Another reply to Josef Průša

I own 6 printers, 0 Prusas, because I like modding them and don’t see any reason to pay Prusa to give me a better starting point that I’ll just then undo.

What I was trying to articulate is that a bed slinger motion system requires a much larger enclosure than a core xy motion system or other fixed/z axis bed designs. So that if you have any real estate constraints and want an enclosure, bed slinger becomes non viable. :)

I agree that the fumes are bad, I use a spare bathroom with always on ventilation for mine.

The unfortunate thing is that the volatilized chemicals/ and particles in pla and petg are also not super great for people, they’re merely less terrible smelling

Input shaper calibration is affected by the surface that the printer is standing on. If your workbench happens to be more or less rigid than the surface the printer was calibrated on at the factory, the calibration won't be accurate. The input shaper could fail to correct for some resonances, or correct for resonances that don't exist. This will cause visible artefacts in the print.

Other printers at a similar price point offer one-touch calibration of input shaping, or automatically calibrate before each print as part of the homing and warmup routine. On the Mk4, you need to buy an accelerometer module, figure out some way of attaching it to the printhead and the bed, then run the calibration routine twice.

And it's especially not theft when the products are made and sold in a western country that has a much more sane patent system than the US: if your product isn't registered in Germany, any German person can legally create their own copy for the German market, as rightly they should. And then the US can put an import ban in place for those products because if they were sold in the US they would be infringing on the patent holder's right to market. Again, as rightly they should.

And lo and behold, thus it came to pass, and no markets were actually impacted.

(and as fun, related trivia: look up the Samwer brothers. Because there is no such thing as international patent law, there is only "you get to register in every jurisdiction you want your brand protected in" and if you don't, then anyone is free to clone your product, because you gave them permission to do so. Whether you like that or not.)

With this model, people all over the world can benefit from our work. If we tried to go the route with patents and traditional funding, we’d end up designing a farming robot which only works well for large farms in California and would be too expensive for most of the people we want to serve.

Patent protection in many ways slows down innovation. 3D printer development was pretty static for the first 15 years and only advanced significantly after the patents expired. Then people all over the world contributed ideas on how to make better 3D printers for cheaper, and in ten years the price went from $25,000 to $250. Under patent the price only ever dropped from $50,000 to $25,000.

So you can see how open innovation produces a lot of value. The “problem” with this is that the value is hard to capture. This is what Prusa is experiencing today. Your solution is to lock down information harder and use the threat of legal action to restrict the spread of ideas. Unfortunately this creates a system where people in wealthy countries are constantly doing engineering for things which could benefit people in poorer countries, if only they were cheaper. Clones allow for cheaper versions to be made locally in the poorer countries where their labor costs are lower. But with widespread patent harmonization most countries can’t legally clone important goods, so they go without.

What we can do in the wealthy countries, instead of locking down ideas, is to explore new way of organizing our companies and projects. Countless people make a living asking for donations on YouTube. We see more engineering projects supported by this model, including Godot ($15k per month in donations) and Blender ($185k per month in donations).

This kind of open innovation can allow engineers to pay their living while producing products that are open for all. Imagine how much benefit the rest of the world would see if all of our MRI machines, manufacturing equipment, and other vital technology was open source?

For me it is imperative to find a way to make it work. Abandoning this would to me mean that I have failed those people that need my skills most. Those whose lives would be forever changed with increased access to advanced technology. I can not lock down my work and keep it out of their hands. They deserve better.

[1] https://community.twistedfields.com/t/january-2023-update-ne...