Exchange system

This post follows a previous post (http://dev.forums.reprap.org/read.php?4,23972) where someone emmited the idea to centralise the efforts around the distribution of repraped parts.
In my opinion, this is a critical issue. I would really like to build a Mendel machine but it is difficult for me to find who can print something for me, and it seems like I am not the only one with this problem. A forum is not the correct format to expose this kind of information.

The idea then would be to start a dedicated exchange system where users could create a profile with details about their machines, their needs, their designs and what they offer, and make some search. The system would keep track of the most active persons and help people to see who is reliable and who isn't.

I have been reviewing several similar softwares during the last months, for another project, and I eventually found that one (open source, of course):
[www.project-open.com]
it is quite business-oriented, but it may be customised to meet the need of the reprap community. Of course, if anyone finds better...

I don't have enough skills to run a server myself (though I would like to) but I would be very happy to help with finding and setting up something. Is anyone interested in this?

I think you have mis-diagnosed the problem. I really doubt there are people with functioning repraps that would make reprap parts if they could just find someone to take them. The problem is a simple supply-demand problem. The supply is very small and the demand is very large. The few people with a supply are not having any trouble finding demand and so would have no use for the site. If no suppliers use the site, then there is no use for consumers.

I might be producing reprap sets in a month or two and I've already identified 10-30 people to give them to.

I understand your point.

From my point of view (someone who needs parts), the problem is tha, because of the low offer, I find it hard to find providers. In that sense, a different way of organising the exchanges could be more efficient.

From the point of view of the potential providers, I suppose that a simpler exchange system would make it more inviting to propose their help too. Even though, as you say, it is not the source of the problem.

In a way, my understanding is that what is needed is a reward system. A system that could say who is actively replicating the machine, and would allow the community to reward them. And also, to reward those who give rewards. and so on... In brief, an economic system.

I agree with the economic approach.

I paid $300.+ for my set of plastic parts. I'm sure the number of takers would dwindle down if they were asked to pay that price. The takers would then be more motivated to bring the project to a successful end. And they would be more motivated to print Reprap parts instead of their own thingies.

Just a thought...

yep, I also think that a great deal of the problem is a matter of motivation. But instead of a 'pushing' concept (where people would be pushed by the initial cost), I think it is wiser to use a 'push and pull' one (in addition to the initial cost, there would be some more or less direct advantages to print for the others).

@Brew:
300$ is quite surprising, the complete set of plastic parts is not supposed to use that much plastic, and a kilo of raw material is around 20$?

yeah the materials might be $20, but you have to run a laser cutter for some time to get them all, and its the time that costs $$$.

for a uni project, i did a 3d plaster print of a tower we had designed that cost about $350, with the materials being less than half of that. mind, it was done at uni labs which are somewhat subsidized and not run for profit. i've got a picassa gallery of it and a perspex version of it here: [picasaweb.google.com]

this is not a crazy idea, but i think mccoyn has a good point, the problem isn't connecting sellers to buyers, the problem is that there is very high demand and a very haphazard supply. i personally am building a mccwire at the moment that i want to have up and running shortly after exams finish. i will use it to make several full sets to give to friends, and will make more available in the forums. there doesn't need to be a new site for this at present, simply listing your availability to produce in the forums should be plenty.

what i see as the problem is that the project is growing a little too slowly due to its nature. this is just my opinion, and can be take with salt, lime, and tequila. but it can take several months to get a single machine up and running to the point where it is productive, assuming that people are fitting it into their free time and that it isn't part of their job. this means that the time to reproduce is quite high.

the solution you're offering is partially valid, in that getting people to band together to get a repstrap up and running then all taking away a full set of parts is not a bad thing at all, but would i give money to someone over the net that i wouldn't see the fruits of for several months? personally, i wouldn't and so i've chosen to make my own. when completed, i'll probably print out a bunch of sets of mendel parts to retrospectively offset the costs.

Chirdaki, I think you got the point: very few people would send their work to someone if they know they won't see a benefit in the near future (if at all). And that is where the community effect takes place.

If someone sends some parts to someone who needs it, he should be known by the entire community so that other people can reward him for his action. It is a 'loop' effect that can only happen if the community is organised and reaches a critical mass. The mass may not be here yet, but this project is meant to grow so I believe that a proper exchange system should be planned early.

Plus, it will be a way to tackle future complex issues. I think in particular of the moment when there will be plastic recyclers up and running. When this will happen, the situation will start being more complex: in addition to the part producers, there will be plastic producers. Later, there may be other projects happening with metal, and so on. the complexity will grow, and there will be a need for more organisation. I think the community should start thinking of it now.

The idea I had was to create a "indentured servitude" model. If I had a working RepRap/RepStrap (I don't) I would do something like this:

• You send me $X dollars for a set of RepRap parts (Where X = SUfficiently large amount of money to weed out those who aren't committed to actually making a RepRap in the short term)
• I print and send you a set of RepRap parts.
• You make your RepRap and print two sets of parts which you send to me
• I send you back your $X upon receipt of the parts.

In essence, I loan you a set of parts for the cost of a set of parts.



The hope is that that system gets parts into the hands of those most likely to produce working machines, while increasing the overall supply of sets of parts (effectively enforcing the "make a set to give away" core of the project).

Another system could be like the KickStart model.

In KickStart, a company (Amazon IIRC) hold donations in trust for projects. When the amount of money reaches a target amount, the project gets approved and the persons who proposed the project are given the money held by Amazon (minus a small fee). If the project does not get the required amount of money by a set time, then the project is cancelled and the money is returned to the people who donated it (with no fee).

Now, this could be used as a base business model for a RepRap manufacturing system.

If people who want a RepRap "donate" (ie Pay) money (the cost of the parts) to a holding company. Then anyone who has a RepRap and prints out parts can give them to the holding company and they distribute them to the people who have paid for them and then distribute the money (minus a small operating fee) to the people who produced the parts.

This way you could pay to get the parts for your RepRap and then once you have it, feed back into the system and recover your costs.

You could also allow other projects to exist in this system too, where you might not want a RepRap but want the ability to use it for rapid prototyping. You could place a job (stl files) and an amount of money to be paid to the person(s) who print it (along with operating fee and transportation costs) and then the person who print out the job gets the money and you get the parts.

Basically the "holding" company co-ordinates printers and the people who want the printed objects.

However there is some complications in it:

There are many types of plastic out there and varying levels of accuracy in the RepRaps. The types of plastic can be easily solved by specifying the type of plastic desired and then matching the plastic to the printer (so only the people who print in that type of plastic can accept the job).

The quality of the job can be managed with some kind of end user feed back system (like rating the quality of jobs or such).

How do you set prices for jobs? One way would be by a negotiation/bidding system. Printers could "bid" for jobs where the lowest bidder who meets the quality and other criteria gets accepted for the job. If timeliness is needed, then the system can select the lowest X bidders, where X is the time needed for each piece divided by the time allowed for the job all divided by the number of pieces in the job.

X = (Tp / Tj) / Np

Where
X: Number of Printers needed
Tp: Time per piece
Tj: Time allowed for job
Np: Number of pieces in job

The price can then be set using the amount of material needed, transportation costs, running costs (payment for use of their machine and for its maintenance and the resources used - electricity, time, etc).

The idea is to create a central system that allows the community of RepRappers to offer their services to those who need it and allow people who buy a reprap this way to be able to recoup the costs of their purchase.

If done correctly, the only costs is to those who are not printing repraps and those who don't contribute back to the community (and the last people who ever buy a reprap).

The number of fully working machines has only recently gone from a small handful to the current number. I think Makerbot are largely responsible for this bump in numbers. When someone first gets a machine up and running I don't think they will generally start to print parts straight away, they will spend a bit of time printing things they have been waiting to do, and experimenting until they understand the machine well. After a few months people are likely to start on parts. As we have only recently seen this rise in number of working machines, I would expect it to take a while to follow through to there being a lot more parts available.

greenarrow Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
>When someone first gets
> a machine up and running I don't think they will
> generally start to print parts straight away, they
> will spend a bit of time printing things they have
> been waiting to do, and experimenting until they
> understand the machine well. After a few months
> people are likely to start on parts.


Except this doesn't happen, by the very nature of the people a project like this attracts. The machine gets built, a few things are printed, and you see improvements that could be made to the extruder, or some other part of the machine. And of course, you don't want to start printing parts until the machine is "perfect", so printing parts gets put by the wayside. Then, before you know it. The next generation of machine is out, and there's a whole new set of parts to build/new machine to tweak. Lather, rinse, repeat.

That's why I like the system I proposed above. It establishes a financial incentive to print machine parts early (You get your $X back). If you've ponied up $200 to get your parts, and as soon as you print two sets of parts you'll get your $200 back, you're going to prioritize that.

Personally, I see the merit in Abrannan's suggestion in that one would be able to, essentially, borrow a set of parts in order to get up and running.

The logistics of deposit value and reimbursement could be handled differently from person to person.

Just to verify what greenarrow and abrannan are theorizing about...

I printed a couple dozens parts back in August on my Darwin-clone. These parts required a lot of finish work, but were incorporated into my machine to replace missing or failing parts. I've been making small improvements since then, the most significant being a heated base plate. I'd like to upgrade to the 5D firmware, tweak the preferences to improve quality and then rebuild my X-axis with printed parts to eliminate some play.

Now, I could push out a set of Mendel parts today and give it to someone. If I did that, it would require a few hours of finish work with a drill press and some files to get them functional. I just can't see myself charging people for that when after a month or two more of work on my part I can print out the same parts with better quality.

Another problem I see is that I and others constantly underestimate the difficulty of this project. I think it really does take several months to build a Darwin. I expect the makerbot kit is easier to build, but it hasn't been out that long. If you put $X into a KickStart system, I believe you should be prepared to wait 6 months or more for the first benefactor to get ready to print a new set. There certainly are a lot of people interested though, so there might be a few people willing to put up the money despite the long wait.

... so maybe another way out there: build a reprap/repstrap, print optimized/better parts for a new Mendel ... and simply give away your 'old but working' reprap/repstrap

Sid here from Germany is playing around with the idea to build a small bootstrap-reprap for shipping around as 'starter-set' for building daughters and then ship again to another person ...

Viktor

It seems to me that all these ideas use the principle of forming chains of exchanges, which is a good way to develop a project exponentially. The challenge with chaining is that is has to be organised correctly to be maintained by the community. I suppose that the systems proposed by Etharan or mccoyn would be much more efficient if they were made easily accessible to the newcomers, and easy to trace by the people who give/sell their stuff.

So, correct me if I am wrong, but what is needed is a protocol for the exchanges (how we do that - seems like it will be based on chains) plus a place where people can connect to the service (where to do that - so far the forum).

So far, the contacts were made through the forum, but if we want to make one or several systems of chain-exchanges we surely need to use something more organised.

Whilst I agree that an exchange based system would be good, I think there far too many problems with such a system at this time. Most reprap users are involved with it because its a hobby, they are interested in making cool devices and improving their reprap.
And the problem of quality control is potentially a huge can of worms!

What this needs is a central body (or several) that can provide parts of a known quality for a reasonable price. (They could then crowd source components from reprap owners, providing quality control, in way that is invisible to the end customer unless they want to know).

I want to start a company providing this kind of service. Firstly to meet the demand for printed parts, then later the demand for the electronic components (as it seems that only makerbot are making Gen3) and at that point probably provding complete kits of the latest RepRap design. But ulitimately offering a super cheap prototyping service.
Unfortunatly I lack the funds to kick (ha!) this all off, and kickstarter isnt an option here in the UK.

As someone who hasn't (yet!) contributed to RepRap I understand if people are a little sceptical about my chances of sucess. But I hope you guys could offer some advice and maybe even a little encouragement. Heck, maybe you'll be able to offer some support

I have already posted in the 'For Sale' forum in an attempt to see what people think is a fair price. I think a viable alternative to a kickstart model is for me to make a formal offer of parts (a complete set of darwin or mendel parts) at a price of £75, but make the offer that anyone willing to pay £50 now upfront will get their parts at that price. As an added incentive, I should point out that for every 10 pre-orders I could get another Cupcake (the fastest way to build a print-factory IMHO) thereby boosting output. The biggest problem is that I doubt I would be able to start shipping parts out before the new year.

But once production is going full steam and an established brand, then I could begin offering the service of being a third party rating system for reprap'ers.

So what do people think?
(I'm going to go ahead, damn the torpedos and all that, but I'm interested in second opinions whilst I mull the exact way to pitch my sale offer!)

Hi, Have not followed the whole discussion but what I experience from printing some Mendel parts is that it is much easier to print one Medel part a lot of times than to print a complete set. You need to tweak some settings for each part, once you have that you can print lots of copies. So it would be interesting to work together on a local scale and divide the parts and than sell the complete sets together. Maybe someone could even start some small warehouse business with a market driven system that sets the price for each individual part based on demand, the large parts will be more expensive because the difficulty in printing them which make them rare. People could specialize in printing those difficult parts and leave the small parts to others doing them in bulk. A website shows the amount of parts in stock and the price if you ship them within a certain timeframe.

Its an interesting idea... but at the small scale there is one thing that will kill you.

Cost of shipping.

I understand your idea, but as soon as you move beyond a home workshop your overheads increase dramatically. And the price for a complete set of RP parts has to go up dramatically. And add to that the cost of shipping on your 100+ parts. Its simply makes more sense to print all the parts at a single location, yes there is additional time required fine-tuning each part, but thats a one off cost (or at least should be, these are machines and repeatability is kinda core to it all )
Maybe if you are shipping 100 kits or so the source shipping costs might be more reasonable... Although there is the added problem of the very high likelyhood of suppliers being overseas.
I suppose in many ways the £75 price is wildly optimistic, and imposes many limits on the manufacturing. Maybe a better way is to ebay kits, let the market set a price and then work the logistics from there...
Its a bit of a bodge, but it would follow a more conventional process of getting a product to market and then boosting profits by optimising production and logistics.

hmmm.

Zach of makerbot fame has been buying some small parts from makerbot owners. Shipping doesn't seem to have hurt the process. Just an added expense.

Well, depending on how you calculate it, Makerbot were paying at about double the rate of my offered £75.
Although that's just napkin maths. Like I said, the £75 price is actually a big constaint!

Great ideas all around,

I like this idea and I think it is doable. There is a lot of good ideas here that I would like to condense in one place. These are my favorites:

" the idea to centralise the efforts around the distribution of repraped parts."

"If someone sends some parts to someone who needs it, he should be known by the entire community so that other people can reward him for his action. It is a 'loop' effect that can only happen if the community is organised and reaches a critical mass. The mass may not be here yet, but this project is meant to grow so I believe that a proper exchange system should be planned early"

"it is much easier to print one Medel part a lot of times than to print a complete set. You need to tweak some settings for each part, once you have that you can print lots of copies. So it would be interesting to work together on a local scale and divide the parts and than sell the complete sets together. Maybe someone could even start some small warehouse business with a market driven system that sets the price for each individual part based on demand, the large parts will be more expensive because the difficulty in printing them which make them rare. People could specialize in printing those difficult parts and leave the small parts to others doing them in bulk. A website shows the amount of parts in stock and the price if you ship them within a certain timeframe."

So here are some things I see as being key needs.
* Low Overhead - perhaps a storage unit or an existing Hacker Space could be a centralized exchange.
* Website - shows the amount of parts in stock and the price if you ship them within a certain timeframe. The price of each individual part based on demand, time,value and effort.

Here are some of my ideas that I would like to add to the mix:

I think the parts delivered to the exchange would be in exchange for credits instead of $,£ ect.

Parts could be bought from the exchange with credits or $,£ ect. Probably PayPal.

The exchange never pays for shipping from or to users.

The exchange would house ALL parts of Mendel. Even print material.

Monies collected would be used to buy items in bulk (nuts, bolts, bearings, abs) and the overhead costs and a modest sum to the people that run it.

All transactions need to be transparent.


What we are really mimicking here is a hive of workers. Kind of like a giant ant hill.

We are the factory.

abrannan Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
>
> [*]You send me $X dollars for a set of RepRap
> parts (Where X = SUfficiently large amount of
> money to weed out those who aren't committed to
> actually making a RepRap in the short term)
>
> [*]I print and send you a set of RepRap parts.
>
> [*]You make your RepRap and print two sets of
> parts which you send to me
>
> [*]I send you back your $X upon receipt of the
> parts.
>
>
> In essence, I loan you a set of parts for the cost
> of a set of parts.
>
>
> The hope is that that system gets parts into the
> hands of those most likely to produce working
> machines, while increasing the overall supply of
> sets of parts (effectively enforcing the "make a
> set to give away" core of the project).

khiraly has proposed almost the same system:

"I offer also a full kit with RP parts included, with
an obligation: You need to send back two printed sets to me
within 2 months."

---

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