Hacker News Reader

Comment by silversmith | Hacker News Reader

Sure, if you are very serious about it. But anecdotally, a lot of folks buy 3d printers only for them to gather dust. Unless you are really up there on income, get something cheaper to start. Ender 3, while being objectively worse, can be had for peanuts compared to Bambu Labs printers. I have one sitting in the room next door, bought on a whim after noticing a very good deal. While I would love a better one, it has taught me what at-home 3d printing can be used for, and what are the main features to look for in the next upgrade. And the limits of applicability I've run into have thus far been mainly down to materials and my design capabilities, and better hardware won't solve those.

View on HN

3D printers have exited the hype cycle and now are in two categories:

People who bought them as a cool consumer gadget similar to VR. These printers are gathering dust because there ultimately isn’t that much interesting plastic junk to print.

Silently churning out hundreds of rapid prototypes a month for engineers & makers. In my circle it’s just become an assumption that you have 2-3 printers running when prototyping a project. 3D printers have just become a background tool rather than something that you actively tinker with + improve. I got mine down to decent print quality and haven’t upgraded it in years, but print daily!

I make monitoring/automation software for 3D printers, and I'm thinking about adding a "make something every day" achievement to help with this. I'm collecting handy/functional prints (like the OP) to make it easy to achieve.

It takes a lot of activation AND creative energy to figure out something useful/functional to print, then execute on your vision.

Given the lifespan of plastic products I don’t think it’s so bad that people let their printers sit unused for extended periods of time. If you don’t have a useful/desired object to print I would rather they not make a plastic object that will last hundreds of years and cannot be currently recycled except by doing it yourself. I would be concerned that achievement hunters would in fact be motivated by your idea and will be printing benchies or other useless objects they don’t actually want to keep the streak up. Maybe instead you could make a handy way for the users to list their print wishlist so they could keep it running with stuff they need/want instead of the ritual.

I print PLA and I don't think those are very durable. Sure, ABS is. That's why I think for the kind of widgets were printing, i think it's best to use flimsy PLA.

Thanks for the comment. I hadn't considered that people might print junk just to get an achievement, but that does seem like an obvious misaligned incentive now.

Maybe it'd be better to collect models that solve a specific problem, like "kitchen drawer organizer set" or "cable management kit." I want the game-ification to help provide activation energy needed to do something creative and get into the habit of using the 3D printer to solve household problems. This has certainly helped my house buy less plastic crap shipped from overseas. For example, I need a new dog poop bag dispenser for my curb - instead of buying one, I'm going to 3D print one. =)

If I do launch something like this, I'll make sure the naming is "Make Something Useful" or "Make Something Functional."

PLA is biodegradable

Ish. Kinda. It's biodegradable under the exact right conditions, but not in your compost. I'm not sure what happens to it as microplastics.

Please consider "make something every week" instead. With how long it takes to think up and design truly useful prints, especially if you have a day job that does not involve CAD... "something every day" will mean "something off of the popular page on thingiverse every day, then into the bin next day" for many would-be achievement hunters.

That's a much better idea, thank you!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com