so, i’ve been a 3d printing addict for thelast six years. it all started out during my bachelor’sdegree, where a friend and me decided to try something new and build a 3d printer fromscratch. and at that time, it was a choice betweenthe overly simplified prusa mendel or the original sells mendel, obviously, we wentdown the harder route and built this.
what is meant by 3d printing, so this was my first 3d printer, and thingswere a bit different back then, you couldn't just buy the parts and expect everything towork, you actually had to figure out every little detail and make it work. and i still fondly remember that smell ofburnt mosfet and wood as we tried to add a
heated bed to it. so with that background of approaching 3dprinting from both an angle of using it as a tool to make things but also as a projectto learn from, and, you know, just being fascinated by the technology, i want to talk about whyi think 3d printing in a consumer application still has ways to go and in my opinion, justisn’t a valid concept in its current form. so you can basically squeeze 3d printers intothree categories, the professional machines, with prices ranging anywhere from 50k to 500kand beyond, and those machines are in a great spot. you’ve got applications in prototyping,in micro-batch production and increasingly,
even 3d-printer-specific uses like customizinggoods or producing structures that aren’t feasible with traditional means of fabrication. then there are the “maker†or “enthusiastâ€grade machines, i’d actually consider both $3000 premium machines and $200 far-east kitsto fall into this more category of more involved users. this bracket also has its specific set ofapplications, and that’s everywhere someone wants produce things with the machines thathe or she wouldn’t otherwise be able to buy at the price or not even be able to buyat all because they are fully custom parts for a project or just one-off things you need,so they design and print them.
now, 3d printers aimed at consumers, as inthe everyday person, are in a bit of a weird position there. imagine your typical consumer, someone whogoes to an electronics store and buys a 50€ 2d printer and supposedly goes, hey, wouldn’tit be nice to be able to print in 3d, too? now think about how much they know about thetechnology behind 3d printing and how much they know about 3d design and customizingthings. if you thought, “well, they don’t knowabout any of thatâ€, then you’re on the right track. because they don’t.
many “consumers†don’t even know enoughabout their 2d printers to use them properly. so to stick with that 2d printer analogy,the core reasons i see why everyone now has one of them is because they are comparativelyeasy to use, they are reliable, though some people might disagree here, and most of all,they allow you to do things that aren’t easily possible any other way, specifically,creating and printing your own documents, photos, cards, whatever you want. that’s really the kicker for them, if allyou were able to print was pre-made graphics and forms, then what would be the point ofowning a 2d printer when everything it is able to make is also available in a store,ready-made, cheaper, and in better quality?
so, on the same terms, why would anyone wantto buy a 3d printer without having the same level of ease of use and usefulness as a 2dprinter? well, they wouldn’t if they were in theirright minds. what’s still pushing consumers towards owninga 3d printer is plainly marketing, good or bad. when every single kickstarter printer claimsto be the new best machine that now finally allows you to print everything you could everimagine and even established 3d printer manufacturers start doing the same, then the consumer isjust going to give in eventually and just buy one of those damn things if they reallyare so great.
but then what? sure, they are going to print the first samplefiles and vases and trinkets from one of the 3d file sharing platform, but what do theydo once they run into the first issue - and trust me, they will. what do they do when a print doesn’t stickto the bed or just doesn’t come out with the level of quality they were hoping for? or even worse, what happens once the euphoriawears off and they run out of things to print. because that’s going to be that moment ofenlightenment - and disappointment - when they start asking themselves “what did ieven buy this thing for?â€
so really, what makes 3d printers great isthat you can produce original things that you come up with, and not just reproduce desingssomeone else uploaded. so that should really be the first thing we,as a community and as an industry need to start focusing on, allowing people to moreeasily create things that truly are their own. and that doesn’t even have to be full-blowncad knowledge for everyone, even simple things like makerbot’s thingiverse customizer area great start there, since they allow you to change the dimensions, features, letteringof the part you’re going to print. because that’s what 3d printing is awesomeat, producing things that you can’t go out
for and buy at the store, like you would whenprinting exact replicas of ready-made models. it’s a start, but creating your designsthat are completely your own is an even better use for the technology, so somehow, we needto work out a way for, no offense, normal people to use some sort of cad tool. now, the thing about cad and designing 3dparts, is, in my experience, that the actual program you use isn’t the biggest challenge,because frankly, 3d cad programs have become insanely good and accessible in the recentyears, so the tools are there. what’s the bigger challenge, unless you’reregularly creating physical things, like building and making structures, is that it’s incrediblyhard for people to imagine in detail what
their design should end up looking like, becausethat’s simply not a region of our brains we’re regularly using and training. and i realize that is pretty much the definitionof a “consumerâ€, as opposed to a “creatorâ€. you’re often going to see people have aninitial idea, but no concept of what it should look like in the physical world. and even worse, the process of then reproducingthe design they thought of into a 3d model, that process then doesn’t use tools andmethods that people are familiar with or even have a direct, physical, real-world equivalentto. sure, clay-like sculpting modelling is verymuch based on a physical process, but it is
a very limited approach that is only reallyuseful for one specific type of 3d model. so the one company that stands out here isautodesk, and they’re placing themselves in that exact void that will need to be filledif more accessible 3d printing is really meant to become a thing. tools like tinkercad that are simply basedon combining existing shapes to make new ones are a great place to start; they’re “enablerâ€technologies that give even the uninitiated a chance of using 3d printing in a meaningfulway. sure, the tools aren’t perfect and coulddefinitely use a bit more “intelligence†that tells you how to best 3d print a modeland how you could refine it to make it more
suitable for the technology, for example howyou could avoid overhangs or orient your part optimally, but still, it's amazing to seewhat even third-graders can achieve with these simple tools. because they are tools that are very accessible,but still powerful enough. so what i think would really give this areaa boost would be 3d printer manufacturers not just selling their hardware, but alsogoing, hey, these are the software tools you can use to make your own awesome stuff withour machines, and this is how you can use them. now, the 3d printers themselves could usesome extra intelligence, too.
don’t get me wrong, it’s amazing to seehow far the hardware has come and how sophisticated many of the low-end 3d printers already are,but these machines are still way too complex and way too dumb to be properly used by non-tech-heads. like i mentioned earlier, what do you do whena print doesn’t stick to the bed, what if the extruder grinds through the filament,what if a stepper motor keeps skipping on the exact same part of a print every singletime? those are issues even somewhat experiencedusers might not be able to immediately solve, and frankly, these problems shouldn’t evenexist in the first place for a user-friendly machine.
if you look at 99% of the 3d printers outthere, they’ve all got mostly the same hardware and the same lack of feedback about what they’redoing. so to paraphrase it, most filament-based 3dprinters work like they were doing open-heart surgery with their eyes closed, no sense ofsmell and touch and someone who also doesn’t know how things are looking, whispering intotheir ears, a bit left, now forward, now plunge down, yeah, you can do it, you can do it. so what i’m trying to say is, there is solittle self-awareness in these machines, that some of them could literally set themselveson fire, melt down an entire axis and not even realize that anything has gone wrong.
they'd just keep following their routine andhope for the best. and this requires a bit of a change in mentalityby the manufacturers, a 3d printer that’s usable by everyone shouldn’t just have thebare minimum of components that make it function, it should have the bare minimum of featuresthat make it foolproof and reliable, even when not used by a specialist. and many of these features wouldn’t evenadd that much to the raw component cost of the machine, the biggest part would be a one-timedevelopment project for the hardware and the software. and that would include things like sensorsfor the filament path - so monitoring things
like: is the filament loaded properly, isit being transported properly, is it running out in the middle of a print, maybe even adiameter sensor that can have the machine compensate for filament irregularities. and by the way, these are not things thatare completely science-fiction, these are all things that are known to work and arebasically just waiting for a broader implementation. then things like ambient temperature sensorswhich can either automatically adjust printing temperatures and cooling fan settings or evensuggest to the user that they might want to think about moving the 3d printer to a warmerroom. and if a manufacturer really has too muchcash to blow, they could even consider adding
current and voltage monitoring for each stepperdriver to predict when an axis is about to lose its positioning. editor’s note (which is also me): we nowactually have this functionality, the trinamic tmc2130 can report when it thinks a steppermotor might have skipped step. we’re getting there. still, there are so many options out therethat just need to be implemented, but would each make these machines so much more reliable. maybe that up front research and developmentinvestment would have to be something done by the community, but because “the communityâ€now is such a fragmented mess, i think there
needs to be at least one bigger manufacturerinvolved to set a pace and drive the project forward. i'm not really sure who would be suitablefor that, though, most manufacturers just seem to be interested in producing closed-sourcemachines that are more of the same for maximum profit these days. but it doesn’t even need to be entirelynew concepts, even already functioning and commonly used ideas like sensor-based bedadjustment should just already be implemented in every single printer. not just the in consumer types, because there’sjust almost no drawback to it even for the
more involved machines. sure, you can get exactly the same resultswith three-point adjustment and a piece of paper, again, in that case the machine itselfhas no clue about how well it is adjusted or whether it’s even adjusted at all. and it’s not just about adding “moreâ€to the machines to make them easier to use, it’s also about making them better. most of the time, it’s not about featurecount or sheer size, it’s about how well everything works as a unit. i mean, most enthusiasts can work even witha barely functioning product and make them
produce great results - whether that’s 3dprinter geeks or linux users, it’s the same principle. but most users will prefer something thatjust works, even if it means they’re getting less for their money, at least when it comesto marketable number games, which is why apple products sell so incredibly well in the itspace. for a 3d printer, that’s mostly no-brainers. use decent components instead of more of thecheap ones and you’ll be preventing user headache in the first place. so in the end, even though they look likethe same type of machines on the surface,
consumer and enthusiast type 3d printers reallyrequire a different mindset in their design language. the more involved 3d printers are doing great,by the way, and they are very much on the right track when it comes to their featureset, but they are also used for entirely different things than what you’re looking at witha true consumer-grade product. for the maker-grade machines, whether it’sindividual projects or a part of a larger collective like the e-nable project that designsand 3d prints prosthetic limbs, there’s always a straightforward reason for them touse 3d printing, and the machines and software are already good enough to be used productivelyby these more involved users.
but to really reach, dare i say, the masses,to make 3d printing more than just a fad, and actually an appealing concept for everyone,there needs to be a change in pace from just making more of the same machines to actuallycreating approachable workflows and bullet proof machines.
i know this isn’t going to be an instantevent where all manufacturers just suddenly flip a switch, there’s a bit too much fragmentationgoing on in the market right now, but maybe we can start that slow process of convincingmanufacturers that 3d printers need to start moving forward instead of just sideways.
