Five years late for this party?

Any one else feel like they are five years behind this trend? I'm not sure how I missed this boat, because the hobby sure is fun.

With the advent of cheap consumer printers, and the patent craze that Stratisys is on, I wonder how much life the hobby has left...

Where's the next trend?

Where will this hobby take us?

Are we already a dinosaur?

I don't know, this seems like a great time to get involved - there's just a fantastic amount of existing knowledge and robust designs to take advantage of, along with a ready supply of cheap components from China. Maybe we missed out on some of the white heat levels of excitement, but the opportunities are still very exciting.

Unless you want to be on the bleeding edge of development, now is a great time to get involved. I've been using 3d printers for about 20 years and only now am I somewhat interested in building a printer for home use. Things are more stable, the "try this, oops, that don't work" hit or miss mentality has started to go away and what we are left with is a somewhat defined road map of what to buy and how to use it to achieve repeatable results. You can buy a kit and it will work! or source your own parts to get a more robust printer at a fairly reasonable (cheap) price. But there is still a world of development left for the person that wants to blaze a new trail.

I can't repeat the names we have for Stratisys at my work but a lot of what they have patented will not stand up in court - most was already publicized and put to practice when they initiated their patents, Their prior art will not hold up, but it will take someone with some big kahuna's to take them to court, prove them wrong and get their patents thrown out. There is still a lot of development to be done and a lot of new ideas to flesh out and make workable, if you are wanting you name on some patents - go for it, $300 charge on a credit card to get started and you too can be playing in the patent game,

Where will this take us? - I bought my first home computer in 1976 (no it wasn't an Altair) and about 12 years ago I worked on the development of the first 300mm wafer handling equipment (the machines that make computer chips - I can't tell you what I'm working on today) so I am very aware of the technological developments and have a fair idea of where things might go. Right now our level of a commercial 3d printer is comparable to when teletype printers were first being used for home printers (1979) or the 40 column dot matrix printer was being developed. Put another way - the current level of technology in 3d printers is almost comparable to an pacman video game. We are light years behind what a 3d printer will be in just 3 to 5 years from now. There are an un-numerable amount of fields where 3d printers will be developed for specialty uses - pick one and focus on it and you will get rich, of course you might happen to pick a real looser of a field and then you will only have a memorable but enjoyable time.

Is it already a dinosaur - yes but evolution takes a bit of time, enjoy the brontosaurus steaks and hang on tight, it will be another mind blowing (E ticket), heck of a ride!

Not too late at all, not by a long measure. Get in on it and dont hold back!

Some good comments. perhaps we can liken the current tech to bubblejet vs color laser. These things do seem to have a long curve.

If you want to be an early adopter for printing PLA Yoda heads with a 10% success rate, yes, you're late.

I think you still qualify as early adopter at this point, though, if you want to use hobbyist/consumer-grade equipment tuned well enough to make functional parts, explore engineering-grade materials and multi-extrusion, or dabble in lost-PLA casting.

I was way behind the curve until a few months ago too. I thought it was still science fiction, or still being worked on in some basement lab at MIT.

I agree with all the comments here. I've also thought that the state of 3D printing now is like the first dot matrix printer. But really, it's like the first PC or Macintosh. A crude beginning of ... We can't even imagine how this technology will develop, what it will make possible, or how it will change our lives, in the next few decades.

And just having finished the adventure (that's one word for it!) of putting together my first printer (Prusa I3) and figuring out how to get a halfway decent print out of it -- I definitely feel like an early adopter. It feels like the wild west, where you have to figure it out as you go along.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/28/2015 03:45AM by CraigMoberg.

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Unless you want to be on the bleeding edge of development, now is a great time to get involved.

Oh, that sounds like a cue for my 'old fart' rambling...

When I got started with embedded microcontrollers back in the 90's I had to build my own programmer for the 16c84, solder my own circuit boards and do rs232 by bit banging in software. Now we can buy a mega2560 + ramps clone for $20 and have a choice of (nearly) ready to run firmwares to install! How amazing is that? Which seems like an opportune moment to say a big THANK YOU to all those who have contributed to this remarkable achievement and made so much possible.

James.

It's not too late, now is the time to get involved.

I think that whether it is too late or not depends more on yourself than on the availibility of cheap 3D printers. If you think of a model aeroplane as coming as three parts in a plastic snap together kit then you should go for a Makerbot or UP!. If however you think of a model aeroplane as being made from balsa, tissue paper, glue and sweat then there is lots of life left in the hobby.

I have a suspicion that a great many denizens of the hobby 3D printer world have made telescopes with mirrors that they ground themselves, computers built with Veroboard, a microcontroller and a handful of chips, CNC milling machines etc.. There will always be a lot of pleasure in building something yourself.

Mike

I jumped-in with the Cupcake Makerbots back in around 2009. After piles of hours with barely any gratification, I shelved my machine until just a few months ago. I've retro-fitted my machine with much more modern components and have created something superficially unique. There's so much good material to draw-on now, that the resistance for the basics is far lower and it's a lot easier than it was to really explore the possibilities. I think we're actually still building-up to a critical-mass where this is going to take off in much bigger ways. Anyway, 5 years ago, this space was awesome, but today I think it's even better. The show is far from over!

... my first contact with 3D-fabbing was around 1988, when I started to laminate an mill/cut thin sheets of paper, plastic and metal on my first CNC-mill.

This was called LOM (Laminated-Object-Modelling or Manufacturing) and around 1992 some companies presented LOM-machines on the fairs, that cut paper sheets with a CO2-laser and were big enough to build complete car-motors out of endless paper-rolls.

After 1995 LOM-fabbing wasn't interesting any more, because the customers found SLA much more interesting ... most LÖM-companies vanished from the market ...

After 2006/2007 the FDM-printers got notized -- thanks to the RepRap-project!

But in the same time the fab@home project with syringes (paste-dispensers) was presented too, but didn't find enough followers to hold the needed interest level.

... the next 'focus of interest' could be SLS/SLM, focussed on metal instead of plastic ...

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Viktor
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