What do you think is the next great push in the RepRap Community

So I believe that the RepRap community is the reason that 3D printing is at the forefront of technology today. What do you think would be the next great push for wide spread adoption of 3D printers? Is it easier to build machines? Is it making them cheaper to acquire? or is it to find a middle ground where people find use for them in their everyday life.

I am a designer of 3d printers and I have wondered what it would take to increase the adoption of 3d printers in homes so that more people can start enjoying making things.

What do you all think?

Personally, I never understood why people 'should have' a 3d printer in their home. You see those vendors always telling it's the future, yeah it's going to change the world, in X years every home will have one blabla.

I'm maybe missing a bit of nuance here, but I don't think the adoption should be increased. 3D-printing is in my opinion a prototyping technique, and yes it's fun to play with, and even more fun to build and try to 'perfect' your printer, but in the end, it's so funny to see how 'the world' mistakes a prototyping technique for a fully developed production technique.

Maybe it's me seeing things wrong, 'the world' is a big place, and usually the definition with the most votes wins, but I'll just keep on saying it's a prototype technique anyway (and one that's a lot of fun too!).

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Ohmarinus
Personally, I never understood why people 'should have' a 3d printer in their home. You see those vendors always telling it's the future, yeah it's going to change the world, in X years every home will have one blabla.

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." -- Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943.
"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." -- Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977.
"This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us." -- Western Union internal memo, 1876.
"Radio has no future. Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible. X-rays will prove to be a hoax." -- William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, British scientist, 1899.

It's a good thing that not every inventor or developer quits after one person disagrees about the market size or adoption of some new-fangled technology. I'm sure there are just as many predictions going the opposite way where Invention X is the next greatest thing and 30 seconds later is all but forgotten.

25 years ago I remember my parents getting a 9 pin dot matrix printer. It was difficult to use, incredibly noisy, output was lousy but at least usable, and took forever to produce a page (and even longer if you printed in "high quality"). Now, printers that can give you photo-like quality in seconds are essentially given away to make money on the consumables. I think 3D printers will take a similar trajectory. Their will be a flood of all sorts of different fly by night companies that will make the early printers (that's now). The market over time will prune off the weakest companies and there will be a number of dominate companies that move the industry forward. Quality and speed will increase with incremental improvements both in printer design, techniques, and materials, while price will decrease. I think some homes will have a printer that serves a real useful purpose. But I think in most homes it will just be a thing of convenience to create something in the home that saves them a trip to go pick it up.

You could argue 3d printing is the early stage of replicators (ala Star Trek). They have an obvious use as NASA has shown recently, the ISS needed a certain tool so they printed it off rather that the time & cost it would take to send a rocket up just for that (and I'm guessing even waiting until the next resupply run wasn't an option).

But yes at the moment 3d printing is mainly for prototyping but as technology evolves who knows what it can become, maybe 3d print your clothes?

Personally I believe the next push should be on the reliability front, better electronics (32bit electronics) and closed loop controls of DC motors. Once those targets are achieved then cost will have to come down. However today whan you can get for 2-3k USD was not possible 3 or 4 years back. Reprap has pushed that price vs quality quadrant it seems.

For me 3d printers can become a viable tool for not only prototyping but also manufacturing. I could see a small farm of 3d printers working on producing limited batches of products or parts, not just for prototyping but also for production. Plastic cost have come down significantly and quality has come up. I recently reviewed some premium filament and found its tolerances lower than cheap stuff.... Aint that a kick to the old nads?

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Modicum V1 sold on e-bay user jaguarking11

The simplest truth about manufacturing is efficiency of scale. Making a million of something will always have a lower unit cost than making one of something. I do not expect this to change for at least 30 years.
For this reason, I cannot imagine 3d printing ever replacing a significant portion of conventional manufacturing. A machine designed explicitly for small quantity prototyping simply cannot compete with injection moulding.

You also have to consider that conventional manufacturing is advancing just as fast as additive methods. It doesn't get hype outside of industry but productivity-wise, conventional manufacturing is improving much faster than 3d printing.

I do not think comparing 3d printers to pre-1980 computing makes sense. Computers were so new that people couldn't imagine a use for them, and there wasn't an alternative technology that computers were trying to displace. We already know exactly what 3d printers will be used for, and existing technology has structural advantages over 3d printing that physically cannot be overcome.

I think the truly disruptive technology will be fully autonomous mail. Such a system is already within reach, and would dramatically alter the economy. People won't need household 3d printers when you can order the part and get it delivered for pennies a few hours later.



If we are talking incremental improvements to hobby level FDM we just need better software and the Stratasys patents to expire.

I do not see 3d printers replacing mass manufacturing at all. That's not the point I was trying to make. It does replace some manufacturing for items that are made in limited numbers while reducing costs. Those injection molding molds cost a pretty penny at 10k for a small mold is not unheard of. If you need 100 pieces of something then you either pay to have it made by hand or get a mold made. In cases like that its more cost effective to have them 3d printed out.

One more area 3d printers have been making great strides are in the dental world. They are starting to 3d scan a tooth before work is been done then they perform the work and create the crown for a test fit in less than 10 minutes before sending it out. You could have ceramic impregnated resins print out a temporary tooth or even a permanent one that must then be baked in a autoclave for 1-2 hours before being placed in a patients mouth.

Splints for limb surgery or even casts for people with broken arms can be made in such a way that the patient may get a door to scratch the arm after 3 or 4 days of wearing the damn thing.

3d printed replacement parts for household items on the side. How about 3d printing an item in less time than it would take amazon to ship it to your house. I recently 3d printed a coffee tamper for my espresso machine. I have no need for 10,000 of them nor do I want to resell them. I simply sliced an existing piece and printed one in less than 2 hours. Its doing its job effortlessly for about 15c worth of plastic just in time for guests to arrive in the afternoon and have a good quality cup of coffee with me. ........

The more I use these machine the more use I seem to find for them. Simply put they are certainly not for everyone. I know people who have never owned a cell phone either. However the realities are that it is good for more than just rapid prototyping. e-maling an object across the planet and have it printed in less time than it takes to fly there has some advantages as nasa found out.

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Modicum V1 sold on e-bay user jaguarking11

I agree on the electronics and motor feedback.
If you look at the evolution of 2d printers and even copiers, it is reliability of operation and quality that gains market share.
Look at how we went from old style RC airplanes, to gyro stabilized copters.
Things got easy, so more people buy and make more and so on.
With repraps right now, the management of the hotend is not great.
You have to keep an eye on it and watch that first boundary go down to check leveling and so on.
That assumes the rest of things are working.
So leveling, motor position feedback, and hotend babysitting seem like big ones.
I'm still surprised there are not more (non-software) automatic leveling systems going on.
How do the stratasys machines do it?

Bed leveling is less of an issue if you built your machine right.

How does stratasys do it? They charge huge money and tune and install the machines for you expecting a service contract. They also build the printers in such a way that besides the first adjustment they do not appreciably change over time. Something I have been able to replicate with my own printer. Unless I change the hot end height I do not need to level my platform. I use 7 points to level my platform and lock it in place. With that said my next iteration is going to have a leveling probe for no other reason than to try it. I am going the magnet hall sensor route with a 4mm rod. One more thing that I prefer is to lay down a thicker layer of goop on my print bed due to it preventing warping. For that I use two sheets of paper to level my platform. ~.15mm space. Once I build my enclosure (months in the making) I will go down to the 1 sheet space and still manually adjust the printer before I even try to auto level.

Reprap as of now focuses on building easily replicated printers, which is great, but none of the designs out there take into account torsional rigidity nor do they take into account the loads we put our printers under. I see people fighting for resolution and slowing their printers down to achieve those resolutions. The problem is two part, we use components that by nature have some tolerances that end up magnifying problems when used at higher speeds, but the bigger problem no one wants to admit to is the foundations of the printers we build are weak. As I mentioned before, if your printer cant take a decent amount of weight its probably not sturdy enough to swing 500g of mass at over 100mm/s. Its one of the reason people talk about delta smooth rods being a problem, however most designs using smooth rods do not tension the rods nor do they build a structure to hold those smooth rods instead they build a structure that is held up by smooth rods......

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Modicum V1 sold on e-bay user jaguarking11

Today reprap are replicating. Most of people does not realy know how to do with 3D printing. Most prints are useless things like vases, and yoda models. At last people print spare parts for things broken on the car or in the house. Reprap geeks print mostly printer's improvement parts (that means our printers still needs to be improove). Only a fiew are printing realy interesting things, mostly linked with their own hobby : RC, video, gardening and so on. That's why I think the most important is not the printer itself. The real next goal is to figure out what to do with a printer. Mass production is not always cheap. For example a printed peristaltic pump cost 1% of any one mass producted, and works as good. In the future, we will have a large bank of usefull things. That peristaltic pump could be feeded with a hacked solar pannel and a second hand motor. For a small percentage of existing cost, a third world man will have access to things I wasn't able to buy yet. There's a program in africa of people accking out of order copy machines to make a 3D printer for free.

With comming new materials (armed plasic and low friction polymers), the field of possible will enlarge. Actualy we're limited by the weakness of the plastic. Through, the Maker revolution is not only about 3D printing which is only a part of affordable CNC machining. See hacked fabric machines, coocking machines and so on... The most important is what we're about to share. By the past, you needed to be an expert to do something. Whatever it is. Some of us are machinists, some of us are gardeners, and we share the best of our skills. Without knowing anything about gardening and hydroelectric, I can download and print a fully workable vertical garden, a pump, and pilot all with someone's open source program on arduino. Then I'll own a high-end garder any farmer don't have.

Today, we don't do that much with our machines. When we'll realy exploit our possibilities, I guess the world will change. We won't buy pumps if we're able to print it, we won't buy tomatoes if we're able to grow it easily, and so on. Not everybody will do as so. But poormen understood quickly that opportunity. Those who will make for their own will know a kind of prosperity. Meanwhile some traditional business will decay.

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Collective intelligence emerges when a group of people work together effectively. Prusa i3 Folger (A lot of the parts are wrong, boring !)

Quote
cdru

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." -- Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943.
"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." -- Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977.
"This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us." -- Western Union internal memo, 1876.
"Radio has no future. Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible. X-rays will prove to be a hoax." -- William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, British scientist, 1899.

What the point in upgrading the telecommunications network in the UK to fiberoptic, no want will want the faster speed - UK telecommunications companies!

The price is the big killer at the moment but until raw parts go down in price (but up in quality) the price will stay.
The biggest problem is software. once an .stl file is created it's no different to a 2d printer (and compared to most printers, 3d is far cheeper per refill!) the biggest issue is in the creating of the .stl. From personal experience the cad software is baffling an operates in a non logic manner (may be logical to those who have grown up using cad) but for the normal's it's stupid, confusing and too much hassle!

wow, lots to talk about there.
I totally agree on the platform, and have built two prusa I3's using 1" thick plywood.
Pic attached, but not totally done with the one in the pic.

One issue I keep running into is the x-axis rods not being parallel or same spacing as the carriage, and no way to adjust any of it.
So I am making an adjustable carriage design, then using heated rod to change anything on the ends that run on the z axis rods.

I've been thinking the built in flexibility of the bed is forgiving, but not worth it now.
Can you imagine if we got a stratasys, and turned to them and said "we tune our own printers"! that would be fun.

Cad software certainly has short comings. However the easiest to use as of now is sketchup..... No prior knowledge required and if you can use M$ paint you can draw a simple 3d shape. If you think about it, current smart phones and technology is idiotic to use via non feedback means, however it still works. The learning curve will be high for any new tech, the next generation of people will find it easier as they will be exposed to it much sooner. Until now CAD software was relegated to the engineers and tinkerers, 3d printers have made it a necessity for a much larger audience, including me. Before I started building my 3d printer I had never really sat down and put together plans for anything other than paper and pen. I bet a 90 year old draftsman will complain cad is not easy to use, however its being used more and more, to the point where its become more wide spread than anyone could realize 30 years back. At some point CAD software will become standard install the same way M$ word has. Overall I think we underestimate the willingness of users to adopt it. Got an idea? Want to see it materialize? Get a 3d printer. All cad companies and generally every computer company and software company out there has started to focus on 3d printing. It has not yet reached critical mass though. M$ is already starting to support the movement, they better as it could spell disaster if they don't capitalize on this. Remember 3d printing has been a thing for 30 years, same as desktop document printing was for 30-50 years before the real home printers hit the market. That by itself is a trillion dollar market. 3d printers will become a trillion dollar market soon enough.

The other end of the spectrum is that most users will simply download their needs before they step up and learn how to do it themselves. Bring it on!

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jaguarking11
However the easiest to use as of now is sketchup.....

"Easiest" is relative. I thought it was far easier to learn AutoCAD than it was Sketchup. Yeah I was able to draw a super primitive shape in Sketchup faster, but for anything advanced I'll take real CAD software any day of the week.

Easiest would definitely be Rhinoceros. It has better precision than SketchUp, more freedom, yet the freedom isn't 'too free' as some programs can be too extended to the point where you don't know how to approach a design problem anymore.

I admit that SketchUp is becoming a better and better contender (however.. I heard the 2015 version has some flaw that supposedly you have to be 'always online' because the license is continuously checked through the net? < very much dislike this).

Of course, these programs are not meant for 'organic' designs, technical work is fine, but for other kinds of modeling I've seen people work magic with Blender and the like. However, not all modelers produce watertight STL's each time. Blender seems to be good at making it watertight.

SketchUp and Rhino feel more like Solid modelers, it's more my type of program, I guess this largely comes down to personal preference. However, there is software that is more intuitive for most people in general, and vice versa.

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My primary gripe with RepRap is fanboy logic. Fanboy logic is the blind acceptance of... some college professor at Bath, saying that this technology will self propagate. As if any technology just happens out of the blue or if Bill Gates just said, " My idea is so good, that I don't even have to work at it. Microsoft will just happen."

The hard thruth is 99% of people who build a RepRap or buy a RepRap will make no difference whatsoever in the projects eventual success or failure. The 1% who invest and have good ideas will make or break RepRap.

The Future is really hard to predict, but Improvements I am excited about seeing are.

Dyes that can change the color of filament as you print to create multicolored prints with a single head/filament spool.
More designs that use extruded rails or lead screws instead of smooth rods.
Sensors that monitor your printer and stop it when it detects there is some sort of problem.
The growth of .stl marketplaces.
Very large scale 3d printing in car and house manufacturing.
New printing materials like conductive filament and carbon fiber impregnated filament.
Easier to use interface software.

Thanks Mike

Personaly Im hopping for push back.

reprap != 3d printer

Sure 3d printing is an intersting diversion, but bring back the orriginal goal of a self replicating machine

What matters is ubiquity, not self replication. Adrian Bowyer is over rated in my opinion. He didn't invent 3D printing, although he'd like to claim he did. I've heard many guys talk about 3d printing before him. Then again, white college professors just happen to get all the credit sometimes. Self replicating 3D printers are just a highly publicized wild goose chase. Nothing more.

... Adrian not claimed the he's the inventor of 3D-printing - he initiated a DIY-able kit, cheap/easy enoug, so a scoolboy nearly everywhere in the world could build one out from scrap and available 'vitamins'

For me the most valuable/propelling developments in home-brew 3D-printing will be in speed, resolution and metallic and/or ceramic fabbing materials ... the subsequent target is the combination of all this materials in one fabber, so he can print complex parts with intermixed plastic, ceramic and metal parts 'spiced' with embedded electronics ...

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Call for the project "garbage-free seas" - [reprap.org]

Quote
modzilla
What matters is ubiquity, not self replication. Adrian Bowyer is over rated in my opinion. He didn't invent 3D printing, although he'd like to claim he did. I've heard many guys talk about 3d printing before him. Then again, white college professors just happen to get all the credit sometimes. Self replicating 3D printers are just a highly publicized wild goose chase. Nothing more.

I desagree. The glory of Bowyer is to makes 3D printing affordable to anyone. It's a bigger and faster revolution than personal computers in the 80s, because of replication abilities and the open source format. In the 80s PC movement anything was copyright, even DIY computers. It's a great human evolution to a copyleft wold. The "few" (as you said) Bowyer did, he did it the better way. It's a genius touch. We're just at the start of the benefits it brought, from hackspaces/fablabs, to microeconomic manufacturing, to collective engineering, to unexpected humanitarian applications.

3D Electronics/firm(soft)ware will follow it's evolution. What we realy need is better raw materials. For 3d printing we need stiff and stable materials, resistant materials (heat, friction...), technical materials (conductive, insulating, opaque, UV filtry...). We need post treatments (hardeners, stabilizers, protectors, waterproofers...), with probably owens or insulators. We need more chemists/plastics reaserchers contribution to our world. Or we'll have open source machines working with copyright materials (Igus Igildur, Dupont Derlin...)

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/29/2015 04:15AM by Zavashier.

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Collective intelligence emerges when a group of people work together effectively. Prusa i3 Folger (A lot of the parts are wrong, boring !)

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edu3d
What do you think would be the next great push for wide spread adoption of 3D printers?

To me this is a bit a misalignement to the title. Certainly 3D printers can get even wider adoption and RepRap can go away at the same time. Actually, that's what I currently see. Kits are more and more prefabricated, assembly times of just 20 minutes are accepted as "I built it myself" and such stuff. If this continues, we'll all buy readily made printers in a few years, and they'll be cheap, like $300.

Accordingly I see the future of the RepRap community in moving towards technological details, perhaps modding these readily bought printers and in collaboration. The latter means setting up a number of community designs which one can trust when going to home depot to buy raw materials.

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I think it's time for edu3d to reply again

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Quote
Ohmarinus
Personally, I never understood why people 'should have' a 3d printer in their home. You see those vendors always telling it's the future, yeah it's going to change the world, in X years every home will have one blabla.

I'm maybe missing a bit of nuance here, but I don't think the adoption should be increased. 3D-printing is in my opinion a prototyping technique, and yes it's fun to play with, and even more fun to build and try to 'perfect' your printer, but in the end, it's so funny to see how 'the world' mistakes a prototyping technique for a fully developed production technique.

Maybe it's me seeing things wrong, 'the world' is a big place, and usually the definition with the most votes wins, but I'll just keep on saying it's a prototype technique anyway (and one that's a lot of fun too!).

Exactly. I don't ever see 3d printers becoming commonplace in households unless they grow a lot more consumer friendly and can support more than just plastic.

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cpus
Exactly. I don't ever see 3d printers becoming commonplace in households unless they grow a lot more consumer friendly and can support more than just plastic.

As of now I am counting the material types supported

1 - ABS
2 - PLA
3 - Ceramics
4 - clay
5 - carbon fiber
6 - metal impregnated plastics
7 - somewhat cunductive plastics
8 - metal (Well solder experiments)

Not a bad variation I would say. Depends on what one wants to make. I am tempted to do a ceramics swap able head on my printer. Would be nice to print in some fine ceramics.

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the self replicating idea is funny, because only about 1/2 of most cheap machines are printed, and I would argue only a few important things are hard to make with other means.
I started switching parts in the build zone to laminated pressboard so I could do heated enclosure.
A cheap bandsaw and drill press are all that is needed.

here is the pressboard extruder I did, its a copy of gregs/wade with realigned motor mount holes to provide access to screws behind belt.
I've done 2 of these now, and even found you can sew the requires closed loop belt with thin needle and nylon thread.
Closed Loop belt

ceramics? do you have a kiln and glazes handy?
You do fire them right?

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jmaeding
ceramics? do you have a kiln and glazes handy?
You do fire them right?

... think about SLS or SLM with 'local' heating/fusing/melting of the materials

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Viktor
--------
Aufruf zum Projekt "Müll-freie Meere" - [reprap.org] -- Deutsche Facebook-Gruppe - [www.facebook.com]

Call for the project "garbage-free seas" - [reprap.org]