How Open Source Hardware Is Driving the 3D-Printing Industry 199
TheNextCorner sends this quote from ReadWriteWeb:
"Open source software has been a key player in all kinds of disruptive technologies — from the Web to big data. Now the nascent and growing open source hardware movement is helping to power its own disruptive revolution. ... As 3D printing, powered by Arduino and other open source technologies, becomes more prevalent, economies of scale become much less of a problem. A 3D printer can print a few devices — or thousands — without significant retooling, pushing upfront costs to near-zero. This is what The Economist calls the 'Third Industrial Revolution,' where devices and things can be made in smaller, cleaner factories with far less overhead and — significantly — less labor."
A post scarcity society (Score:5, Interesting)
The loss of jobs need not be a bad thing in what is quickly approaching a post scarcity society. Ultimately, perhaps even within the next few centuries, we're going to see a situation where the abundant resources in our solar system are harvested and processed by mostly automated engines, providing an excellent (upper middle class) quality of life for everyone on earth. There is no physical reason why this should not be the case.
Pollution and environmental concerns would be very minimal with adequate management, energy is abundant, and if anything providing a good standard of living reverses population growth.
The main difference between that and today, other than a general longer, healthier, better life, would be the types of toys you get to play with if you excel. Obviously not everyone can have their own private ocean liner, there's only so much ocean, so artificial scarcity will need to be introduced by either fiat or economic acrobatics. Overall though we are I believe on the cusp of a golden age.
Re:Material costs - material generally (Score:3, Interesting)
Imagine plastic recycling: plastic bags or wrappings shreded and then fed to 3d printers - that's what I am waiting for.
Re:Free Complexity at the cost of speed (Score:4, Interesting)
It's still not mass producing - it's custom desktop fabrication. It's like laser printing in the 80s... very slow but nice quality. So in the near future it's still mostly for prototyping or small scale runs.
Good point. If and when enough people have access to these printers, and if they are sufficiently standardized, you will not need mass production anymore. Or rather, the product is still produced in mass, but in many small fabs or even on the desktop, as opposed to requiring a single massive factory in China. It's distributed production. The point is that it's not necessary for these printers to become so fast that they can produce thousands of products per hour. If you're printing at home, you will probably print only a few items every day at most, and you'll be able to afford wait times of an hour or so.
Re:A post scarcity society (Score:4, Interesting)
"Post-scarcity society" ???
What a load of bullshit.
Have you ever heard of peak-oil? Do you realise 80% of our energy demand is covered by fossil fuels? Have you heard of global warming?
Do yourself a favor, and go read this :
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/ [ucsd.edu]
Good for trinkets... (Score:2, Interesting)
...but that's about it in my experience. We had some disappointing results with 3D-printed components at work: they had poor mechanical properties and were permeable to water. We now use a rapid CNC-ing firm (http://www.firstcut.com/) that can produce one-off components cheaply and get them to us inside 3 days; plus they have a fantastic range of proper materials (ABS, nylon, aluminium, etc.). For the time being, we're staying put with CNC.
Re:Material costs - material generally (Score:4, Interesting)
The prices of Photopolymers [bucktownpolymers.com] used in SLA type 3D printers has dropped to below the cost of PLA and ABS used in FDM printers and continues to drop. Photopolymers are dropping to under $10/kg in high volumes, so the costs of the materials are becoming less of an issue.
It's true that there are several open hardware printer projects for FDM type printers that focus mainly on printing with one material at a time such as
RepRap [reprap.org] or Open Source Photopolymer DLP 3D Printers such as LemonCurry [google.com]
3D printers are also printing with more than one material and are already printing multilayer printed circuit boards with only fluids. Much of the development work in 3D printers recently has been from open hardwave projects vs the industry since many of the old patents have now expired.
Re:Is there an open source hardware specification. (Score:0, Interesting)
I'm currently working at a start-up co-working space and this one guy who got rich from a business he started up decided on a whim to buy a makerbot without even knowing exactly what to use it for, so now it's just sitting here and I'm having a field day. This thing is totally awesome :D