Biomanufactured materials are coming
tsungxu.com
tsungxu.com
3D Printers and CNCs are still marketed towards hobbyists and/or industry professionals similar to how computers were marketed in the early 80's. I believe in the next few years we will see the Personal Computer version of home manufacturing and a revolution will ensue.
I can imagine all sorts of things I’d like to design and make but unless I make it a full time job the amortized cost of the equipment will never make it worth while. I don’t think 3D printers will come down in price enough to change that.
PCBWay also[1] has 3D printing (including metals[2]), CNC machining, sheet metal fabrication and injection molding services[1].
In my field (medical physics), the technology is constantly improving, but the maintenance requirements never go away. High precision requires high effort; high complexity, generally, requires high precision. That goes triple if you want to eat off it.
Plus, you probably want a variety of materials — are we going to eat off of a plastic spoon, or melt metal in our houses? Space Kinko's can stock everything from aluminum bronze to Zylon composites.
Growing up we had an Adam computer in the 80's but we got rid of it and didn't have anything until years later when we purchased an Apple LC II. That's what we need–an Apple computer for 3D printing/CNC/Laser. The Shaper Origin is a great step forward, but it still requires specific skills, but I do think we will get there.
The thing is, unless you're enjoying it as a hobby, it's better to just buy it pre-made. You don't need to buy materials to have on hand, or guide the process of making it. And, you don't have to wait for it to be finished.
Same goes for any number of other hobbies- silk screen printing t shirts, candle and soap making, etc.
Would I want enough printable materials on hand to print a couch at any given time, or would I want to order them, then manually print a couch? Or just order one from a local print shop and have it delivered already made?
99% of people don't want to lose valuable storage space in their home to raw materials if they don't have to.
Music, movies and software had the huge advantage that basically all the effort is in the up-front design and then it can be digitally copied at basically zero cost. A car design or washing machine design on the other hand is only a small part of the total effort required to fabricate it. They require at least a dozen different raw material types, careful assembly, electrical certification, programming the microprocessors, greasing the bearings, etc. Most people will have neither the inclination or the skills to do the required post-processing themselves. Anyone living in an apartment will probably also simply lack the space for big machinery, especially if it sits idle most of the time.
Even apart from whether it could be made at all in a consumer-grade printer, some things are just unbeatably cheap with modern mass manufacturing methods. Your example of a cutlery set is one: a modern hydraulic press will stamp hundreds of spoons per minute out of steel plate. That process probably won't improve a lot by transporting the raw steel to your house first and manufacturing it yourself.
I think there are massive opportunities for additive manufacturing in industry, where companies would be willing to spend several million on a production grade device and can hire dedicated operators to get the most value out of it. You can already see that happening in the aerospace industry, and it will probably trickle down to almost anything that requires complex shapes in their assembly process. I don't think it will ever move beyond hobbyist in the home scene, the machinery is too expensive, too big and too complex. That said, the type of person who in the 80s would have gotten a lathe for their home workshop could now get a 3d printer instead (or both!).
Energy generation is decentralizing again. We can make more and more manufacturing feedstocks (metals, H2, CO2, biomolecules) using more modular processes that can also be decentralized.
Are any of these things better in 2022 than they were in 1922 or in 1722?
Let’s pick a standard design for forks and only update it when we get new classes of materials or new manufacturing processes that require or enable a design tweak.
We complain about the amount of human ingenuity that gets sunk into ad click rates or tricking people with dark patterns.
What about the amount of human ingenuity that goes into redesigning a four-legged wooden kitchen chair that looks like a four-legged wooden kitchen chair, or a stainless steel fork that looks like a stainless steel fork.
https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Da...
There is an immense variety in the 10-20$ range, with very little brand recognition or true transparency on quality or attributes. It is likely that new iterations repeat previous mistakes or regress.
What we need is to find a robust, simple, sustainable, long-lasting, repairable optimum that is truly environmental friendly and is produced ethically, and then, as you suggest, focus human ingenuity on something else. This will not happen in the current economic system, but will require some kind of intervention or crisis.
My wife just found an amazing set in Thailand that not only look unique and cool, but in fact have important new features. The dinner knives are sharp enough to cut steak. The handles weigh enough that you can satisfied suspend the ends off the table, which means they handle brilliantly.
The list goes on...
You may not care how you kitchen chair looks, but I assure you the vast majority people do care, at least as much as they care how their T-shirt or pants look.
So what are you left with that could possibly justify the cost of a 3D printer capable of printing a bed for you? Doodads and cheap plastic crap is better no consumed at all, rather than printing yourself some thingamajig, and is anyway already so cheap that getting it for free would hardly be an improvement.
I do see 3D printing as possibly a major advance for certain hobbies, where being able to create your own small parts for various uses can quickly justify even thousands of dollars of investment. But for someone who doesn't have any construction-like hobbies, I think there is really no reason for this optimism.
Farms, ranches, and other remote businesses definitely have an opportunity for that though, because not only do they need a lot of every day things, they are also far away and sometimes things aren't in stock.
But the commenter I replied to was specifically talking about 3D printing in the home, so consumer goods, not industrial/business goods.
If I'm missing somethign some examples of consumer goods you really think could be replaced by an advanced 3D printer that fits in an apartment or small-ish house (say, at maximum the size of a larger washing machine) would help a lot.
You can walk through any Target or Walmart and see hundreds of items the could be made at home in the future.
https://www.3dprintingmedia.network/from-steel-to-metallic-g...
Want a new bed? Just buy these seeds, plant them in a (at minimum) bed-sized pot, and don't forget to water, fertilize, keep in the right temperature range, and keep pests away for the next 1-2 years. Once it's fully grown, you'll just have to dig it out and allow a few more weeks until it stops growing new roots, a few more months until it dries into its final shape. Then, get ready to do some light sculpting to get rid of the root system, make good equal-sized flat feet, get rid of any branches that stick out. Now, buy some lacquer or paint to cover it thoroughly so it doesn't start rotting.
Hopefully it will not develop any disease or cancer in this time that could ruin its shape or kill it before it reaches the desired size.
I print stuff for around the home all the time. It's great to be able to fix toys, closet doors, light fixtures, etc. My most recent print was a bunch of small stilts for a wooden playhouse we're building for our daughter. The playhouse will be on concrete in an uneven low spot, so I designed a piece that will take a 1/4" nut and bolt to allow the structure to be leveled, and keep the wood out of pooled water.
Over the years I've been working on a homemade force feedback steering wheel (for driving games). The gearbox is all 3D printed other than bearings, as well as a faux-wood dashboard. It's as performant as any commercially available force feedback wheel.
A 3D printer isn't going to evolve into some magical star trek replicator, though. It's a device for precisely making plastic objects within a bunch of constraints, or for precisely making resin into objects within other constraints.
I certainly materials change, but will I be alive to see it? (til then I'm living like an hippy/hobbit, using plants the old fashion ways).
I might be pessimistic today. But this seems like a new eye opener
All these skills will become useful once it is time to build a motor test stand for a robotics startup's assembly production line. After every assembly step they need to run a hardware test cycle that checks all the sensors. Pure software engineers don't always know how to handle hardware, but with a little practice you can build up those skills.
Once you've taken on one role like this professionally, you can pivot even further to hardware as desired. Good luck!
I personally am more concerned with doing work I care about, so I've never been too focused on getting paid the maximum, so I don't have the most expertise here. But I worked at Google X Robotics as a hardware test engineer. I was a contractor so I don't really know what the pay packages were like, but I would say that even the people who were primarily software engineers on that team pretty much all had hardware skills too. When you're working in robotics, you tend to at least play with all the stuff I mentioned above, and I would expect this experience to factor in to hiring decisions. And the people working at Google writing software for robotics seemed like they were all highly paid engineers, though I never asked anyone specifics.
But if someone feels like software is a dead end job for them, moving in to robotics is a great way to make things more interesting. At one of my jobs I wrote C++ to help a researcher implement some of his ideas around locating specific individuals in a room, and I basically got to play hide and go seek with a Toyota HSR robot all day long. Working with robots is way more fun and interesting than writing web forms all day.
Can you elaborate on why you think 'incumbent tech' has anything to do with Amyris stock price?
Here's what I see just briefly looking at some numbers and slide decks:
Amyris has OK revenue growth and gross margin, but wow do they burn a lot of cash. They took on massive convertible debt back in Nov 2021, are continuing to do M&A, and in most recent earnings report are blaming horrible EBIDTA performance on 'higher freight and logistics and increased SG&A, mostly marketing investments'...
1. Revenue growth
2. Product innovation
3. Management
You can make a kind of plastic out of milk: https://plastics.syr.edu/page.php?id=/materials/casein It's biodegradable.
But this podcast with 6 episodes is great: https://open.spotify.com/show/5ldzwDpvUsaaQVVjMLRlLA?si=33fb...
Also SynBioBeta has some great content as well: https://synbiobeta.com/read/
There's a link for "often" that's broken. It's set to
https://www.tsungxu.com/performance-biomaterials/biomanufactured%20chemicals/
the article does provide a nice survey of clean tech, but the conclusions should be disregarded.
I don't see a future where next-gen SMR nor fusion gets to cost parity with renewables quickly or easily. They will have to scale up via beachhead markets adjacent to existing electricity demand sources.
Long term, I do think economically viable fusion will supplant renewables, but that's decades away.
in the US, had we continued to build nuclear at the rate we were between the 70s and 90s, we'd be at over 50% nuclear for electricity generation, which would have knocked coal completely out of the equation, leaving only nuclear (baseload), gas (variable demand), and renewables (opportunistic generation). over 70 years, fission-based nuclear has caused 99+% fewer human deaths than fossil fuels have.
and yes, there's no need to pin any hopes on fusion right now, which is decades away at best.
Creators of a Texas plant thought it would never freeze (or that if it did it wouldn't matter with the government's gift of a an extremely small liability cap on nuclear), so they didn't put enough safety stuff for that scenario and had to shut down a reactor unplanned.
Only the relative dominance has changed, with 80% being commonly accepted for a few years and 100% now broadly accepted as reasonable.
Their consensus is that specifically batteries are completely nonviable for long-term balancing of intermittent energy sources. Physics simply do not add up.
So they'll still use mostly wind/solar/batteries. This is what grids are rolling out right now around the world.
By comparison, the world produces 300-400 GWh of batteries each year. Most of which is going to electronics and electric vehicles. Battery production has been increasing, but it's unclear if the supply of input materials can keep up. The price of lithium jumped 400% last year: https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium
In short, the chart on the right is not something to be taken for granted: https://www.tsungxu.com/content/images/size/w1600/2022/01/so...
Moore's law is the exception, not the norm, because making chips faster works by making transistors smaller. This doesn't apply to most products, as even zero manufacturing costs cannot bring cost below input materials. Imagine the cost of a car went from $500,000 in 1910, $50,000 in 1920, and $5,000 in 1930. Is is safe to assume that a car would cost $5 in 1960 and $0.50 in 1970?
We are electrifying heating and transport. As a result about 80% of end-use energy will end up being electricity.
The motto "electrify everything" is used. It is not a big surprise that this, and developing nations growth, requires electricity.
That's why everyone is really pleased that renewables and batteries are the cheapest way to deploy electricity generation in history.
> the state's higher storage target and DPS and grid operator support will slash costs to $150-$200 kWh by the end of the decade, based on BloombergNEF estimates.
They have dropped an order of magnitude since 2008, so I'd maybe expect a few more years before it does it again but that does appear to be the current prediction.
If their predictions are that costs are going to decrease, but when push comes to shove costs increase above expectations then what does that say about the value of these predictions?
In Western Australia coal will be gone by the end of the decade. In South Australia it’s gone already and generation from gas is on a strong downward trend too.
Australia’s conservative electricity system planning is expecting the country to hit 80% renewables. That’s going to end up being the lower bound.
This is an extreme exception to the norm. Usually minimum demand is around 70-80% of the peak demand: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42915