Some of the greatest and most under appreciated technological achievements in the last 40 years have been in materials science and miniaturization.
Some of the greatest and most under appreciated technological achievements in the last 40 years have been in materials science and miniaturization.
I agree that the pieces did not exist in the 01970s, but the missing pieces weren't the computation.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bxv0SsvibDMTZ2tQMmpyOWtsRFk...
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!
Logically it's a simple project, though the devil is always in the details!
In terms of paging I was thinking of paging in later layers of data from disk, perhaps from a large file, perhaps from a series of files. But CP/M certainly did have support for paging RAM, in 3.x, if your hardware supported it.
(My own emulator, and the hardware I have running genuine CP/M are all running 2.x so no paged RAM there. Shame!)
If you were using a 6502 or Z80 in the late 70s you wouldn't have to write the floating-point routines; you could just call the ones in the BASIC interpreter you probably had in ROM. They'd still be slow.
As for paging RAM, do you mean bank switching? The 8085 and Z80 didn't have MMUs, so you couldn't do "paging" in the sense people normally understand it today.
The FP routines in the Arduino library take about 5 µs for a multiply on an AVR (e.g. Uno).
That's 1000 times faster.
Factors in that include:
- 16x faster clock speed
- typically 1 cycle per instruction vs 3
- 32 8-bit registers can easily hold all the data for operands and result and temporary values, vs Zero-page on the 6502
- single-cycle register to register 8 bit arithmetic vs three instructions needed per 8 bits on 6502
So that's a factor of around 1633 = 144x combined.
All the above apply equally to add/sub and multiply, but also:
- AVR has 2-cycle 8x8 -> 16 multiply instructions, for signed, unsigned, or mixed operands, and for fixed point 1.7 format as well. That's hundreds of clock cycles on 6502 or z80.
Also, the Microsoft BASIC interpreters used a 40 bit floating point format (32 bits of mantissa) instead of 32 bit. That's another factor of 16/9 for multiply.
The 8080/z80 and 8086 have more registers than the 6502, but not enough to implement soft FP keeping values in registers like AVR can.
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.
(I'm sincerely hoping I'm missing something here and am going to look really silly asking this question.)
Never underestimate what lengths someone will go through to appear to be unique.
It's possible that they were referring to the RepRap Host Software, which was RepRap's original slicer.
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:
I don't know why they have a record for earliest filing of a 3d-printing patent, but this guy (Wyn Kelly Swainson) was an American graduate student of English Literature who filed the patent in Denmark after teaching himself some basic lithography and chemistry from a library after wondering why no technique existed to make copies of sculptures. He ended up doing research for DARPA and founding an engineering company.
Also, for any random reader who isn't familiar with the cultural history of the west, Daedalus was the mythical designer of the labyrinth of Crete made to contain the minotaur, and also the father of Icarus, who crafted the artificial wings he and his son used to escape Crete after King Minos tried to keep them trapped there after he helped Ariadne help Theseus to kill the minotaur. He was also somewhat responsible for creating the minotaur in the first place, as he built the fake cow costume King Minos' wife used to mate with a bull and birth the minotaur. I guess it became a popular pen name in the early to mid 20th century, because it was also the name (Stephen Dedalus) of James Joyce's self-insert character in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses.
I'm not trying to downplay the reprap team and their work did lead to some of the innovations in home 3d printing, but I suspect a lot of the project is like this, losing time by ignoring things that already existed and trying to reinvent things using cheap household items by going down unnecessary rabbit holes. Thank god that people serious about actually making a shippable product actually got involved at some point or it'd all still be theoretical.
The point at which people serious about making a shippable product got involved was already after it was no longer theoretical.
Honestly that's the normal way to do product design, start with the expensive version that works and then slowly redevelop it to use cheaper parts, or make big enough purchases that the cost of the parts naturally comes down.
I get that you were involved in the project, and won't hear of any criticism, but people serious about shipping instead of tinkerers would have done things differently, and there is no reason to deny or get upset about that.
Evidently the normal way to do product design failed at producing consumer 3-D printers, as it invariably fails at big innovations, so in those cases people have to be tinkerers to be serious about shipping. Clayton Christensen has a book about this you might be interested in reading.
Humanity is not one subject. It is multitude of objects and subjects. The best analogy is loose coupled network (each active node have ~10..100 connections, and billions passive objects with 1..3 connections).
Because of this, we could talk only about some subjects, who directly interested in use opportunities and have all need for this activity.
Even if use relatively conservative approach and consider only formally declared countries as subjects, we will have about 200 subjects (plus some active and successful humans - for example, in business usually considered 80% value of company is good CEO). If we look slightly deeper, we will see some trans-national subjects, like G7, G20, ITU, and many regional subjects. And you should understand me right, before We (I and You) create some at least voice agreement, we cannot consider any subject "we".
Yes, exists "invisible power of market", and some other similar things, like libido, but they all are unconscious powers, and you cannot expect for them to do conscious decisions and conscious things.
Therefore the diversity of humanity, the ITU, libido, and so on, are irrelevant to my claim.
Ex ante, there was nothing distinguishing the proposition that a usable 3-D printer needed precision-ground leadscrews from the proposition that a usable 3-D printer needed a heated build plate. By trying hard to do without, we found that the first one was false but the second one probably true.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba%E2%80%93Kongsberg_scan...
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.
But the point I was trying to make was that dot-matrix printers predated the availability of microcontrollers, or even microprocessors, and you needed cheap microprocessors to make hobbyist 3-D printers.
Yes, one could make 3D printer without PWM, but it will be extremely slow, or even cannot do some things.
With modern microcontrollers this problem resolved by using interface just for high level commands (all low level control performed by microcontroller), but on early machines used computer as controller and they have to deal with this.
I have some experience with modern FDM and SLA, and I seen many cases, when FDM was severe limited with microcontroller PWM range.
May be. Problem is by definition of G-code, which is much more than 8bit (as I remember, there somewhere between 12bit and 18bit if consider just integer numbers, but for example diagonal lines and arcs are calculated with floats). Yes, I know, digital 8bit CPU could calculate 32bit floats or even 64bit floats, but it is slow and need additional RAM. All these calculations are much easier to do on 32bit computer.
> some external chips for PWM
Additional chips are bad for economy by definition - because size of PCB grow and because additional pins mean additional costs also. That is why first designs was dumb, without any controller at all and driven by computer - to avoid additional chips.
In modern designs microcontrollers used for convenience - so now printer could run without working computer (for example from file on flash).
You wouldn't necessarily have to interpret G-code on the 8-bit microcontroller itself, although it's about the same difficulty as interpreting BASIC on it. Keep in mind that keeping the motors of a 3-D printer busy only requires a few speed changes per second, maybe 10 at most. By contrast, the 8051 in an Epson MX-80 printed about 80 characters per second and had to actuate the 9 hammers in the print head with a new set of voltages 9 times per character, for a total of about 700 deadlines per second.
When Don Lancaster was trying to figure out how to build 3-D printers and other "flutterwumpers" in the 01990s, his idea was to use a bigger computer to rasterize curves into a set of one-byte step commands that would be interpreted by an 8-bit microcontroller, for example in https://www.tinaja.com/glib/muse140.pdf, as I mentioned in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42080682. His first explanation of this concept may have been his July 01993 "Hardware Hacker" column in Electronics Now (previously in Radio Electronics and Modern Electronics) https://www.tinaja.com/glib/hack66.pdf where he's exploring the possibilities opened up by Parallax's BASIC Stamp:
> One potential use for the BASIC Stamp is shown in figure four. I’ve been doing a lot of work with the stupendously great PostScript general purpose computer language. In fact, this is the only language I use for all of my electronic design, pc layouts, stock market analysis, schematics, Book-on-demand publishing, and just about everything else.
> All the camera ready figures you have seen here in Hardware Hacker for years have been done by using nothing but my word processor and PostScript. Device independently.
> The only little problem has been that PostScript I/O tends to end up a tad on the skimpy side. Usually you only have three choices: Dirtying up otherwise clean sheets of paper or plastic; writing files to the hard disk; or returning your data back to a host for recording or other reuse.
> The BASIC Stamp can instantly let you extend the genuine Adobe Level II PostScript to any personal project or machine of your choosing!
> Assume you’ve got a homebrew machine that has an x-axis and y-axis stepper, an up/down mechanism, and a "both steppers home" sensor. This can be a vinyl signcutter, engraving, or embroidery setup. Or an automated printed circuit drill, a wooden sign router, or a Santa Claus machine.
["Santa Claus machine" was Theodore Taylor's 01978 term for a 3-D printer; it's what Lancaster consistently called them in his columns over the years.]
> You could use two of your BASIC Stamp lines for RS423 serial comm with your PostScript printer. Use two lines for both x-axis stepper phases. And two lines for those y-axis stepper phases. One line for pen or drill or whatever up/down. And a final line that zeros only when both steppers are in their home position.
> The hidden beauty here is that all of those fancier PostScript fonts and the level 2 tools immediately become available for use on your own custom homebrew rig. At unbelievably low cost. With zero royalties!
Normally when people do diagonal lines and arcs on computers without FPUs, they don't use floats; they often don't even use integer multiplies per step, but rather strength-reduced algorithms like Bresenham's algorithm and the DDA algorithm Bowyer talks a bit about in https://3dprintingindustry.com/news/interview-dr-adrian-bowy....
I agree with you that additional chips are expensive, but in the overall scheme of things, a few 555s to drive your motors aren't going to make the difference between feasibility and infeasibility.
So I think it's clear that we could have done hobby 3-D printers 40 years ago. What similar opportunities are we missing today?
Something You have not done yourself or something for what You have not paid to someone else to do.
Life is complicated, it is very typical when appear opportunity but nobody use it. Because to use opportunity need 3 things:
1. The will. 2. Enough qualification (or enough IQ and time to learn). 3. Free (!!!) resources or cheap borrowed funds.
If only one thing from list is missing, it become extremely hard to use opportunity. For example, I live in Ukraine, and even without war, regulations in country are so prohibitive, that many services are not enter country or enter with severe limitations, like Paypal only enter with private accounts, but business accounts are not available in Ukraine.
Yes, You understand right, idea cost nothing, but ability to implement ideas worth billions if find fertile environment.
And yes, I spent lot of time to find ideas and I could share with You high level information on how to find (or generate) ideas. Just let me know if this theme is interest for You.
But well, as you ask, for about prohibitive regulations, we in Ukraine made (and making) two things.
First, we are practically motherland of anarchy, and was few multiple years periods, when country live without government and without regulations. You could read about deregulation in books of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daron_Acemoglu
and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_von_Mises https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Rothbard
also I myself like Ostrom, Elinor (1990). Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action.
Second, when government become powerful, we read prohibitive as it is - we just avoid made business in prohibitive niches. Because of this appear paradox, government and armed forces said that country need rockets, they even allocated large budgets to buy rockets from private companies, but nobody make rockets as they are prohibited.
In some cases, possible to make virtual business or semi-abroad - it is possible to create business in US or in EU (or other countries with adequate regulations) and hire people remote.
As conclusion, I mean, the best way to deal with prohibitive regulations is just flee abroad, to country with more adequate regulations, and you could from abroad support deregulation struggle if you wish. But if it is hard to flee, you could try to open business abroad.
For other opportunities I writing email.
Well, must admit, this is not only way, but most effective.
Also possible to use opportunity in educational environment or at community or in government organization. But from organizational science, all of these are just special type of business - educational business, or business owned by community , or business owned by government.
And yes, many people are practically running business, but don't think it is business. And this is very serious problem for economy, because they use this opinion "not a business" as consideration to avoid vital business transactions, and thus killing opportunities.
Yes, I agree, providing more info you become more vulnerable.
No, at concurrent market appear more priority matters.
You sure hear about Queueing theory, and may be you know, when execution unit wait for something, this time subtracted from max performance, and in worst case EU could wait 100% of time, so performance will be zero, no matter how fast EU could run ideal case.
How this apply to economy - business do many things without guarantees, only based on trust ("business is all about trust" - you could make big table with this phrase and hang it on the wall as icon).
In low tech business, typical to invest large resources to stored things, so people could just pay money and got product immediately, and do not wait until it will arrive from fields.
In high tech business appear additional dimensions, investments made into r&d and into prototypes of products, before mass production.
Services are just genuine trust, as in many cases you cannot know if service suitable for you before use it, so you should buy small amount of service or service business should spent some amount of it's resources to make gifts to try.
Any way, in many cases, need significant amount of borrowed money to start business or to scale business, and the more trust have subject, the cheaper will be borrow for him.
Statism is usually considered State as intermediary, who in theory should guarantee deals and even borrow cheap money, but this scheme is very limited and vulnerable for not good enough persons, because State itself must got resources somewhere to store them and to have something to share. If state have no spare resources it cannot guarantee anything. Not good persons use lot of tricks to force people to give their resources to State, and in extreme case just use violence to pick up resources from their owners (sure, this is bad for trust and killing free market).
Ideal business as I said before, called for trust. For example exists Islamic banking, which is extremely similar to idea of Venture Fund, and invented because for Muslims prohibited to give money for percents. So they create business with acceptor of money and got share in this business, and involve in this business to control that money will be spent wise.
And the last I should say - some people think, business could grow on internal money, just constantly withdraw some small amount from money circulation and reinvest these money into business grow.
Well, this scheme is working, but exists one problem - many business opportunities are limited in time, exists sort of time window (you could read more on this in ballistics or in space science, they use term as usually exists positions of planets, most energy effective). You could use such opportunity only if you will do things fast enough, so create your product or service before time window closed.
And grow on internal resources is very slow, usually it is just few percents faster then inflation, but to finish inside good time window in many cases need large investments, tens percents of turnaround or even more than turnaround, so without cheap borrowed money business will lost opportunity.
But to borrow money need to show clear enough organization; you may hear about Due Diligence, but I think you are not know, that Due Diligence is usually much more strict and deeper than tax reporting. So conclusion - to have more success in using business opportunities, you must share much more information than to just deal with state regulations.
Things looking even worse if we look on insurance and on finance transactions - typically insurance and finance transactions fees are depend on trust, so very high probability, semi-hidden business will constantly lose few percents of turnaround, and will be even more limited in using opportunities.
More detailed on this you could read in books from Acemoglu, Mises, Elinor Ostrom.
It depends on current market of considered niche. For some cases, market price is so low, every additional hole or trace on PCB could kill economy; for others, could include something like SGI or Cray as controller (mean, something severe overpriced) and it will be still profitable.
Using no other parts, at least none others that would not also have been available in the 1970s?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yz_DKXIuL8U
However getting the right thermoplastic filament would be a major challenge, and slicing would require a high end mainframe with graphical terminals. Everything would be prohibitively slow. Also regular 2D printers were much more expensive back then.
Yup I miss that too. Maybe all the appliances came only in avocado green or harvest gold, but they held together and did not spy.