MakerBot Gets $10 Million Investment 160
First time accepted submitter chrisl456 writes "MakerBot Industries, makers (hah!) of 3D printers / personal fabrication devices, just got a big boost in the form of $10 million from an 'all-star lineup.' Replicators, here we come!"
Sweet... (Score:2)
Anything that could potentially drive the cost of 3D printing down is a win, IMHO!
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Wow... who pissed in your Cheerios this morning?
Probably because the low-hanging fruit in making things cheaper usually involves slave wages in developing countries as opposed to a fair wage in industrialized nations.
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You're entirely welcome to not include such features in your build.
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Slashdot sucks during election years because everything becomes a political attack, incredible demonstrations of stupidity, or ad hominem accusations of trying to kill us all because of perceived badspeak. :(
Replicators? (Score:3, Funny)
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Whoever wins, we all lose!
dvd case (Score:2)
As long as these printers can't produce a real-looking dvd/blueray case, including insert, I'm not impressed.
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You could definitlely make a DVD/blu-ray case, although you might have to go with snap-in hinges instead of the flexible plastic spine, and a good printer with good quality paper will make a real-looking insert.
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How about the transparent plastic "window" in which you could put the insert?
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Well it's at least possible to print transparent material:
http://www.objet.com/3D-Printing-Materials/Overview/Transparent/ [objet.com]
Don't know of any DIY kits that can do this right now though.
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I think a non transparent one with the title picture in some crappy looking relief would be possible. The inlet you print on your newspaper replicator.
All cases would look the same, like those lightscribe CDs also look the same.
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Can't Wait... (Score:2)
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I am not shitting you, I am seriously looking into building a custom car with 3D printed body panels and interior framework.
I'd have to scale-up an open source printer (like an Ultimaker or Makerbot) to AT LEAST 6'x6'x3' build volume (although a monstrous 10'x10'x5' would be ideal to avoid unnecessary seams) and then I would design and print the ABS panels to go on a chromoly or stainless tube-framed car. The panels would be only for aerodynamic and weatherproofing purposes.
Forming the body out of fiberglas
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Hmm, but the resolution on the Ultimaker/Makerbot is very low (As previously mentioned in this thread). How will you get a smooth, presentable finish?
I too am in the planning phases of a build. My first build will use standard premade fg panels, but I have pondered a second build (if I like building) and was considering a large 3d router to construct bucks to make cf moulds from. Again, the bucks would likely need a lot of preparation before making the moulds from them.
If your idea pans out then it may also
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I'll just slightly overbuild and sand the panels if they can't be made smooth enough (as is almost certain to be the case). Then I'll paint over them (I wasn't planning to go unpainted, but that would certainly be a good option for an offroad vehicle - look at ATVs with this kind of body). I'm planning metallic black on black plastic. The Lotus Elise already has ABS panels so you can look at how bodywork is done on those. Many newer cars have some ABS panels as well.
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The S1 Elise front clamshell that I have is most definately FG, not ABS...
Are the newer ones ABS then?
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The S2 Elise manual says the "main outer panels" are plastic.
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How will you get a smooth, presentable finish?
Sand it smooth? ABS sands just fine. If needed, print it slightly oversize to allow for losses.
Alternative suggestions I hear are heating (heat it up with a heat gun to soften, then smooth it) or acetone (acetone dissolves ABS, so use a little bit to soften it and then smooth it).
Re:Can't Wait... (Score:4, Interesting)
My understanding is that the most agonizing part of fiberglassing is making molds. If my jackass brothers could make surfboards, I'll bet you can glass into a mold. So... print molds, then smooth them out for actual use, and then lay fiberglass, or vacuform some lexan... I like Lexan because you can paint the inside and it looks awesome. You could even fade the paint to transparency and/or mask off sections to leave transparent windows to the understructure where it looks cool. But fiberglass doesn't require a big oven...
I'd also settle for nothing but vacuforming the interior pieces if they're not made of metal. That's how the big boys do it. You can do it with a shop-vac. In my acrylics class way back in junior high we had a locally made oven constructed from sheet metal, insulated with fiberglass, and filled with heat lamps. Any jackhole ought to be able to build one of those. I've priced a hand roll/break and you can get one for $200 that will handle the sheet metal you'd need to conveniently build one big enough to handle a whole dashboard.
My dream toy car is a tube-frame Lancer with a TDI+Quattro drivetrain...
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I think the problem with printing a mold is that the finished product typically has convex curves. This means that the mold would have concave curves which would be very hard to do surface finishing on.
I think the best way is still to CNC the buck (a replica of the finished shape) from foam, finish that and make your mold from that.
Also, you don't need an autoclave to do CF work. You can use the fibre and room-temp resin. The problem is that you get too much resin for the amount of fibre. Vacuum bagging hel
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Oh and mine is a Caterham R500 replica :) That's the first build, 2nd (if I go there) will be some mid engined 3 seater with some kind of body.
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I considered a 3-seat layout, keep in mind that the McLaren F1-style layout makes the car wider and makes overtaking difficult, especially on the street.
I'm planning a 2-seater that be easily changed between RHD and LHD. The only parts you'd actually need 2 of are the steering rack itself and some hydraulic hard lines (even then, you could probably get away with using soft lines to allow the master cylinders to be relocated, but I'd rather not).
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Cool, locost? something else?
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Custom Elise-like mid-engined thing. It'll probably cost almost as much as an Elise when it's done, but at least this way I'll get exactly what I want, and if I need to stop spending on it I can put the build on hold, and won't have a ruined credit rating and repo men at my door :-P
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Good job! You going for an Elise type chassis or a more conventional tube-frame? What donor?
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Conventional tube frame, RSX powertrain, although I keep thinking about electric powertrains (I'll be kicking myself if they surpass ICE performance shortly after the car's done) or some TT LS1/LS6 monster (might be doable if there was an affordable transaxle that could handle that power in a mid-longitudinal layout...)
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The same layout I was idolising for my 3-seater idea, although with some euro screamer V6/8 (BMW S65 anyone? :) ).
I haven't done any hard research on it yet, but so far the most common transaxle seems to be an inverted Porsche jobbie. I always wondered if a formula (FF etc) transaxle would be an option too.
I hear you on the electric, I went to see someones almost-finished electric build recently and i'd say, for now at least, stick to ICE. Hey if you are building a middy anyway it shouldn't be toooo hard to
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Hey are you on GRM forums? I'm on there with the same username. If you aren't on there you should join up, it's one of the best car forums.
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Yep, I've done a lot of poking around on there but never signed up. Time I did I guess!
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Maybe you should use electric power steering so you can get away from the hydraulics entirely.
Another option is to leave the rack alone and use a chain drive to connect the wheel to the rack... Or a belt I guess, but to my mind, a chain is superior.
Going to duplicate all the master cylinders, too? Or are you going to use linkages to carry the pedals across?
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My idea is to basically have the holes and fittings for the master cylinders and steering rack duplicated on both sides, and to have a section of hydraulic hard line that's removable between the left or right sides and the lines going to the brakes and clutch in the center. So one side has blanks covering the holes in the firewall and the controls are installed in the other side. To swap them, you move the steering rack and gauge cluster (remember I planned an easy to work on modular dash), move the pedals
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s/move the steering rack and gauge cluster/swap the steering rack and move the guage cluster/g
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tube-frame Lancer with a TDI+Quattro drivetrain
I'm curious, why that combination? If you're going to start with a Lancer, why not take the Evo version and have a more performance-biased drivetrain than any (Audi, I presume) quattro? And the 4G63 can be tuned to astronomical levels, so why replace it with a TDI?
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I meant an Evo, but it's just a layout. The only parts I would be using from the original would be suspension parts, and even then, I imagine I'd want to just get all adjustable racing parts anyway. So the only Evo parts I would use would be cosmetic (reproductions of same anyway) and the measurements. :)
I don't need astronomical power, because I like to do the super-twisty stuff that happens at lower speeds. I've had more power and it only gets me into trouble. Maybe that's a character flaw, but so be it.
up on blocks in the basement (Score:2)
Fifth Element? (Score:1)
A useful breakthrough for 3D printing will be (Score:1)
when a car company puts such devices in all of their service departments, and simply FTPs the CAD files to make replacement trim parts on demand --- my truck has a broken seat adjustment handle --- I haven't even considered asking the dealer what a replacement part, w/ shipping would cost, but in a couple of years, I predict that I'll be able to just drop in and they'll be able to make such on-demand.
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Why would you do that?
Glue yours together, scan it, then print its replacement yourself.
Seriously? (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't see why everyone's so fascinated with those extruding printers. They're extremely complex, extremely slow and their output is very low resolution. They have to fill solid parts with extruded material in a zig-zag pattern... takes forever and the output is a joke.
This [blogspot.com], on the other hand, almost looks like magic [youtube.com]. This thing makes one whole layer at a time with extreme precision. It's also extremely simple in design: a single motor on one axis, one projector and a container for liquid resin.
Compare the output of the two types of machines [blogspot.com]. If you still prefer the MakerBot-type machines after seeing the video and the photos, please explain because I can't see any reason for the MakerBot to even exist. It's like wanting Windows 3.11 instead of Linux or Mac OS X.
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Because a liter of that resin costs hundreds of dollars, that is why. Also it is UV fixed, meaning storage is an issue and that stuff tends to go bad with time as well.
Re:Seriously? (Score:4, Interesting)
(Also, I'm not sure about the resin properties, i.e. if they are as good as the plastic.)
The fact is, for many simple items the current resolution is doing just fine. And if you don't need to produce large quantities or aren't in a big hurry, taking time may not be an issue since you can just let it print and go do something else.
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With the hobbyist printing systems, once you get too far up in price, you start to bump uncomfortably close to the services that rent out time on big serious pro gear, with the advanced capabilities that offers, on a per-piece basis.
The extruders are substantially limited; but they can also knock out comparatively high-volume pa
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The video you link appears to be a DIY stereolithography [wikipedia.org] machine. These machines are very nice and create 3D parts with extremely high resolution. I have seen the output from one of these machines at a company I have worked out, the resolution is better than 100um and the parts that it produced needed no additional machining (in fact they were producing parts that could not have been produced in a single piece by machine). However the machine itself cost over $100k, and the resin costs $100's per liter.
Tea, Early Grey, Hot. (Score:2)
And I'd like that in my 3D printed coffee mug please.
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Attempting to calculate answer to your question: why you want dried leaves in boiling water.
What do they need $10M for? (Score:2)
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R&D. Their margins probably anywhere near sufficient to support staff to sit around all day working on better versions or techniques.
Sometimes, you're lucky like Tesla and you fund your R&D with expensive cars. Sometimes, you need outside money.
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Hopefully to fund research.
That's kind of the problem in tech.. you have to have a selling product to fund research.. but keeping that selling product current requires resources itself.
A huge cash boost (should) let them do some R&D for a while .. and we might get something more practical.
As an aside, I realize the current generation of makerbot isn't all that useful or practical.. but I still really want one! :(
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That is what makes them a good investment. They have a business model that is working but could be more successful if they had more capacity. Not something that will work if you throw enough money at it. Once upon a time investors also used to care about book value vs market cap too.
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West Coast (Score:1)
yo dog, I heard you lieked memes... (Score:3)
West Coast Needs some Maker Bot Love
I checked Thingiverse, and the only fleshlight-like models are all variations of goatse.
It's not a miracle. It's just a CNC machine. (Score:4, Informative)
Additive machining is cute, but not a miracle. It's a slow process. Building up objects one layer at a time takes forever. The consumables are rather expensive. Injection molding and casting are probably 100x cheaper in quantity.
High-end [fortus.com] additive machining system [youtube.com] are getting to be quite good. The low-end machines, though, are not yet very useful. The precision is too low, the surface quality is poor, and the material options are too limited. TechShop has both a high-end commercial machine, which is usually busy, and a machine at the MakerBot level, which is almost never used. If you're making tiny parts, you need high precision.
The big advantage of many of the additive processes is that they don't have work-holding problems. The big limitation of CNC machining is that you have to clamp down the workpiece, and the clamps get in the way of what you're doing. Some part of the workpiece will be inaccessible. So most work requires multiple setups, each of which has to be aligned with the previous setup to 0.001in or better. Designs have to be planned to be clampable.
The more interesting processes [youtube.com] can work metals. But they need 500W to 6KW lasers. If you're going to work in steel, you need enough power to melt steel.
For comparison, here's a high speed stamping press. [youtube.com] This is how most of the small metal parts in the world are made. Once you get the tooling set up, parts come out at machine-gun speeds.
Re:It's not a miracle. It's just a CNC machine. (Score:4, Insightful)
Additive machining is cute, but not a miracle. It's a slow process.
Sure, but that's not the point. If you need 100,000 greeblies, you can probably afford to have a $100k mould cut for your high-speed injection moulding process. The exciting property of 3D printers is that it's now possible to create plastic (or metal) parts in small numbers.
Printing also has some advantages over the usual machining techniques; clamping is one. The absence of tools means you can create structures that are too fragile to achieve with a milling machine. You can print objects inside one another.
For some industries, the 3D printer is a revolution. I build scale models. Until now, the model kit cottage industry created kits by hand-building a master (a process in which it is basically impossible to get curved surfaces exactly right) and then casting resin copies of it. The 3D printer means that we can create sub-mm accurate masters, or even sell the 3D parts directly (though they still are more expensive than resin cast parts).
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It seems like you are trying to imply that anyone has suggested these systems for mass production of parts. No one has.
Yes, people have. [google.com] Look up "personal fabrication revolution" for some of the looser talk on the subject.
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Which Techshop? San Jose doesn't have any additive manufacturing equipment at the moment.
Menlo Park has a pro machine, and San Francisco has something slightly above the MakerBot level.
Lowering the bar (Score:2)
Hopefully this means bringing the kit price down to under $500 and cheaper feedstock. I had just saved up enough money for the Cupcake kit when they were discontinued in favor of the new version at twice the price.
Same old InkJet story... (Score:2)
...it's not the printer that will tear your budget apart, it the consumables.
Imagine if someone could invent a 3D printer or InkJet printer that could work on recycled goods (powdered or not), now THAT would take care of that ever growing garbage pile problem of ours, but noooooo... it wouldn't bring any money on in...well...not enough billions anyway, besides - the car running on water was invented over 60 years ago, but you wouldn't depend on gazoline then...and money Money MOOOONEY!
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Very Cool (Score:2)
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Uhuh, it's the same kind of plastic as legos; anything but fragile. Something makes me think you've got serious sour grapes.
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Either way it is not what anyone would be calling brittle, unless you are making some very thin sheets.
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I was thinking more in terms of dimensional tolerances, homogenous density, surface finish, and the like. Anything where the bulk properties of ABS will do you can get away with extrusion printing(possibly with some clean-up work/drilling/etc. on critical surfaces); but most of what makes something like lego work depends on factors that extruders can't touch.
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Uhuh, it's the same kind of plastic as legos; anything but fragile. Something makes me think you've got serious sour grapes.
It's not fragile but it looks pretty ugly. Objects are formed by extruding molten plastic from a nozzle and snaking it around to form one slice of the shape. So objects look like a congealed series of coils and loops. Whether that matter or not really depends on what you intend the object for. I think the powder bed replicators produce a much nicer finish (in colour too) and support more complex shapes but then again they cost a lot more.
next up, a machine that poops houses (Score:2)
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Are Gothic Cathedrals [thingiverse.com] ugly? How about golden chalices [makerbot.com]?
The first picture doesn't show what I am referring to (because the light cream doesn't reflect the light too well). The second picture amply shows it. It's fugly. Here is another pic [thingiverse.com] which shows the typical surface you can expect from your manufactured objects.
There's no doubt it's cool tech but the results are pretty primitive. I'd see it more useful for replacement parts than producing something you'd want gracing your mantelpiece.
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There seems to have been no finishing work done either on those. Again that would not make it suitable for mantelpiece decorations, but with some minor heating to smooth out the surface it could be a fine replacement to a broken car door handle.
Re:Oh god, more delusions (Score:5, Insightful)
Hahaha idiot. You can print ABS plastic with these things, for starters. You can make real stuff with them. These will become the next common home appliance. The age of fragile prototypes is long gone.
And corporations will be up in arms. Want Lego? Why pay $30 for $1 worth of blocks when you can print them for a couple dollar's worth of material. Want a body kit or some lightweight/cheap replacement body panels (although even common cars now have plastic body panels) for your car but don't want to pay so much? A printer with a big enough build volume can do that too, and you can get an exact copy of a commercial product. Want a custom computer case or a copy of an expensive commercial model? Knock yourself out. Want some cheap/custom furniture? Plastic built into the right structures can be very strong. See: milk crates. Except it won't look ghetto because that will just be the under-structure of your custom furniture.
This will do for many physical objects what computers did for movies and music - including making it easy and cheap for anyone to produce it.
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True that lego will have to be an exact copy to fit properly unlike the awful lego knockoffs, but eventually it will be possible.
Anyways I think PirateLegos would become the new standard. Who cares if they fit properly with the expensive official Legos when you can have tons of PirateLegos for cheap? :D
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Until the technology gets much better and tolerances much tighter you will find that PirateBricks (Lego is a trademark) won't fit, stack or hold together well enough to justify the effort to make them.
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I think you are all missing the point. Why bother with blocks when you can print the whole shape or section? Craft some interlocks if you want to build components instead of the whole thing :P
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The current problem is mainly the cost of the raw material, plus the initial investment. From Maker-bot's website it's around $20 USD per pound, which is pretty hefty (although nowhere near where I thought it would be.) You are right: this will revolutionize the way we think of physical designs of objects.
The device itself is still pretty pricey. It'd be really cool if someone bought a nicer one and opened a store where you could send custom print jobs for the cost of materials + profit. Thats probably the
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Not inexpensive; but you pretty much upload mesh+money and get fedexed an object...
Cheaper and better for a number of applications; but somewhat less versatile, are the online machine shop services, which use conventional feedstock materials and machining techniques. You can't do some of the really fancy geometry; but paying $10/cc to have a part laser-sintered when it could be milled, tapped, and finished to your spec in the same time and probably for less money doesn
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I'm sure they can find some way to disrupt 3D scanners. Just shiny paint would do the job fairly well at present.
Agree w/ all but the Lego bricks (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem is you can't make bricks of the same quality as Lego bricks using any 3D printer currently in existence or on the drawing board --- the tolerances simply aren't tight enough --- Lego uses _tons_ of pressure in their molding equipment, moreover, Lego is constantly doing QA on their production and will pull a mold and grind it up to re-use it at the slightest deviation --- the new Lego bricks I purchase for my kids still work fine w/ four decade old bricks from my childhood. Lego's precision for brick parts is something on the order of 2 micrometers.
By way of contrast, the printer which Shapeways ( http://www.shapeways.com/forum/index.php?t=tree&goto=1339&#page_top [shapeways.com] ) uses as a tolerance of, ``... about .1mm, but the material can change it slightly. Overall, .5 should be fine, just make sure that they are not any sort of support walls or they may get broken during shipping or printing.'' .1 mm == 100 micrometers
If you want to know what its like when the tolerances are sloppy, buy a set of Mega Blok bricks, but even those have tighter tolerance than the tenth of a millimeter which Shapeways quotes.
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True, it'll be a long time before it will be possible to print blocks that will fit properly with official legos. But like I said in this post, [slashdot.org] if "PirateLegos" that are Good Enough can be built, they'll become the new standard.
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The problem is, .1mm of tolerance means that one can have:
- a piece which is on-spec in all dimensions
- a piece which is off-spec in one or more axes by the tolerance at one end or the other
- a piece which is off-spec in _all_ dimensions at each end, doubling the error
It's when one has multiple pieces off in multiple ways that combinatorial mathematics kicks in and one sees that such won't work for large structures (cf. transmissions built w/ on-spec parts where all the parts are sli
Re:Oh god, more delusions (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yes :-(
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I'm not talking about building crankshafts and helicopter blades with this. Does it really matter if your computer case/peripherals or motorcycle body panels aren't quite as structurally sound as injection-molded pieces? Does it matter what your furniture's frame looks like, and do you think the cheapo wood with pressed-on spike plates that is currently used is really that strong?
I'm not saying it's anything like a Star Trek replicator by any means, but these aren't the flimsy prototype builders of the '90s
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Yes I admit printing legos is far off. As for the cost of electricity and materials, those are low. Practice prints will only be an issue for people developing an object (and are becoming a non-issue entirely at a rapid rate as these printers become more precise). Most people will just download a design and send it to their printer so design time would be no more of a consideration in printing objects than it is in running Linux.
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Funny that you're modded down, your reaction pretty much matches mine.
MakerBot is cool, but pointless and not actually useful yet for anything that matters. The technology just isn't there yet at the hobbiest level. Its certainly out there, just not at the hobbiest level. Everything produced out of the RepRap is too big and blocky and most importantly, weak to be used in anything of value other than some art deco kind of crap around a geeks house.
Oh well, modded down for disagreeing with a factual statem
Re:Oh god, more delusions (Score:5, Insightful)
Funny that you're modded down, your reaction pretty much matches mine.
MakerBot is cool, but pointless and not actually useful yet for anything that matters. The technology just isn't there yet at the hobbiest level. Its certainly out there, just not at the hobbiest level.
Right around 1980 or so you could have said the exact same thing about personal computers, and it would have been true.
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And just like in 1980 hobbiests were doing it. The GP apparently thinks anything harder than a coloring book or more expensive than a meal at McDonalds can't be a hobby.
Re:Oh god, more delusions (Score:4, Informative)
To say that these things can not make anything useful is very far from correct. Checkout RepRap [reprap.org] which is a very similar device to makerbot. Its firmware has the code built in to print the parts it is made from and is one of the tenants of the project. The video on the RepRap home page explaining the project is brilliant. These projects are indeed very worthy of getting funded.
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And in 1980, you would have been correct. "Not actually useful yet for anything that matters" is an accurate statement in 2011.
I think you're talking about Slashdot comments, right? :P
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And for my part, I'll add that I've seen very useful things come out of these printers (not just the silly low-res busts we see too many of) and there are better, cheaper designs all the time.
So yeah, we're not exactly ending scarcity in manufactured goods any time this decade, but they're useful tools.
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Uhm, lack imagination much? It's distressing the anti-nerd, anti-tech, anti-imagination tone of a lot of comments I see on /. these days.
Yes the current incarnation is not much in terms of utility - but you wouldn't want to be commuting to work today in the first automobiles either. The notion here is to get the technology out into the hands of a bunch of self-motivated tinkerers and some of them will come up with useful, unforseen ideas. If you're an advocate for the free market, or American ingenuity,
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What makes you think it's fragile? the example I saw recently was a fully working spanner. That's not something frangile because it must face a lot of forces when tightening and losening nuts and bolts.
I'm not sure why you think it'll be a fad. It's already seeing a lot of use in companies that can afford the kit as is right now. That implies it's already past the fad stage.
Of course, these things only ever get better with time too. So when it's consumer affordable it should be quite impressive technology.
E
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CNC machines are infinitely practical. Not so with Robo Sapiens. The fact you don't understand such a basic concept speaks wonders for your entire theory and line of thinking.
Everything from games, equipment panels,jewelry, to cases, to glasses, to boxes, hobbyist equipment and components (car, plane, heli; including portions of airframes), to you name it, can be created with this category of equipment. Whereas with a Robo Sapiens, all you can do it make a costly puppet move.
To say they are comparable in th