3D printing is nothing special
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A 3D printer is a device that makes plastic doo hickeys. It's cool (I have one, I printed some cases today and just got done plastidipping them), but almost no one that I know would benefit from having one. Most people aren't designers, they aren't driven to design something they have in their head. There's only so many 'cool' things that you can make from browsing Thingiverse. Once you print those cool things, what are you going to do next? Wait until something new and cool comes that you think you need (once a week? once a month?) then print it?
Most people will not use a 3D printer every day, unlike they will with computers. 3D printers have a severe print time limitation - it takes me a lot of time to find/design something, slice it just right, print it, and have it in my hands. 3D printing has an incredibly high ping. My browser gets me any information about anything I want to know about in seconds.
Think about it this way; 3d printers will eventually expand. You'll be able to print more and more things. Soon, they'll be useful things. Then, you'll be using a printer to make essentials.
One day, they'll be indispensable, just like computers today.
They won't be the same as what you see now. They'll work with metals, they will mold and polish. They may even do some crazy assembly in addition.
Whatever they will be, we probably can't envision yet.
This kind of skepticism has been raised about everything, years, decades or centuries before it happens.
The very thing that makes 3D printing an interesting field is that's it's in its infancy and the long-term possibilities are unknown/unknowable.
I'm not making any predictions about what will or won't happen, but I'll be fascinated to see it unfold.
Unless they will start being able to make things out of steal, glass, rare materials, and be able to vacuum seal things
...well yes, exactly.
Infancy? We had 3D printers in the 80s along with 1Mhz processors powering home built computer kits. Yet, 30 years later those CPUs are running at 3000Mhz with multiple cores while the printers have barely advanced. The only reason you hear so much talk is the patents on early Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) units have expired. But these $1000 printers are only good for printing cheap plastic junk like this guy printed for his daughter which costs more to print and is worse quality than the stuff you can find at the local $ store.
Still, I agree that fused deposition modeling is not going to be cost effective compared to injection molding if you need more than 2000 objects worldwide.
The point is, if you pretend a new tech will always be as lame as it is now you'll never see anything coming. And for most of the years computers have been around they did not revolutionize communication. That's a relatively late development.
Not even close. Computers have been used as a novel communications tool since at least 1958, and for (de)encryption of traditional communications since 1943.
[ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-Automatic_Ground_Environme... ]
Imagine if Amazon Prime were to adopt 3D printing into their model...
;-)
Revolutions happen when you drastically reduce costs, or increase functionality. 3D printing does neither.
F.Y.I. The next revolution will be in robotics.
Increased functionality: I can have exactly what I want. It can look exactly like it was professionally created.
Decreased costs: It saves the cost of shipping it from China, then driving it on the freeway. This might be worth it for heavier items. If 3D printing can be scaled to a factory level, this might be very attractive, since you wouldn't have to hire expensive American workers to produce in the US. It might make things with high capital cost much more affordable: imagine being able to 3D print out custom car body parts and have them assembled for the price of a high-end car. Impossible now.
I think 3D printing is a cool niche, but I don't see it becoming a mainstream thing. People simply don't need to have physical objects produced often enough in their homes — there are odd times where it's useful, but they are rare enough that a trip to a store, or online order outweighs the inconvenience of having a large machine dedicated to a single task in your home.
I think 3D does have future in commercial settings and offering on demand print services, but I still doubt most people will have one in their home in the near future.
Those plain sandals on the floor? They needed three different looms for the three kinds of fabric, plus whatever kind of molder is used for the rubber sole. And sewing machines in various configurations.
That tea kettle? It needs to be made of parts that can withstand extreme heat. It's got a copper bottom and steel sides, plus a handle that must be made of some kind of heat-resistant plastic.
That briefcase? Fake leather (however that's made), steel hardware of various sorts, and zippers. All hooked together with riveters, sewing machines, and other tools.
Most items you own are the result of a large number of industrial processes. There's an amazingly intricate web of raw materials producers and manufacturers behind nearly everything. Conceivably, some or many of these processes could be replaced with printing, but that's not even on the horizon at this point.
To be more specific, I see big challenges in printing materials with the right properties: flexibility, tensile strength, etc.. There's a reason we use so many different materials in today's products.
And then there are the challenges of printing electrical devices. Many of these involve quite a few materials, such as copper, silver, gold, tungsten, and on and on. Many also involve a high degree of miniaturization (I'm thinking of chips here).
Sometimes I feel like tech people get focused on new ideas that they overvalue them and don't realize there are other ways to do things. A lot of the stuff I hear people dreaming about can already be done on a CNC milling machines or even on a regular milling machine with a competent machinist. If you want something cool made out of metal draw it up and go to a machine shop. No need to wait for 3d printers to progress to Star Trek functionality (they probably wont in your lifetime).
Its really similar to when the first PCs came out - only hobbyists were using them, and most people probably didn't have much use for them, until easier to use OSes like Mac/Windows came out.
How much of the stuff in your life could be made by snapping together plastic and metal doohickeys?
It also takes a lot of time to conceive of/design a program, develop or have someone develop it, debug it, distribute it, and get people to download and install it. But this has happened, and on a grand scale, due to a steady progression of improved demand and increased efficiency of supply.
I do not mean to suggest that 3D printing will find the same reach as computing, or in the same way. I simply mean to point out that we do not yet have the perspective to see where it might go or how it might make itself indispensable (or at least invasive) on a commercial level.
By contrast, 2D printing to online professional printing services is much easier, generally cheaper, and the finished products are delivered anywhere I want quickly with no assembly required.
As a result, my family's use of our 2D printer has declined dramatically over the last five years.
With our subscriptions to Amazon Prime and Google Shopping Express, I anticipate our use of the 2D printer will dwindle even further and any desire to own a 3D printer to follow suit.
CAD is great for precision, but that's not really what's called for, it's something that will give good results with a bit of imagination. It's not minecraft, but whoever captures that freedom of creation in CAD will probably do really well.
CAD will always take a long time though due to our limited input abilities (we can only really do one thing at a time) for highly detailed things. The real magic comes in assisting people to remix existing designs and components with built in engineering rules. Imagine being able to tell a schematic of an arm to hold weight and lift it to X. No calculations, no placing actuators, no wiring, just an arm that does what you wanted it to do. Software like that isn't impossible it just takes a lot of work to get there.
These threads always disappoint me because I see so many smart people struggling to think about what is possible instead of what currently is.
I'd buy a Lego brand 3d printer in a heartbeat, though, if they made one. I hope they see an opportunity instead of a rival.
[1]: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:74388 [2]: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:19265
I'm not surprised that a 3 year old is interested in having another piece of weak, brightly colored junk around the house and is uninterested in its provenance.
You buy something in Walmart -- do you ever think about how the product is actually made by robots, made out of metal and powered by real-time operating systems painstakingly coded by software engineers, who then in turn wrote them on software that was painstakingly coded by different software engineers, that ran on hardware that took engineers decades of innovation and miniaturization to achieve, that was created by slightly more advanced robots in some other factory?
No, you don't. You pick up the damned thing, walk over to the cashier, and buy it and move on with your life. It's the same thing with 3D printers. It's a PRINTER. It's not God, it's not the Higgs Boson, it's not the next step in string theory, no new quantum mechanics theories have been discovered, and no, Jurassic Park still can't be created, even if we do have mammoth blood.
On another note entirely, it's amazing how articles like these can make a (supposedly) young 15 year old like me feel like a completely Luddite-esque curmudgeon.
Well, yes, but maybe I'm not the average case. For example, How many ice scrapers do I need to buy for walmart to think it's snowing here? If I go to the five nearest walmarts and buy all their available ISO400 film will that land on someone's desk?