achieve it.

if you see a specific problem with the project, please pitch in and help, theres tons of things that could be improved.

Reprapper Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
>
> RepRap is failing. Designs diverge further from
> the standard on a daily basis, and the standard is
> making no effort to keep up.
>
It's called speciation.
>
> Divergence is
> beneficial to a degree but without a stable,
> working baseline it makes it really really hard to
> leverage other peoples

---

-------------------------------------------------------

Hell, there are no rules here - we're trying to accomplish something.

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.

Thomas A. Edison

Quote

Hm. Ru, I found your post quite entertaining. It was a bit defensive though, and some of your response points were flawed (probably due to the emotions that controlled the reactions)

Messages of negativity and doom and how everyone is wrong are quite commonplace in open source projects. Whether they're correct or no, they really get to me.

The patronising and paternalistic tone of 'you're all doing it wrong, so you're going to fail' to cover the underlying sentiment of 'this project should be run the way I want it to be run, and produce the things I want it to produce' is the usual way it goes.

The sheer inability to 'get it' is what really irritates; merely using the internet as a soapbox to vent your spleen and proclaim your 'me me me, want want want' in the hopes that a bunch of strangers doing what they want to do are going to suddenly come round to your way of thinking is just so futile.

I'm clearly too sensitive for the internet

Still, my key sentiments are generally applicable:
* We owe you nothing
* You offer us nothing

so either

* Work with the project to steer it in the direction you want it to go in
* Fork the project and go your own way

or

* Hush.

Its not quite refined enough to add to the FAQ of just any open source project, but I do feel it fits

Forrest Higgs Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------

> > The dev team needs to focus on
> > centralizing the best of that knowledge into one
> > spot, and making it easy and accessible.
> >
> The Darwin part of the dev team has. You only
> need click on...
>
> [reprap.org]
>
> ...to get to what you are asking for.

Can you name one person outside the dev team who has gotten that setup printing reliably? Because if not, that probably means that it needs a bit more polish before the big "1.0"

> For the same reason, Repraps are going to be the
> only choice for schools. Once there, what do you
> suppose any red-blooded kid is going to do with a
> school Reprap the moment he gets hooked on
> printing "things" instead of documents. Hell!
> He's going to print himself one and take it home.
> At that point it's all over for HP.

...and that's why all schools today use Linux? A school isn't looking for cutting-edge mass installations, they're looking for a company (like Microsoft) that will take their money and give them a product that simply works. Works reliably, in a way that Windows does, and Linux does not. RepRap has to have a reputation as the product that works when that school is deciding on a 3D printing solution, or it will be left in the dust.


Korndog Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------

> btw, nophead does have a lot of amazing results,
> but keep in mind he's using a lot of expensive
> commercial stuff for his hydraraptor; xyz stages
> and motor controls are all high-end. this is no
> reprap, so technically we don't have a reprap that
> can reproduce commercial quality stuff and thus we
> need more development.

That would be a fair argument, if the dev team had done their best and failed. Let I checked, no one had even attempted to replicate Nophead's key innovations, so how could you know that it's impossible to do with more ordinary hardware? Nophead has taken a $40,000 machine and implemented it on maybe $5,000, assuming you count a good fraction of the sticker price of his positioning table. Who's to say you can't take that $5,000 machine and implement it on $500? $300? I don't see much conclusive evidence.

Ru Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------

> Still, my key sentiments are generally
> applicable:
> * We owe you nothing
> * You offer us nothing

I'm building my RepRap either way. I'm not asking the dev team to get it together for my sake, it is for the sake of the other 99% of the world that doesn't have the luxury of enough free time to follow a dozen build blogs and fifty forum posts a day, just in order to build a printer that should be simple.

I guess I just don't understand the rationale behind a project that has a stated goal of mass adoption and yet doesn't do everything they can to make it easily adopted... Listen, I want RepRap to succeed. Whether this makes a difference or not, I'll keep trying. Please understand that I'm not doing this for me, beyond the fact that RepRap succeeding benefits me just as much as everyone else.

Look, would you believe that I share much of your attitude about Linux? It's true. I'm also on the core team and have been for a long time, yet I don't use Linux. Indeed, my PC-side software has been written in VB.NET. Although I've written some things in Java, I'm not fond of the language. As far as I was ever able to see it is simply C in a different box.

On the printer side, I use a cheap BASIC IDE. I've stayed with Pic's rather than going over to Arduino, as nice an open source system as that is.

The point of all this is that you pretty much do what you want in Reprap. At times it seems otherwise given the passion which some here have put into both the concept and reality of such open source products as Linux and Java. Nowhere is it written that you must use either the generally accepted development tools for Reprap. Of course, if you don't you will find, like I have, that you'd better be prepared to do a lot of extra work and be a little thick-skinned when one of the true believers takes a verbal shot at your heterodox approach to things.

I think that your initial premise that Reprap is going to fail is flawed. Reprap was conceived by Dr Bowyer as a machine that could make most of its own parts. Reprap Darwin is well on its way to doing that for all of your concerns about the choice of development tools and operating systems. Reprap is, even at this point, putting considerable downward pressure on the cost of commercial 3D printers. As I said earlier, if an organisation like HP brings out a cheap, commercial 3D printer, and they could, then in large measure one of the main goals of the Reprap project, viz, putting inexpensive 3D printing in many more hands, will be achieved. For the reasons that I mentioned earlier, I doubt that HP and similar corporations' business models will allow them to completely overwhelm virally produced Repraps, simply because corporations have to show a profit and Reprap builders don't. They just have to avoid going bankrupt.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/04/2008 11:30PM by Forrest Higgs.

Well in that case (you want to keep trying it benefits you etc.pp.)

Why don't you just make some proposals, that can be adopted to make things easier for you (and many others) to follow the project?

See, it's hard to get everything documented, not every single word is usefull, not for the majority though, but every bit can help keep up the improvements for those who care.

It may be best, to have two different sites.
One for the ones that would like to improve things and one for those who just want to build a machine and go away.
May... or may not

There are improvements to be made, tons (referred to zach who should know )
So pick one and make a suggestion.

That's the best way of getting things done.

'sid

Wow. There are clearly a lot of strong feelings on both sides of this issue.

It reminds me of the subject of patriotism in the US. Sometimes, when a American citizen doesn't like the way things are being handled (for example with the Iraq war), and conveys this to members of the opposing party, they are accused of being unpatriotic. It's a sort of "If you don't like it here, live somewhere else" attitude, and it's unfortunate.

The fact is that comments like Repprapper's can be quite healthy for a project like this one. When weighed appropriately, they can help developers set priorities, and determine which of a project's rough edges should be smoothed first. These remarks can also bring light to otherwise neglected issues, raising community awareness and inspiring someone to come up with a solution.

Too many negative comments could conceivably darken the tone of a project and turn otherwise interested parties away, but I don't think we are near that threshold, and it seems this posting is generating a lively and healthy discussion.


Some comments:

Reprapper Wrote:
> But the RepRap dev team does, right? ... They should be working
> towards a stable, well documented release,
> incorporating these improvements

I got a machine to print? The last I checked I was not on the development team?

I have about 1/3 of a machine printed.

Just summer has gotten in the way.>< and

Plus I have been busy showing the machine as much as possible...

Bruce

I've been involved in a few open source projects, this one has the fastest progress of any of em by far. The core people on the project the most open minded and hard working volunteers I've ever worked with. I'm glad Adrian's working on the granule extruder because shortly after that's working we'll be making the cheapest custom objects ever.

We don't have a stable Darwin & software, because it's all improving so fast; and that's the way I like it

brucew Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
>
> I have about 1/3 of a machine printed.
>
Hey! Cool!

Quote

...and that's why all schools today use Linux? A school isn't looking for cutting-edge mass installations, they're looking for a company (like Microsoft) that will take their money and give them a product that simply works. Works reliably, in a way that Windows does, and Linux does not

The schools do not want linux because it is not what the staff are familiar with. Windows support is commonplace, and many staff and students will have at least some idea of how to make it work correctly. Moreover, given that Windows and MS Office are likely to be tools that everyone is going to have to use at some point, schools would be doing their students a disservice by not letting them learn about it.

It is a self supporting monopoly. There are commercial linux vendors out there who do provide useful services, but they're a terribly difficult sell, because windows is what everyone knows. Speaking from bitter experience, windows systems administration is not an easy task; it is complex and cryptic in just the same way that *nix is. Installation of many linux distros is much, much nicer than (say) XP.

I'm not saying MS bad, *nix good, just that it is a flawed analogy.

By your reasoning, no school is *ever* going to use a reprap, because it will never be 'a product' in your eyes. And if linux products with a vast user and developer base and serious funding behind them (ubuntu; shuttleworth is a pretty wealthy guy, and debian has been around for many years) can't ever break into that market then there is absolutely no hope at all that a small, young, largely research project like reprap ever will. So lets just ignore schools.

Was that your point?

Quote

I'm not asking the dev team to get it together for my sake, it is for the sake of the other 99% of the world that doesn't have the luxury of enough free time to follow a dozen build blogs and fifty forum posts a day, just in order to build a printer that should be simple.

You seem to be expecting the project to leap ahead by a generation. Assembling a reprap is not a trivial task. It can't be at this point; too many things are still under development, too many things still require polishing and simplifying and improving.

Ever had to reconfigure a linux kernel?

Yuck.

You don't have to do that anymore. In due course, making a reprap won't be so painful. But for now, I don't see how it can be any other way, although places like bitsfrombytes do go some way to making it much simpler.

Quote

Let I checked, no one had even attempted to replicate Nophead's key innovations, so how could you know that it's impossible to do with more ordinary hardware?

Major points I gather from nopheads work: use ABS, use an encoder to get extruder feedback, use rafts to build upon.

All three of these are being taken up. You can make use of all of them now, if you obtained appropriate bits. RRRF supply ABS and a pretty useful encoder board, and newer versions of the firmware (and possible skeinforge?) support rafts.

Did I miss anything else important?

And progressing on to Andy's post...

Quote

It's a sort of "If you don't like it here, live somewhere else" attitude, and it's unfortunate.

Not at all. Criticism (hopefully the constructive sort) is pretty much indispensible. The thrust of my argument was that anonymous individuals popping out of the woodwork to say 'you're doing it all wrong' isn't at all helpful.

If you want to make change, contribute, discuss, PM the core members or whatever. But appearing one day from nowhere, having apparently contributed or discussed anything, and enumerating all the bad points of a project (real or otherwise) is neither of those things.

Quote

I think you're right that we need a stable, well documented release

Stable seems like an odd goal at this particular point where things seem to be changing quite swiftly. The current darwin design represents a good baseline, and its construction and usage seem reasonbly well documented to me; but even that is still being improved because it requires feedback from people attempting to make one.

People have raised the issue on the forum of problems with the documentation however, and I've no idea if they were ever fixed. I'm not necessarily in favour of a fully open wiki (reverting spam is such a tedious task) but a more inclusive access policy would be nice. Again, people have volunteered to sort out the wiki pages; I've no idea if they were ever given access?

Well seeing my name mentioned here many times I must point out that I am a member of the core team. I am spending nearly 100% of my time RepStrapping a Darwin and I will do my best to get it working as well, or better, than HydraRaptor and implement any changes in a way that people can easily and cheaply copy. As pointed out by Ru most of my inovations have already been incorporated and blogged by Adrian and Zach, even if they haven't become part of the released design. Anybody keen to be an early adopter can do so with a little digging around.

So the critisim that the core team are not implementing my improvements are not valid.

I also think, considering how complex and young the project is, the documentation is exceptionally good. I am following Ed's instructions on the wiki and using the published STL files and succesfully building a Darwin. Before that I followed Adrian's instructions and built a working extruder. It's not at the stage yet where people without some technical nous can do it, and perhaps never will be, but what do you expect? Some people cant build furniture from flat pack instructions so it is never going to something anybody can do, but that is what friends are for.

---

[www.hydraraptor.blogspot.com]

Funny. This question comes up rather routinely I see. I'm sheepishly admitting here that I did the same thing some time back. Then, as now, the core team came out of their respective places of thinking, patted my hand, and told me that things were still progressing even if they were silent for a bit. Funny that this is so cyclic.

as to Zach reprapping full time...YOU THE MAN!

Demented

Hmmmm... wonder where my last comment went. Perhaps I was too abrasive and someone in authority erased it. I'll rephrase:

I think "reprapper" is full of bologna. Reprap isn't failing at all, new technologies often take 20 years to reach fruition so reprap is far and beyond exceeding expectations.

"Reprapper" should feel free to help develop the documentation and other problems sited. The amount of typing used to make the original posting for this thread would make at least a page of documentation and that could be done exactly the way "Reprapper" wanted it done.

---

The Guy

nophead Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Well seeing my name mentioned here many times I
> must point out that I am a member of the core
> team. I am spending nearly 100% of my time
> RepStrapping a Darwin and I will do my best to get
> it working as well, or better, than HydraRaptor
> and implement any changes in a way that people can
> easily and cheaply copy. As pointed out by Ru most
> of my inovations have already been incorporated
> and blogged by Adrian and Zach, even if they
> haven't become part of the released design.
> Anybody keen to be an early adopter can do so with
> a little digging around.

That is great! I knew you were working on a Darwin, but not to what extent if any you were planning on upgrading it or implementing repeatable changes. If the final product of your labor is a well-documented, working Darwin that can be built using similar tools and materials to the current one, with similarly usable software, and you finish it within a reasonable time frame, say a year or so, then it is game over. RepRap has won, my concerns are addressed, and you'll never hear from me again. However, those are a lot of "if"s.

> I also think, considering how complex and young
> the project is, the documentation is exceptionally
> good. I am following Ed's instructions on the wiki
> and using the published STL files and succesfully
> building a Darwin. Before that I followed Adrian's
> instructions and built a working extruder.

Agreed, it is surprisingly and impressively good documentation. Unfortunately, it documents a machine that no one has gotten to work without extensive modifications, possible exception of Bruce*. I think that indicates a flaw somewhere.

TheGuy Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Hmmmm... wonder where my last comment went.
> Perhaps I was too abrasive and someone in
> authority erased it. I'll rephrase:
>
> I think "reprapper" is full of bologna. Reprap
> isn't failing at all, new technologies often take
> 20 years to reach fruition so reprap is far and
> beyond exceeding expectations.

RepRap to a large degree isn't using new technology. And you can bet that if it takes this project 20 years, heck, if it takes this project 3 more years to get a usable product it may well have become irrelevant because some big corporation will have already cornered the market.

> "Reprapper" should feel free to help develop the
> documentation and other problems sited. The amount
> of typing used to make the original posting for
> this thread would make at least a page of
> documentation and that could be done exactly the
> way "Reprapper" wanted it done.

I realize that I am an unknown, and it is hard to take me seriously when I come in and make suggestions about a project when none of you have any reason to listen to me. I would ask as a huge favor that you evaluate my concerns based on their own merit, not on mine. I think that will lead to a more productive discussion just like I think it has already.

----------------------------------
*Bruce do you have pictures you'd like to share? I've been following your blog, along with literally 9 other individual build blogs plus the builder, main, and RRRF ones, but I just checked my reader and it looks like you haven't posted anything since May. I'm sure we would all love to celebrate your achievements, unless you're keeping the project under wraps so you can have a big "self-replication!" announcement when you're all done a la Vik.

I do not have any recent pictures. I have been Slow because of summer and showing the printer. ( I should blog about the get together 2 weekends ago. )

I did print the rest of my diagonal brackets last night.

I am not keeping anything under wraps.

Just to hope to have a full set of parts soon.

Bruce

Reprapper Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
>
> Agreed, it is surprisingly and impressively good
> documentation.
>
You know, you might have a lot more credibility if you'd actually worked on the project for a while or, failing that, indicated that you any background to back up your pronouncements.
>
> RepRap to a large degree isn't using new
> technology.
>
Most things don't.
>
> And you can bet that if it takes this
> project 20 years, heck, if it takes this project 3
> more years to get a usable product it may well
> have become irrelevant because some big
> corporation will have already cornered the
> market.
>
You seem really fixated on the "some big corporation" taking over idea.
>
> I realize that I am an unknown, and it is hard to
> take me seriously when I come in and make
> suggestions about a project when none of you have
> any reason to listen to me.
>
Increasingly, that is the case.
>

It doesn't look like you're making suggestion for healthy and useful change, Reprapper. It looks like you are attempting to coerce others to follow your "lead" with vague threats of corporate take over and project failure.

This is a healthy project with a dynamic community of committed volunteer workers. It has self-organized with a minimal guideline provided by Dr. Bowyer's steady hand and some simple common sense rules.

The code, circuitry, mechanical designs and documentation are following exactly the principles laid down by the original idea. Constantly boiling down the essentials and promoting the successful. What you "want" is a simple, single profile that requires little or no thinking on anyone's part but the fact that this isn't available at the moment does not preclude it or prove that any sort of failure has begun.

If a large corporation wants to start selling a 100$ solid object printer which can make its own parts tomorrow, everyone here would rejoice. But don't hold your breath, if they were going to do that they already would have.

Once more, I reiterate what other's have said : Please feel free to make the contributions you suggest but don't expect others to do it for you. We're all too busy already.

---

The Guy

Forrest Higgs Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------

> You know, you might have a lot more credibility if
> you'd actually worked on the project for a while
> or, failing that, indicated that you any
> background to back up your pronouncements.

When did I ask you to take my word for something? You can disagree with me, fine. But this discussion will be a lot more productive if it is confined to ideas, not individuals. If you want to flame me for being overly presumptuous that's ok, but do it in a PM. Looking through this thread it appears that I'm not the only one who has noticed some of these concerns, and that in and of itself should be justification enough for an open discussion.

TheGuy Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------

> If a large corporation wants to start selling a
> 100$ solid object printer which can make its own
> parts tomorrow, everyone here would rejoice.

I agree. But there are some of us who would be disappointed with a printer that costs $100 and isn't intended to improve itself but instead requires you to continue buying new proprietary upgrades to stay up to date. Which of those scenarios seems more likely?

> But
> don't hold your breath, if they were going to do
> that they already would have.

Do your research. Stratasys has a patent on FDM through next October. No other company in the western world can touch this stuff until then. Of course, a startup like Desktop Factory could come in and try to develop their own technology, but it is a lot easier to crib someone else's that you already know works. After all, that's basically what we're doing. Following October of next year though, things may get more interesting.

Please re-read my sentence: "which can make its own parts"; every other adaptive aspect of reprap stems from that. First you complain that reprap projects are diverging, then you insist on evolution.

Yes, we know all about Stratsys and patents, it's been mentioned.

I notice you didn't comment on my last line either, I guess you were right in your first posting when you said "Call me a troll" the only thing you seem to want to contribute is dispute.

---

The Guy

> > If a large corporation wants to start selling a
> > 100$ solid object printer which can make its
> own
> > parts tomorrow, everyone here would rejoice.
>
> I agree. But there are some of us who would be
> disappointed with a printer that costs $100 and
> isn't intended to improve itself but instead
> requires you to continue buying new proprietary
> upgrades to stay up to date. Which of those
> scenarios seems more likely?

And I'd certainly rather use a good open source compiler rather than a closed-source one. On the other hand, it's a whole lot easier to build the open source compiler with a closed-source compiler than putting it together in assembly; I posit the same situation here. Having the $100 closed machine means that it's much easier to get the open source one, and doesn't actually negatively impact the open source one much at all, so long as the open source one is actually developing. More people with compilers is good for open source stuff.

It also seems to me that ultimately, making repraps /friendly/ is a substantially different task than making them /work/, and one that can happen substantially after they are put to good use by power users/developers. It took a good long time to go from the first post of the linux kernel to get Ubuntu, and a lot of that wasn't exactly what you'd call user-friendly. It still got used, just not by the average mook. Even now, a lot of people use implementations that /still/ aren't what you'd call friendly, for various reasons. I see no reason for reprap to be different at this stage, or to expect that there will not be a user-friendly distribution of it later.

I've noticed several of you, notable exception of Forrest, assuring me that I am mistaken to claim that Linux is less stable and well supported than Windows.

Ok fine, I'll accept that for the sake of argument. It is true that Linux in recent years has matured to the point where I can give a copy of Ubuntu Hardy to my friend with the reasonable expectation that he'll be able to install and use it without my tech support. Why is it then that it isn't being adopted en masse? Because last I checked, for all the EeePCs and OLPCs in the world the Linux market share is still miniscule.

It is because people will actively make decisions to avoid having to learn a new system. If they invest the time and effort to learn how to use a commercial 3D printer, will they want to switch to an alternative that doesn't behave how they are used to? Why are there still so many Windows boxes being sold today?

Waiting for some commercial company to come along and do all of the hard work for us will not further the goals of reprap, if the goal of reprap is to produce a 3D printer for the masses. If it is just to produce a good 3D printer without regard to market share then the point is open for further debate.

Boring...

I was wondering when you were gonna get bored with this thread Forest...

Demented