[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Why did consumer 3D printing take so long to...
___________________________________________________________________
Ask HN: Why did consumer 3D printing take so long to be invented?
"Today I saw an old paper printer, it has all the pieces for 3D
printing except the plastic. Computer sends it data, it moves in 1D
to print the image on paper using ink. A 3D printer is just 3 of
these moving pieces from a paper printer with a melting plastic and
thin pipe and software to connect it all. All the pieces existed
to make a working 3D printer existed even in 1970! and relatively
cheaply. So why has it taken so long for [at home] 3D printing to
actually become a thing? Is it because of the internet somehow?
Did just no one care in the 1970-2010s? Like there aren't even
prototypes from 1970 from garage hobbyists for 3D printing. What
was wrong?!" - omgsoftcats
Author : superconduct123
Score : 46 points
Date : 2024-11-07 17:58 UTC (5 hours ago)
| LarsAlereon wrote:
| It was invented but protected by patents, so it wasn't until
| those patents expired that companies and hobbyists started to
| experiment. Early 3D printers hadn't figured out things like
| layer adhesion yet so parts tended to be too weak to be very
| useful. It wasn't clear that this was an area for improvement
| rather than a fundamental downside of the technology.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| Yes! The fused deposition modeling (additive printing) patents
| expired in 2009, which triggered the wave of innovation and
| home 3d printing.
|
| https://futurism.com/expiring-patents-set-to-improve-3d-worl...
| jerf wrote:
| It's also easy to underestimate how much computation is
| involved and how _little_ there was in the 70s. The 3D printer
| slicers generally require several seconds on modern hardware to
| calculate their final path. The resulting files are in the
| several megabytes. My Bambu 3D printer is all but festooned
| with sensors and is constantly adjusting things, but even the
| simple ones have more to their firmware than meets the eye.
| Even assuming that they 'd use some simpler algorithms and data
| structures, you're looking at vast computation times, and most
| likely, vastly simpler objects being printed.
|
| Even something that seems as simple as "sous vide" cooking,
| which is basically a heater hooked to a thermocouple, took a
| lot of little innovations to make practical to hand to the
| masses.
|
| And then, there's the general improvement in motors speed,
| precision, and cost, along with any number of advancements here
| and there and everywhere to make it practical.
|
| Could someone thrust back to the 1970s and given a fairly
| substantial budget make _some kind_ of 3D printer? Probably.
| But it 's slow, extremely expensive, and can print various
| sizes of plastic bricks and spheres and other very
| algorithmically simple objects, and in rather low quality
| without many, many years further development. I can think of
| many ways of bodging on various improvements, but they're all
| going to have their own compromises, not be garden paths to
| what we now think of as modern 3D printing. (For example,
| someone could bodge together a machine that offsets a rod on
| the printer head, and then in the offset space, has an object
| to be "copied", by basically banging into the object with a
| very crude sensor, so there's no generation of geometry at all.
| But this is going to be clumsy, inaccurate, and full of very
| complex and disheartening limitations.) You're not going to be
| printing Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson's face embedded into a
| toilet [1] or anything, at 1MB of geometry. It will be
| commercially useless and inaccessible to hobbyists.
|
| [1]: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6436138/files
| etrautmann wrote:
| Also 3D modeling software and hardware to run it.
| silvestrov wrote:
| AirFryers are even simpler than "sous vide cooking". No
| reason they couldn't have been invented in the 50s - 60s when
| kitchens had good electrical supply.
| creaturemachine wrote:
| Air fryers are just convection ovens packaged differently.
| jdietrich wrote:
| Sort of, but not really. Air fryers have a much faster
| rate of airflow than any convection oven, which results
| in significantly faster and more even cooking. The air
| fryer really is a meaningful technological development.
| knowitnone wrote:
| if you consider adding a fan as "meaningful technological
| development"
| jerf wrote:
| Oh, there's plenty of technologies that were developed
| and/or popularized decades after the basic tech stack was
| available to do it, even under the constraints of
| "commercially viable". That's an interesting study of its
| own.
|
| 3D printing is not one of them.
| kragen wrote:
| It's plausible that our current 3-D printing design workflow
| has grown up in the computationally intensive way that it did
| _because_ all that computation was available; it 's easier to
| just use a least-common-denominator but bulky file format
| like STL than to worry about the incompatibilities that would
| result from using more expressive files.
|
| People have been doing CAD/CAM since the 01950s. Boeing
| started using CNC in 01958 on IBM 704s, and MIT's
| Servomechanisms Lab (working with the Aircraft Industries
| Association: https://web.archive.org/web/20090226211027/http:
| //ied.unipr....) sent out CNC ashtrays to newspaper reporters
| in 01959: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_numerical_
| control#C.... Pierre Bezier started writing UNISURF in 01968
| at Renault, who was using it to design car bodies by 01975.
| The Utah Teapot was created in 01975, and it consists of nine
| Bezier patches; you could print the whole dataset on a
| business card: https://web.archive.org/web/20141120132346/htt
| p://www.sjbake...
|
| The IBM 704 was a vacuum-tube machine that could carry out
| 12000 floating-point additions per second and had a failure
| about once every 8 hours
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_704. The Intel 8008 (not
| 8088, not 8080, 8008) that came out in 01972 could carry out
| over 79000 8-bit integer additions per second, which is about
| the same speed. But much faster computers were already
| available, such as the PDP-8, in wide use for real-time
| control, and they very rapidly became much cheaper. Any
| computation MIT's Servomechanisms Lab could do in the 50s was
| doable by hobbyists by the 80s.
|
| The reason 3-D printers mostly use stepper motors is that
| they don't require closed-loop feedback control. 2-D printers
| from the 01970s used stepper motors for the same reason. They
| were accessible to hobbyists; in the 80s I had a Heathkit
| printer someone had built from a kit in the 70s.
|
| If you wanted to print Frank Sinatra's face on a toilet, I
| think you'd probably want at least a 64x64 heightfield to get
| a recognizable Sinatra; 256x256 would be better than the
| line-printer pictures we were doing. 8 bits per heightfield
| point would be 65 kilobytes, which would fit on the floppy
| disks we were using at the time. This would have been totally
| feasible, though digitizing Frank Sinatra would have been a
| nontrivial project, quite aside from printing him.
|
| So I don't think computation was the limiting factor.
|
| Your "basically banging into the object with a very crude
| sensor, so there's no generation of geometry at all" is
| called a "pantograph" and it has been a common way to copy
| three-dimensional objects and engrave letters with a milling
| machine for 180 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantogra
| ph#Sculpture_and_minti...
| fxtentacle wrote:
| That's also my understanding. The 3D printing boom started when
| the patents expired.
| lawlessone wrote:
| Is it actually better than homes built by other methods?
|
| The most expensive part of home is general the land it's built
| on.
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| He means just regular 3D printers used at home. But yeah, the
| title is confusing.
| superconduct123 wrote:
| Ya I've updated the title to consumer to be clearer
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| Nonetheless the misinterpreted question is also interesting.
| The technical hurdles people are citing for why small scale
| 3d printers didn't happen earlier are completely different
| than those of the large scale "home printers". Why didn't we
| have automatic concrete wall making machines much earlier?
| regularfry wrote:
| The bits of home printing that a machine can do aren't the
| hard bits, except for very specific buildings where the
| wall shape is odd, which there's limited demand for. You
| end up where the choice is a complicated, failure-prone
| robot in a hostile environment vs a human or three who can
| do the job quicker once you factor in machine setup.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| It's actually that and dealing with permitting. The actual
| problem of creating some kind of durable, comfortable, shelter
| isn't all that hard from a technical point of view. Getting
| permission to build a house though is. Society kind of forces
| you into debt for a mortgage just to have a place that you can
| live in. The alternative of paying high rent is not a great
| alternative as you permanently lose the money.
|
| There are all sorts of restrictions and rules that create this
| artificial scarcity. Even something as simple as buying a plot
| of land and parking a trailer on it is not legal in most places
| except in designated trailer parks. You can get a trailer for
| next to nothing. And lots of people live in them. But try
| finding a place where it is legal to put one down and live in
| one. If it were legal, lots of people would do that. Land plots
| are scarce and once you have one, you can't just do what you
| want with it in most places.
|
| I'm just using trailers as an example here. Think prefab
| buildings and raw material cost. This isn't rocket science.
| We've been building shelters since the stone age.
|
| There are of course good arguments for this to be made in big
| cities because of a lack of space. But it's equally frowned
| upon in areas where there's plenty of space.
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| Are many people going to buy a home 3D printer? It's not a
| profitable business.
| JohnFen wrote:
| You don't have to have a large market in order to have a
| profitable business. That said, the market for 3D printers at
| home is larger than many assume, especially as printers get
| closer to being simple one-button-push kinds of things.
|
| They will probably never be the sort of thing that exists in
| every home, but they could very well be the sort of thing that
| exists in every home workshop.
| Legend2440 wrote:
| Huh? There are millions of people with a 3D printer in their
| home. They're so cheap now that people buy them for their
| grandkids.
| dekhn wrote:
| I don;t think anybody was really doing FDM/FFF until the 90s and
| it didn't really take off until the 2000s. It was quite
| expensive, required a high level of expertise in both mech E and
| CS, and existing subtractive methods (like CNC and lathe) were
| very effective.
| vel0city wrote:
| One thing to think about is you'd need quite a beefy machine to
| even properly render the gcode in the 70s and 80s. In this age of
| printers computers often didn't even have fonts, they were ROM
| cartridges your printer would take. And even into the 90s there
| were accelerator cards for _printing documents_ and talking to
| the printer in alternative ways than parallel ports.
|
| So really, for an average hobbyist the idea of a 3D printer
| controllable from a home PC wouldn't really be possible until
| like the mid 90s. So you really need to start your look at why it
| wasn't a thing at some point in history I'd start the digging
| there, not the 1970s.
| h2odragon wrote:
| Micro-stepping controller chips.
|
| Before that, the precision available without gearing and feedback
| wasn't sufficient. There were systems but they were order of
| magnitude more complicated and several orders more expensive.
| foxglacier wrote:
| How do you reconcile that claim with the existence of cheap
| consumer paper printers and hard drives?
| h2odragon wrote:
| paper printers only needed such accuracy in one axis of
| motion, and had gearing to provide it.
|
| hard drives use voice coils, a completely different
| technology. The circuitry that does that evolved and
| certainly influenced the creation of microstepper
| controllers: the neat trick they do is treat the stepper
| motor as a voice coil in between full steps.
| flimsypremise wrote:
| I have several 2-axis microscope stages from the 80s/90s
| that are driven by brushed motors with position feedback,
| and they are all capable of higher accuracy than any
| stepper motor I have. The capability was there, it was just
| pricey.
|
| Hell, CNC machines existed back then too.
| observationist wrote:
| Microcontrollers and software for consumer PCs and the like
| could have been produced, probably, but there are a lot of
| areas of deep specialization. You'd have had to bring
| together all sorts of different disciplines and technologies
| the old, hard way - universities and libraries and
| researching manually. The internet allowed all of those
| things to coalesce easily, and novice level people gained
| access to high quality information and research at the click
| of a mouse.
|
| The patents, compute, research access, and dozens of other
| relatively small barriers created a thicket of challenges and
| no obvious way to reconcile them, even if you had all the
| right ideas and inspiration. I think the internet would have
| been needed in order for all those ideas to come together in
| the right way.
| eesmith wrote:
| "cheap consumer paper printers and hard drives" was not a
| 1970s thing.
|
| I mean, towards the end of the decade was something like the
| ImageWriter, which let you do bitmapped graphics, as a row of
| 9 dots at a time. At
| https://www.folklore.org/Thunderscan.html?sort=date you can
| read about the difficulties of turning it into a scanner.
| (Like, 'We could almost double the speed if we scanned in
| both directions, but it was hard to get the adjacent scan
| lines that were scanned in opposite directions to line up
| properly.')
|
| The LaserWriter wasn't until 1985 or so. My first hard drive,
| 30 MB, was a present from my parents around 1987.
|
| By the 1996, laser-based 3D printing based on cutting out
| layers of paper was a thing, available for general use in one
| of the computing labs in the university building where I
| worked.
|
| The result smelled like burnt wood.
|
| When I visited a few years later they had switched to some
| other technology, and one which could be colored, but I
| forgot what.
| slantyyz wrote:
| The Thunderscan, for the time, was pretty awesome though. I
| remember borrowing one from a classmate to make some scans.
| Given how we keep a document scanner in our pocket these
| days, the whole notion of sticking a scanner into a printer
| seems so antiquated and kinda crazy.
| regularfry wrote:
| I don't think it needed microstepping. The first reprap board
| bit-banged H-bridges with a PIC, and even later boards only
| used A3982 drivers. Microstepping helps, but it came later.
|
| You can look at early calibration settings descriptions and
| they're still talking about e.g. "The number of X stepper-motor
| steps needed to move 1 mm for the PIC."
| Legend2440 wrote:
| 3D printers were first invented in the 80s. There's a combination
| of several factors why they took off in the 2010s:
|
| 1. Cheap stepper motors and electronics from China
|
| 2. Expiration of Stratasys patents in 2009
|
| 3. Widespread availability of CAD software and desktop computers
| powerful enough to run it
|
| 4. Reprap project made it easy for companies (and individuals!)
| to develop their own printers
| Onavo wrote:
| Number 1 is huge, it's also the primary driver of the shift
| from "model planes" to quadcopter drones with enormous
| capabilities. The crucial parts were brushless motors and ESCs.
| The Chinese scale brought the pricing down from ~3-4 figures to
| under 3 figures which was a watershed moment for hobbyist and
| commercial use cases.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| The other big one for drones was sensors and the processing
| to run them. Trivially small cheap gyro position sensors,
| accelerometers, GPS, pressure sensors, etc... needed to exist
| since quadcopters are more or less incapable of flying
| without a computer in the loop.
| jkingsman wrote:
| I don't know that I'd argue that "consumer" 3D printing, as in a
| printer at home that just churns out a part when you want it, is
| even really hear yet, certainly not in the way that a dishwasher
| or lawnmower is. You need to do your own slicing, thinking
| through supports and brims and layer height, and the printers
| themselves need no small amount of troubleshooting that is much
| more than "turn it on and off again". So, I'd argue it's still a
| hobbyist realm than a consumer one.
| Legend2440 wrote:
| The big limiting factor IMO is CAD skills - otherwise you're
| just printing parts off thingiverse.
| OJFord wrote:
| Don't underestimate the number of people that do that though.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| Until they have a little boat in each colour... and put the
| printer in the back of the garage to collect dust.
|
| CAD skills are essential, and it turns out not as hard as
| you might have thought!
| OJFord wrote:
| _I_ do, I 've never printed one of those boats, but not
| everyone's interested.
|
| If you think of it as functional/decorative
| categorisation first of all, obviously some people will
| overlap but broadly speaking I think people are
| interested for one or the other, then within the
| 'decorative' camp you can go a hell of a lot further
| without and I think it's more obviously reasonable to not
| care about designing your own models. You never wanted to
| design your own toys, but there's appeal in printing
| things not available on Amazon, unofficial merch for a
| film you like, or whatever.
|
| Not to say there isn't functional stuff (which I
| exclusively print) on these sites, but often it won't be
| _quite_ what I want, so yeah I end up in Fusion. (And
| typically starting from scratch eventually, because for
| some reason people don 't share source, and working with
| imported STLs is hellish.)
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| Resin printers are HUGELY popular for people that paint
| miniatures and do tabletop stuff. Most of them never
| design characters and just buy the cad models to print.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| There are several "CAD lite" systems available if you
| don't actually need dimensional accuracy though. There's
| a model boom in DnD circles around sharing 3D models,
| slicing them up, gluing them together, and making your
| own designs by basically digital kitbashing.
|
| My friend is filling up hard drives with 3D models DMs
| share.
| artificialLimbs wrote:
| Bro maybe 3-5 years ago. I pulled my Ender 3v3 out of the box
| and hit print and it's been running almost constantly for a
| month. I don't even know what 'bed leveling' is, because it
| self levels, whatever that means.
| paulorlando wrote:
| Patents do explain some of this delay....
|
| Fused Deposition Modeling or FDM (1989, expired in 2009), Liquid-
| Based Stereolithography or SLA (1986, expired in 2006), Selective
| Laser Sintering or SLS (1992, expired in 2012), metal processes
| like Selective Laser Melting (SLM) and Direct Metal Laser
| Sintering (DMLS) (1996, expired 2016).
| legitster wrote:
| What needs would home 3D printing fill in the 70s?
|
| A complete set of woodworking or metalworking tools was a lot
| cheaper than a home computer. And there were entire magazines
| dedicated to proliferating free or easily obtained
| schematics/designs. Labor was also cheaper, and people had more
| time for hobbies.
|
| I would also argue the point that it would have been relatively
| cheap. We are used to the ubiquity of cheap DC motors and
| precision parts being a click away. But if you were to rummage
| through a vintage Radio Shack to cobble together a home printer,
| I think you would struggle to construct anything precise enough
| with consumer available parts.
|
| > a melting plastic
|
| Don't sleep on the chemistry of filament. It has to be extremely
| precise and consistent. We benefit from the massive economies of
| scale today, but this was small batch stuff 20-30 years ago. And
| if we are talking about the 1970s the plastics were _really_
| primitive by today 's standards.
| cyberax wrote:
| > All the pieces existed to make a working 3D printer existed
| even in 1970! and relatively cheaply. So why has it taken so long
| for 3D home printing to actually become a thing?
|
| Easy. The printing process itself is not that hard.
|
| It's the model _design_ that is tricky. We needed home computers
| to become powerful enough to run 3D CAD software, and enough
| people to get proficient with it.
|
| RepRap started in 2005. Realistically, we could have had it maybe
| a few years earlier. But not _much_ earlier.
| spacecadet wrote:
| I knew someone who recycled paper printers into a home brew 3D
| printer and then a 2D shopbot style CNC.
| jeffbee wrote:
| It was the polymers that needed to be invented. In the 1990s we
| used to order quick-turn prototype 3D prints for parts to check
| fit before committing to tooling for hard materials, but we only
| had 3 days to work with it before it fell apart into a puddle of
| goo.
| foxglacier wrote:
| I don't think that's a reason. PLA and ABS were invented before
| the 1990's. What was this self-destructing material, and why?
| sottol wrote:
| I think it's probably correct that few people *really* cared
| until the Reprap project showed a real DIY 3D printer was
| possible.
|
| Early machines were industrial machines with huge price tags,
| proper linear motion systems, complicated extrusion systems and
| so on. There is a bit of a mental leap to go from seeing $100k+
| machine and dreaming to design something that can be built for
| $200-500.
|
| The problems were: no "reference designs", no tried and true go-
| to mechanical parts (like cheap chinese linear motion rails),
| extruders (they were DIYd!) or heated beds (early models were
| just PCBs) and so on - imo it just took someone to get this
| rolling and that may have well taken 30 years.
|
| I think Reprap was first publicly shown around 2005. From then on
| it was taken on by more and more makers and refined. It
| culminated in the early 2010s hype with Makerbots and its
| contemporaries but they still cost > $1500 and were far from set-
| and-forget appliances, like 50% reliable and slow - we had one at
| work and I got fascinated but it printed at 5-20mm/s so parts
| would just take forever and often fail due to bed adhesion,
| clogs, ...
|
| The last 10-15 years then have seen the popularization of 3d
| printers through the Prusa i3 and its clones (Ender and other
| cartesians < $300) and steady refinement of reliability through
| better materials. Then the last ~5years or so significantly
| bumped up the speeds through better linear motion components,
| motion systems and input shaping + firmware and ecosystems like
| Klipper.
|
| Bambu imo got in at just the right time and refined everything
| that had culminated up to this point into a solid appliance. Imo
| their genius was more in the industrial design, making it
| reliable and affordable manufacturing than anything else.
| alexathrowawa9 wrote:
| Bannister Effect
| grogenaut wrote:
| There's also an economy of scale going on that snowballed a
| ton. In 2014 I got my first printer off Craigslist. The bom was
| like $1200. Steppers were like $80 ea, a ramps board without
| controllers was 80-120, the controllers were 20-40 each, the
| heated bed was a huge PCB so also not cheap. Cheap PCB houses
| were nascent at the time. Arduinos we're $50+. Power supplies
| like 40-150.
|
| Now you can get the steppers from Amazon for $8, a control
| board with stepper controllers for $20 with a built in 32 bit
| MCU. At scale if you're building a lot of them those parts are
| going to be even cheaper maybe even another order of magnitude.
| For a while it was difficult to actually even comprehend how
| much cheaper stuff was getting and what that lets you do. And
| then you see a resin printer for $140 and realize it's a cast-
| off I found screen one stepper and some extruded parts.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| A few notes: The patents were a huge impediment. They did not
| expire till 2008 - before then printers cost $25k. They were
| expensive and stratasys had no incentive to make them $300 like
| they are today so volumes were limited. From their release in
| 1995 until 2008 stratasys sold like 13000 printers according to
| their company history web page. For a long time now Prusa has
| shipped more printers than that in a single month. The Reprap
| Darwin wasn't built until late 2007, then makerbot and others
| followed. I bought an Ultimaker in 2011 and that's when it
| feels to me like home printing started to become viable.
|
| Once anyone could build their own design, a community of
| hackers and engineers formed that continuously improved the
| designs with diverse ideas and experiments. That community is
| what made 3D printing what it is today. And it was illegal for
| them to do all of that (in many countries) until the patent
| expiration in 2008. That's a big reason why it took so long. I
| think it's interesting to consider whether this would have
| happened sooner if they had never been patented, though perhaps
| the expired patent created a legal safe haven where no one
| could take away the basic principles by patenting them. Anyway,
| patents play a big role in this story!
|
| Edit: Some cool history here:
| https://3dprintingindustry.com/news/interview-dr-adrian-bowy...
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I remember reading articles in hobby electronics magazines
| circa 1990 where people were talking about 3-d printing as a
| nascent technology.
| johnny_canuck wrote:
| I'm curious how much better the printers are these days as I'd
| love to get another one.
|
| I had a Wanhao Duplicator i3 in 2015 and found it required a
| lot of tinkering and calibration every time I wanted to use it.
| I ended up selling it as it was so time consuming to get
| everything correctly set up that it just killed any interest I
| had in it.
| nameless912 wrote:
| Nowadays spending 500-1000 USD on a machine gets you
| something that can print almost anything (within size
| limitations) out of the box with no calibration. The BambuLab
| printers are nothing short of extraordinary for quite
| reasonable prices (the A1 mini is only like 300 bucks, but
| it's small). And their software stack is good enough that 3D
| printing is roughly as easy as 2D printing (with the same
| caveats that occasionally your machine will jam and you'll
| want to chuck it out a window).
| ben1040 wrote:
| I had a Makerbot 2X in 2014 and it required constant
| janitoring every time I wanted to print.
|
| I built a Prusa MK4 this spring; it calibrated itself and
| printed a great looking piece right from the get-go. The
| difference is night and day.
| criddell wrote:
| Check out Bambu Lab printers if you want something more
| modern. They have several models available for less than
| $1000 and give good results with little messing around.
|
| I say this as someone who doesn't want 3d-printing as a
| hobby. It's just a tool I want to occasionally use in order
| to get something else done and the less time I have to spend
| tramming and calibrating, the better.
| ok_dad wrote:
| I bought the cheapest printer available, the Kobra Go I
| believe, and with very little tweaking I had it running well
| enough that I don't care to tweak more. I owned a delta
| printer ten years ago which I spent $1200 plus another $600
| in custom parts and it ran about the same as my current one
| (though it was bigger) and my current one cost $150 plus
| shipping. I don't suggest the cheapest one if you have the
| money but I only use mine once a month or less so it was the
| perfect price vs. functionality. I did build the old one from
| a kit and modified nearly every mechanism though, so I'm
| relatively confident with these machines. I do suggest the
| more expensive, better quality printers if you don't want to
| tweak stuff much.
| artificialLimbs wrote:
| I got an Ender 3 v3 CoreXY about a month ago. I just about
| pulled it out of the box and started hitting print. It's
| almost that easy. It's been printing almost continuously for
| about a month with very few problems.
| dv35z wrote:
| Check to see if there is a community maker-space in your area
| - including libraries & universities. One of the benefits of
| using those machines are that they are well-maintained and
| frequently used & tuned. Also, you can meet other 3D printing
| experts who can help you with any project - its a good vibe,
| and a great way to get back into making without a large
| investment...
| jdietrich wrote:
| The widespread commercial availability of polylactic acid was
| also a significant factor. It's one of the few plastics that
| can reliably print on an open-framed printer. The cheap i3 and
| Ender clones just wouldn't have taken off if we were stuck with
| ABS.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| Some observations that I didn't see in the other comments:
|
| - Home 3D printing is often more of a hobby than a traditional
| prototyping or engineering discipline. People view it as a skill
| to have, and a fun use of free time. Note how the cheapest and
| most finicky ones are popular; they can be made to work well
| through careful operation, troubleshooting, procedures,
| customization etc. They are not set-and-forget, and I think the
| userbase likes that.
|
| - Home 3D printer parts (the motors, frames, electronics etc) are
| almost exclusively sourced from China. We live in an AliBaba
| world; that wasn't always the case.
| superconduct123 wrote:
| That's a really good point
|
| Those AliExpress clone kits were really popular in the
| community in the beginning
| whatusername wrote:
| I'm not sure how true that first statement is anymore. Most of
| the recommendations I see now are "just get a Bambu labs one".
| We are much closer to 3D printing as a utility as opposed to 3D
| printing as a hobby than we were ~3 years ago.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| Great news! Given that time frame, my info is indeed out of
| date.
| syntaxing wrote:
| A mixture of patent protection, China's (lack of) precision
| manufacturing at scale at that time, and software immaturity.
| LM8UU around 15 years ago when I started my 3D printing journey
| was upwards of $15 PER PIECE. You need at least 8 for a Mendel or
| i3 style printer during the reprap boom. Just the bearings alone
| would have cost you, $100 or so. Then factor in chrome rods,
| stepper motor, stepper motor drivers (Pololu just released their
| A4988 boards), you're looking at almost $1K just for the parts.
| The software like slicers and even gcode interpreters weren't
| even made yet. Merlin wasn't even a big thing until about 10
| years ago. We take for granted how much work the community has
| put into 3D printers to get us where we are today.
| regularfry wrote:
| I don't think you can underestimate the development of
| efficient slicing algorithms. It _might_ just have been
| something that would have happened anyway with other parts of
| the story in place, but there was a point in time when slicing
| anything complicated was very painful.
| tjoff wrote:
| You don't start with anything complicated though. You start
| with cubes, make fixtures etc.
|
| And with waiting 5 hours to print it isn't unreasonable to
| wait an hour or two for the slicer either.
| iamgopal wrote:
| Short answer is, there is no need. Personal computer were sold to
| make nice printed paper. Here there is no specific application.
| refulgentis wrote:
| Computers in 1970 were so slow we hacked in saying lightness, a
| scientific measure of color, was the average of the two highest
| color channels.
| evoke4908 wrote:
| Part of it is technological advancement. It wasnt until the last
| 15 years or so that embedded processors became cheap and powerful
| enough to run a 3D printer at consumer prices.
|
| There's also the problem of 3D modeling and slicing. Again up
| until quite recently, 3D CAD was out of reach for most consumers.
| Either due to hardware capabilities or cost of the software.
| Slicing is its own entire branch of 3D processing and it took
| time to develop all the techniques we use today that make it fast
| and reliable. Slicing software could only exist after the
| printers were common.
|
| As well, I expect the availability and materials science of the
| plastics we use needed some further development.
|
| As I recall, 3D printers rose to prominence at about the same
| time and speed as we started getting genuinely powerful personal
| computers. You really needed a fast CPU, and printing became more
| accessible as the early I5/I7 generations became cheaply
| available.
|
| While you absolutely _could_ build an FDM printer with 80s
| technology, I don 't think it could _ever_ be practical or
| affordable. Even if someone invented all the computational
| techniques for slicing, the compute available back then was not
| even close. It would literally take an actual supercomputer to
| slice your model. It 'd take many, many hours on any consumer
| computer. This would hold true until the early 2000s. At a random
| guess, I'd say the tipping point would have been around the
| Pentium 4.
|
| So, same as most technologies we take for granted these days.
| Enabled almost exclusively by the speed and capacity of computer
| available to consumers.
| nkrisc wrote:
| When I started my Industrial Design degree in 2007 the workshop
| there already had several large, commercial 3D printers for
| student use.
|
| Mind you they were nothing like the tabletop consumer ones we
| have today. They were about the same of a large American
| refrigerator.
|
| Since it was not really any special or amazing for us to have
| several of them, I have to imagine that industrial 3D printing
| capabilities were well established by the point.
|
| Edit: as I recall they were mostly used to make parts which could
| be given a nice surface finish and then from which silicone molds
| could be made.
| jeffreyrogers wrote:
| There weren't good CAD tools to send the designs to the machine
| until recently. Early CAD tools mostly produced drawings and it
| was a separate step to manufacture from there.
|
| The way inkjet and laser printers work is also quite different
| from the way a 3d printer works. The similarity is mostly in the
| gantry, so there was nontrivial innovation required here.
|
| To some extent 3d printing is probably also a reaction to
| decreased access to domestic manufacturing. It doesn't make a lot
| of sense to produce most parts in plastic if you can get a cast
| or milled part quickly and cheaply.
| zoklet-enjoyer wrote:
| Patents
| cityofdelusion wrote:
| The pieces did NOT exist in the 1970s. Fast microcontrollers,
| stepper motors, precision miniaturized manufacturing, reliable
| and cheap miniaturized DC electronics, and far far more
| technology was non-existent at any kind of affordable price
| point. Look at kitchen appliances or metal/wood shop machinery
| from this era, still heavily analog, mostly made from sheet
| steel, mostly non-computerized. The 80s would bring better
| microprocessors but even the simple Nintendo was an inflation
| adjusted $450. For comparison the first RepRaps used a full power
| PC as their host machine and their materials cost roughly $1000
| in today USD and needed parts from a commercial stratasys
| machine.
|
| Some of the greatest and most under appreciated technological
| achievements in the last 40 years have been in materials science
| and miniaturization.
| kragen wrote:
| Microcontrollers and stepper motors were already controlling
| 2-D printers in the 01970s and early 01980s at higher speeds
| and similar powers to currently popular 3-D printers. The first
| RepRaps did not "use a full-power PC as their host machine";
| they were controlled by AVRs, just like Arduino (which didn't
| exist yet). Generating motor control waveforms on a full-power
| PC is a nightmare nowadays, and was already a nightmare in
| 02005. The LinuxCNC people would do it by running Linux under a
| real-time hypervisor. The first CNC machining was done in the
| 01950s with IBM 704s, comparable in power to an Intel 8008. The
| 6502 used by the Commodore 64 to drive its floppy drive would
| have worked fine, though it is much slower than the AVR and
| doesn't have built-in PWM generation hardware.
|
| I agree that the pieces did not exist in the 01970s, but the
| missing pieces weren't the computation.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Now I'm very tempted to build a 3D printer with an 8-bit home
| computer and vintage parts.
| dcminter wrote:
| That sounds like a delightful project! This contemporary
| book from Usborne demonstrates the point that basic stepper
| controls from an 8-bit computer were well within hobbyist
| reach:
|
| https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bxv0SsvibDMTZ2tQMmpyOWtsRF
| k...
|
| I do think that the limitations of memory (and disk) will
| require some ingenuity in 3D printing more than the most
| trivial procedurally defined objects!
| aforwardslash wrote:
| Just buy an old ender 3, they came with stock 8bit cpus :)
| wilg wrote:
| id watch a youtube of this
| TuringTourist wrote:
| Make your own 8-bit computer on breadboard a la Ben Eater
| for bonus points
| inglor_cz wrote:
| An offtopic question: how do you manage to write all the
| years consistently with 0 at the start (I know why, but _how_
| ), when everyone around you uses a different standard.
|
| If I decided, IDK, to write "cnow" instead of "know", or "J"
| instead of "I", I wouldn't be able to do so consistently. Not
| in a world that massively uses the other word.
|
| Or it would take me twice as much time to double-check
| everything that I have typed.
| kqr wrote:
| You get into the habit fairly quickly. I type organise
| rather than organize despite everyone around me not doing
| that, but it is legitimately difficult for me to do it the
| popular way.
| mongol wrote:
| I don't even know the why. Why?
| ForHackernews wrote:
| I assume they're a fan of https://longnow.org/
| smeej wrote:
| Wait, I can guess at why ( _somebody 's_ probably still
| going to be alive in 8k more years), but is that really the
| reason? In case somebody's gonna care enough to read this
| comment on HN that long from now? And not realize that of
| course we didn't bother adding leading zeros? Why not
| 0001970s in that case?
|
| (I'm sincerely hoping I'm missing something here and am
| going to look really silly asking this question.)
| kragen wrote:
| Go wild, man. I fully support your right to talk about
| the 0001970s.
| layer8 wrote:
| More importantly, why stop at five digits? That seems to be
| taking quite a limited outlook, and I can already see the
| Y100K bugs it will cause.
| kragen wrote:
| I usually double-check everything I write anyway. I just
| have to be careful not to "correct" literal quotes that
| include dates or accidentally talk about the Intel 08008
| and the 06502.
| tdeck wrote:
| [delayed]
| dcminter wrote:
| It depends how you define "affordable". Daedalus (the late
| David E.H. Jones) writing in New Scientist in 1974 sketched an
| idea for a laser-based system and almost immediately received a
| notice of complaint from an existing patent holder (plus ca
| change ...) although unlike patent trolls this patent holder
| had actual objects made by the process.
|
| The system here was based around a minicomputer (or at least a
| successor patent of 1978 so described it) so we're talking tens
| of thousands of dollars for the compute involved in that scheme
| - but that first 1971 patent must have expired in the 90s by
| which time inexpensive compute was trivially available to match
| early 70s minicomputer capabilities.
|
| Excerpts from the exceptionally excellent book "The Inventions
| of Daedalus - A Compendium of Plausible Schemes" which is sadly
| long out of print:
|
| https://paperstack.com/img/photos/page%2090.jpg
|
| https://paperstack.com/img/photos/page%2091.jpg
| hagbard_c wrote:
| Given that it is possible to make a 3D printer out of old dot
| matrix printer parts and given that matrix printers were
| introduced in the '70s (Centronics [1] claims its model 101.
| launched in 1970 was the first impact dot matrix printer) it
| would have been possible to create 3D printers in the '70s.
| While the hardware and controlling firmware would have been
| possible to build back then it would have been quite useless
| without the software needed to create 3D models to print on the
| device.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centronics
| kragen wrote:
| However, the Centronics interface was designed to allow them
| to build the printer _without_ including a microcontroller in
| it. It wasn 't until the mid to late 01970s that it became
| common to include microcontrollers in printers.
|
| As for the question of software for 3D models, see my
| overview of the history of that field in
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42080437.
| Findecanor wrote:
| In my experience, it really took off when PLA filament became
| commonplace. ABS and UV-cured epoxy emitted noxious fumes which
| required separate ventilation systems and weren't really suitable
| to be used at home.
|
| Early home 3D-printers also required more of the user. It took a
| lot of tweaking to make them produce decent prints.
| declan_roberts wrote:
| The answer to this is the same reason why flying cars aren't
| ubiquitous. Inventory and discovery is often the easy part.
| K0balt wrote:
| The magic ingredients were inexpensive microcontrollers,
| massively paralleled mosfet transistors (also a product of large
| scale integrated circuits, since they are actually millions of
| tiny mosfets working together), and the expiration of several key
| patents that made it possible to have a commercial explosion
| around the reprap scene.
|
| The patents expiring was a big deal, since the main patent was on
| the fused deposition process itself.
|
| The other factor was that normal desktop computers had become
| powerful enough to run sophisticated 3d modeling programs and
| make machine motion computations from 3d design files.
| kens wrote:
| You could buy a 3-D printer from Stratasys in 1990, but it cost
| $178,000! The printing unit was $130,000 and the Silicon Graphics
| workstation with slicing software to run it was $48,000 more. So
| the technology was there, but two orders of magnitude too
| expensive for the consumer market. Patents account for part of
| the cost, but the computer to control it was also way too
| expensive, as well as the custom (vs commoditized) mechanical
| components.
|
| Link:
| https://books.google.com/books?id=0bqdMvDMv74C&pg=PA32&dq=st...
| snakeyjake wrote:
| 3DBenchy.stl, the little boat that everyone prints as a benchmark
| during 3d printer reviews, is 10MB.
|
| A 10MB hard drive cost $3,000-4,000 in 1980.
|
| That's $12k-15k today.
|
| Just opening the .stl file and having it render (USABLY) on
| screen in high-resolution was probably not economical until the
| late 1990s-early 2000s.
|
| I am used to computing tasks being human-perception instant. It
| takes tens of seconds to run repairs on 3d models, which means it
| would have taken tens of hours to do that same thing, if there
| was even enough RAM, in the 90s.
| kragen wrote:
| It took that long because nobody was working on it, because it
| wasn't obvious that a low-cost 3-D printer was feasible.
|
| The 3-D printers you're seeing today are basically the series of
| RepRap designs, named after famous scientists who studied self-
| reproduction: Darwin, Mendel, and Huxley. The RepRap project,
| which started in 02005, is the reason this happened. For the
| first several years, it was about half a dozen people: Rhys
| Jones, Patrick Haufe, Ed Sells, Pejman Iravani, Vik Olliver,
| Chris Palmer (aka NopHead) and Adrian Bowyer. The last three of
| these did most of the early work. Once they got it basically
| working, after many years of work, a lot of other people got
| involved.
|
| There were a series of developments that had to happen together
| to get a working low-cost printer. They had to use PLA, because
| the plastics conventionally used (mostly ABS) had such a high
| thermal coefficient of expansion that they needed a heated build
| chamber. They had to design their own electronics, because
| Arduino didn't exist. They had to figure out how to build a
| hotend that wouldn't break itself after a few hours. They had to
| write a slicer. They had to write a G-code interpreter. They
| weren't industrial engineers, so they didn't know about Kapton.
| They wasted a lot of time trying to make it work without even a
| heated bed, to keep costs down. They improvised leadscrews out of
| threaded rod and garden hose. They made rotational couplings from
| aquarium tubing. Lots and lots of inventions were needed to get
| the cost down from US$60k to US$0.3k, and lots and lots of time
| was wasted on figuring out how to get the resulting janky
| machines to be reliable enough to be usable at all.
|
| Starting in the mid-90s, Don Lancaster was excited about 3-D
| printers, which he called "Santa Claus machines"
| https://www.tinaja.com/santa01.shtml, when he could see that they
| were possible. He wrote lots of technical articles about building
| what he called "flutterwumpers": "low cost machines that spit or
| chomp". https://www.tinaja.com/flut01.shtml. For example, in
| https://www.tinaja.com/glib/muse140.pdf in 01999, he describes
| Gordon Robineau's low-cost PCB drill driven by MS-DOS software
| over a serial port, with a schematic. (The fishing-line cable
| drive sounds imprecise, since this was years before Spectra
| braided fishing line.) But nobody listened. I don't know if he
| ever built so much as a sign cutting machine himself.
|
| Journalists like to talk about the patents, maybe because they're
| _legible_ to nontechnical people in a way that difficulties with
| your retraction settings aren 't, but when I was obsessively
| reading the RepRap blogs in the period 02005-02010, I can't
| recall that they ever mentioned the patents. They were just
| constantly hacking on their software, fixing their machines,
| having then break again after a few more hours of printing, and
| trying new stuff all the time. I don't think the patents even
| existed in their countries, and they were researchers, anyway,
| and generally patents don't prevent research. Maybe there's a
| vast dark-matter bulk of for-profit hackers who _would_ have
| gotten involved and started up profitable consumer 3-D printing
| companies before 02005 if it hadn 't been for the patents, but
| who never got interested because of the patents.
|
| But what I saw was that businesspeople started commercializing
| RepRaps once the open-source RepRap hackers got them to work
| somewhat reliably. Before that, they mostly weren't thinking
| about it. After that, most of them spent a lot of years shipping
| very slightly tweaked RepRap designs. Josef Prusa got involved in
| the RepRap project and redesigned Ed Sells's Mendel, and
| everybody copied him, and he famously started selling it himself,
| very successfully.
| https://reprap.org/wiki/The_incomplete_RepRap_Prusa_Mendel_b...
| And more recently Bambu Labs has apparently gotten the machines
| to be much easier to use.
| superconduct123 wrote:
| Its interesting to me that a lot of products the R&D comes from
| some big company
|
| But for at home 3D printers it seemed like it was the hobbyists
| who did most of the R&D, then the companies came in later
| kragen wrote:
| Generally, as in this case, a lot of the R&D comes from
| academia, and from the open source community. For-profit
| companies aren't very good at stuff that's far out, so they
| generally free-ride on open-source efforts like Linux,
| Python, the Web, and RepRap.
| Palomides wrote:
| not talking about patents at the time was intentional, nobody
| was ignorant of the situation
| kragen wrote:
| I think you should elaborate. Were you at the University of
| Bath at the time?
| kragen wrote:
| This Vik Olliver interview from 02018 tells a lot of the story
| of the early struggles:
| https://3dprintingindustry.com/news/interview-vik-olliver-fi...
| Animats wrote:
| Have you ever seen 1970s CNC gear? I came across a 1970s CNC
| lathe in a surplus store once. The thing was the size of a small
| car. The electronics box was the size of two racks. Inside were
| cards that handled one bit of one register. Input was from a
| paper tape. No CPU; all special purpose electronics.
|
| Directly controlling industrial machines from a microprocessor
| was very rare before the 1980s.
| mmmlinux wrote:
| 1. Patents. 2. CAD software was HUGELY expensive for a long time.
| 3. Parts were expensive. economy of scale on things like linear
| bearings made this crazy. I recently took apart my first gen
| printrbot (it cost me ~$600 and was one of the cheapest ones at
| the time) and it was all brand name VXB bearings. because that's
| basically all that existed.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-11-07 23:01 UTC)