Will 3D Printing Reboot Manufacturing? | Hacker News Reader

Will 3D Printing Reboot Manufacturing?

mashable.com

26 pointsdfox23 comments

It's good to see 3D printing in the news all the time now, but in reality the bigger story is that all manufacturing methods are becoming more and more accessible. With open hardware, digital manufacturing, and the burgeoning maker scene - hardware is becoming the new software.

Wired's article delved a little deeper into the "New Industrial Revolution": http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/01/ff_newrevolution/all/1

The biggest obstacle between seeing more hardware being built isn't the up-front price structure of manufacturing techniques, it's the twofold information gap between would-be entrepreneurs and manufacturing processes.

One gap is simply the body of knowledge necessary to spec and drive that process. The second gap is actually knowing who does what, and who has a good history of meeting their promises. Right now to bridge both gaps you need to go through intermediaries, but it's easy to immagine a world where technology solves both information problems. And to me that's a lot more exciting than 3d printing.

Are you saying that the knowledge needed for manufacturing a product is more than a small software startup could muster?

To me, it seems the gaps are the same as software products:

Software: Business Guy w/ idea -> Developer + Servers -> Product

Hardware: Business Guy w/ idea -> MechE/EE + Manufacturers -> Product

Are you saying the MechE/EE are harder to find/coordinate and/or typical software startup guys don't have the skills to develop hardware?

I agree with you - when we can solve this gap - then we've got something cooler than any one manufacturing process.

My experience working in a ME/EE/FW/SW team is that the turnaround times in ME and EE are much higher and more expensive. Making masks for chips and molds for parts is extremely expensive and time consuming. Our EEs and MEs use high-end modeling tools and draw on a lot of outside vendor experience to get their work done. Turns can take weeks or months and that's after your prototyping phase and/or process development is done.

Whether it's harder to find and coordinate ME/HW resources is hard to judge. It doesn't appear like that to me and the disciplines have been around longer so there's more maturity in the industry. Typically you won't find the MEs bickering about the latest framework or tool to use. There's more of a get-er-done attitude, especially since the best MEs tend to be more practical minded people in the first place, more likely to go out and pour some concrete on the weekend instead of spending it at their computer screen.

My team mates frequently joke that my job as FW engineer is easier and I tend to agree - only half jokingly. On the other hand, more than once we've sent out firmware fixes to the field that prevented a gear box from stripping or some part from overheating so everything has its place and value.

Right. The bigger trend is downward mobility in automation, to the point where advanced automation is much more commonly available.

Definitely for small scale specialty manufacturing, like 3D printing and other rapid proto methods. However, we've seen a lot of automated processes being shifted back to manual lines since manual labor is so incredibly cheap and becoming better and better in quality. This typically happens after some years of automated production in higher-wage countries like the US or Singapore. Once the process/product is mature and the equipment amortized its often cheaper to get manual labor to take on big parts of the process.

Maybe in a few years we can even have printers printing printers.

http://reprap.org/wiki/Main_Page

I know that this is the stated goal of the reprap, but it's practically impossible [1].

Now, if the goal was to build a factory that could build more factories, then sure.

How do you build motors for the rep rap? How do you build the circuit board for the rep rap? How do you build a heating element for the rep rap? How do you build an extruder head than can withstand the heat required to liquify the material that it's made of?

Don't get me wrong, I think that the rep rap is awesome (I carry a little gear that I printed on one at my local hackerspace around on my keychain so that I can tell people about how yes, we're living in star trek and yes, replicators are almost a reality), but it's nowhere even remotely close to being able to print itself, and likely never will be.

I wish that makerbot got more attention. It's a much better, much more reliable printer.

http://www.makerbot.com/

[1] - I want to clarify: I'm not saying that people shouldn't try things that are impossible, in fact my personal philosophy is basically the exact opposite of that (if something sounds impossible, do it). I just think it's important that budding hackers realize that the rep rap has an interesting goal but that the product itself is currently pretty sub-par when compared to other things that are available. If you've already got a makerbot or something like it, and you want to build a rep rap for fun, then I applaud you, but I definitely wouldn't look at it as an alternative to a "commercial" (if you consider makerbot commercial) alternative.

> Now, if the goal was to build a factory that could build more factories, then sure.

This sounds vaguely like a Java library.

Not a single mention of Reprap. I find this extremely disappointing.

Reprap seems like a neat idea, but it's not yet capable of making stuff that I'd want. It's low-res, and doesn't print metal. If and when it does these things, I think it'll be worth talking about. So maybe it's like the Apple I was back in 1976. The Shapeways printer the article talks about does cost something on the order of a 1970s minicomputer...

The reason I'm skeptical about Reprap is that it's not a business, but they're trying to make hardware. So I'm not sure that they'll ever achieve their goals before a startup does it first and better. Apple had a lot of money, and they used plenty of it to create the Mac, which was the first desktop computer that had the interface and capabilities that most people really wanted (easy desktop publishing, for example.)

The big deal about RepRap isn't so much what it can do but the fact that it is:

1) Low cost

2) Open source

3) Self-replicating

These attributes make it a lot more economically accessible to people who wouldn't otherwise be in a position to learn about and use this technology.

It could allow a bootstrapping hardware startup to produce their first product prototype. The economic value that could result is immense.

Just because RepRap doesn't meet your needs doesn't mean it's not worth talking about.

It's only Self-replicating in the least useful way possible. The components it can create that are used to make more copy's of it's self could be vary cheap to buy in other ways. AKA if you used injection molding and sold it as a kit the overall costs would decrease (assuming a reasonable market existed for them).

I am not saying it needs to be able to use dirt, sunlight, and water to make another copy. Just that the components need to be a little simpler before the cost really drops.

I could be wrong but I do believe that RepRap was the first working self-replicating device after decades of theorizing on the topic.

Sure it can be improved on massively, but you must acknowledge that it is at least a step in the right direction.

It's a step, alright, but how do you know that it's a step in the right direction? RepRap has not set very much of world on fire yet. When I can do more than print out more than a low-res plastic coathook, I'll get excited. How many years will it be before I can replace my car's crappy plastic door panel with a high-quality printed one? Will it ever happen? It doesn't seem like this will happen soon enough for me to hold out on buying a new car.

No, it's just a marketing gimmick. Most automated fabrication device can make parts for a copy of that same device, if given the spec's. The reality is the fact it's open source is what allows people to make copy's of them, not any capability of the device it's self.

I take your point about RepRap not being a business. Do you still think it's not worth talking about regardless of being a business or not?

Last time I looked projects like Firefox and Wikipedia weren't businesses and they are still doing a sterling job competing with large enterprises like Microsoft and Britannica.

I only meant that it's not worth talking about in an economic context. At the rate it's progressing, it's not going to impact global economic stuff anytime soon (say the next five years).

I'm way more excited about lower-cost selective laser sintering (SLS) machines. This process yields high-quality (and high resolution) metal parts that most people would want to use in their daily lives. It's also something that we're not going to see out of the RepRap project in its current incarnation. SLS is startup territory. Current machines run something like $100,000, and anyone that figures out how to make this much cheaper without losing quality will do very well!

IMHO, you're missing the point. The RepRap project might not be economically interesting, but it might put technologies and capabilities into the hands of companies and entrepreneurs who will do economically (and socially, culturally, etc.) interesting things. As a comparison, Linux distributions, Linux kernel development, etc. aren't economically interesting or significant, but nobody in their right mind would claim that Linux hasn't had a huge effect on startups and on the entire tech industry.

Well, FreeBSD would have fit into the spot Linux took up if the legal matters (USL vs BSDi) involved were just a little different.

So I agree with the larger point, which is that something like RepRap (self-replicating, etc.) is interesting. But I'm not convinced that RepRap is that project.

That's a good point. There certainly were/are other projects that could have fit into the same nitch Linux ended up filling.

But what are the alternatives to RepRap? Makerbot maybe? Any others?

That's my take. RepRap is enabling interesting activity. It will be great when something better comes along, but there's many people who can get use out of RepRap in the meantime.

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