What are the opportunities and challenges of affordable 3D printing and 3D scanning?

What are the opportunities and challenges of affordable 3D printing and 3D scanning?welcome to talk about

Printing

Opportunities: By thinking outside the box you could come up with something no one has ever done before. I believe the more people get into 3D printing the more innovation will accelerate. We are at the beginning of a new age. Like the computer age only accelerated.
Challenges: The initial learning curve can be steep for some. This is where these forums shine. I have found alot of help on these forums. Also learning to model in 3D can be daunting, just start with a simple program like tinkercard(R.I.P.) easiest 3D modeling program out there, why they are taking it down is beyond me.

Scanning

Opportunities: Buy a kinect, by far the easiest 3D scanner to use at this point in time. $50 on ebay and you have yourself a 3D scanner.
Challenges: finding what software you are most comfortable with. For ease of use Reconstructme is a great starter but isn't all that accurate. It can get general facial features but they are mucky and vague. There are other softwares out there that claim to get a better 3D scan out of the kinect but I have yet to try them.

As I see it the opertunities at the low end of 3d printing fall in to the concept of building community. You have smart intelligent people with the desire to do something, anything now with access to the equipment and support from people just like them. Forums like this one where someone who is stuck on a project can turn to get past some obstical thus giving them the motivation to push themselves further than they would if they felt they were on there own.

You can see it in the products that come from the "Low end" . You now have low end machines built by makers and improved with the help of the comunity that exceed the capabilities on many of the commercial machines. Since many of the pattents ran out you have seen more progress every year from the low end machines then you did in 5 years when everything was protected. And now you are seeing the big guys running to find the next thing thus driving advancemant at even a faster pace. You are going to see more advancement at the high end from fear the low end will catch it.

in my opinion,with the development of 3d printing,more and more things can be made,you can made what are you thinking.it will decline the time and cost for making a model ,like in the industry.this is new technology.it will give us more benefit.
as the same time it will cause someone to lose job,some jobless,be optimistic,it also can rise some job for someone.

The biggest and next opportunity from my perspective is metal printing and making parts of multiple materials. For example a slip ring with plastic insulation and a metal ring contact or a 3D circuit board allowing better circuit paths all integrated in to one solid component.

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Make your Mendel twice as accurate.
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I am freecad addicted although how many variants of extruder design I have gone through is unbelievable, but with free cad over openscad is i use the part workbench and basically its simple w.y.s.i.w.y.g without the coding, although i had to go back to openscad to do nut traps but still was imported into freecad.
My design I started getting the model of stepper imported that and work around that imported the x carriage its going to sit on and the extruder drive gear I can toggle them viewing but also can show them so i can see them fit together, here is a example of extruder mk1( unfinished ) as things wasnt fitting as they should.

scanning is not as fast or detailed as what it is imagined to be. there needs to be some major innovation in this area.

Take a look at the Photon 3D Scanner on Indiegogo.

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Bob Morrison
Wörth am Rhein, Germany
"Luke, use the source!"
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