
3D Printing Survey Hints To The Third Industrial Revolution - RaduTyrsina
http://www.maindevice.com/2012/06/02/3d-printing-survey-third-industrial-revolution/
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vibrunazo
On the materials graph, I was surprised to see "biomaterials", so I looked it
up. I had no idea 3d printing was being used to build human organs. This is
amazing :S

"As of 2012 3D printing technology was being studied by biotechnology firms
and academia for possible use in tissue engineering applications where organs
and body parts are built using inkjet techniques. Layers of living cells are
deposited onto a gel medium and slowly built up to form three dimensional
structures. Several terms have been used to refer to this field of research:
organ printing, bio-printing, and computer-aided tissue engineering, among
others.[21] 3D printing can produce a personalized hip replacement in one
pass, with the ball permanently inside the socket; at available printing
resolutions the unit does not require polishing."

\- <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_printing>

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iceron
Yep, here is a video from a NOVA special -
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeJPBuBEJ50>

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jrockway
I think CNC milling was already the third industrial revolution. 3D printing
has some interesting applications, but the generic use case of "I want to play
with this widget I drew with my CAD program" has been solved for decades.

<http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/guerrilla_cnc1.shtml>

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kaib
This is incorrect for a few reasons.

1\. Limitations on geometry. CNC milling has a much smaller set of allowed
geometry than 3D printing. More crucially, the limitations of 3D printing are
closer to the limitations of what a stable physical object has (no things
hanging in the air). As an example, sharp inner corner are impossible to do on
a CNC mill, interior details inside cavities that are smaller than the
toolhead are impossible etc.

2\. Tooling cost. A lot of the cost of CNC milling comes from the tooling
cost, basically the work and expertise required to set up a milling operation
is considerable. Many times the setup causes the original design to change in
subtle and unexpected ways (how do you hold the part between milling passes?).
3D printing has no such issues, if the geometry is valid it is as easy to
print as any other valid geometry.

3\. CAD software. Because of 1 and 2 it's much easier to make a CAD software
that targets 3D printing exclusively. There is an emerging "hobby CAD"
category aimed at all the new users having access to 3D printing. This is a
meta observation that "I drew in my CAD program" is often the hardest problem
to solve.

Here is a simple example. This was designed in roughly 30 minutes and printed
out in various materials by clicking a UI button. I would be hard pressed to
CNC mill this part even if I could change features like the eye sockets and
mouth internal: <https://tinkercad.com/things/3XaRYyuG2hd>

Background, I've done a fair amount of CNC milling and 3D printing. I'm the
co-founder of Tinkercad mentioned above. I'm very familiar with Michal's work
from when I worked at Google.

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jrockway
_This is incorrect for a few reasons._

I don't think speculation about what will be a revolution can be correct or
incorrect :)

 _Limitations on geometry._

Definitely true, though it seems to be good enough for machine parts, dental
implants, jewelry, and so on. (That YouTube video of the CNC-milled chess
pieces is pretty cool too.)

For all the geometry advantages of 3D printing, there are also disadvantages.
The materials you can use are limited. Pieces coming out of the printer
require finishing work, especially at the low end. Mills are more versatile
and produce mostly ready-to-use pieces.

Both 3D printers and mills are inefficient for making more than one copy of a
part.

 _2\. Tooling cost._

Tinkercad links to the Makerbot Replicator, it's $1800. Roland makes hobbyist
CNC mills for $900. I've used a cheap 3D printer before, and it can't produce
pieces that are anywhere near the quality you advertise on your site. They
look like a very drunk person vaguely sketched the outline of the piece with a
hot glue gun :)

 _3\. CAD software. ... This is a meta observation that "I drew in my CAD
program" is often the hardest problem to solve._

I don't understand why your software can produce 3D printing instructions but
not toolpaths for CNC mills. Once you've made a nice UI layer (which you have)
it's just another algorithm on the backend.

Anyway, I don't think the 3D printing is going to be a revolution. People can
draw things and make a machine make them already. The rest is just
implementation details. (2D printing was a revolution. Cheap inkjets were just
a nice implementation.)

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kaib
Hahaa, it did come out pretty black and white, didn't it. :-)

I was mainly referring to the observation that while digital manufacturing in
general is considered the 3rd industrial revolution it's 3D printing in
particular that's driving it. Also, if it didn't come across I really like CNC
machining and I think it will have an important part in manufacturing for
years to come.

 _1\. Limitations on geometry_

The set of shapes that can reasonably be machined certainly contains a lot of
useful items. However, the limitations that the machining process places on
the design are subtle to learn and sometimes limit the process fundamentally.
Of the examples you mention dental implants and jewelry are actually rapidly
moving to 3D printing specifically because of geometry limitations. As an
example pretty much all hearing aids are nowadays 3D printed. The geometry
limitations are mostly driving adoption of 3D printing in high end
applications like human implants, aircrafts, complex machine parts etc.

 _2\. Tooling cost_

I think there is a slight misunderstanding. Tooling cost does not refer to the
cost of the tool but to the cost of changing the configuration of that tool
from manufacturing item A to manufacturing item B. For machining centers that
cost is very high, think of it as the work you go through when you switch
milling bits, workpiece holding, alignment etc. For 3D printers that cost is
virtually zero.

As for material choices I have several copies of the croco fob in question
printed in steel. They were ordered through a 3D printing service and costed
about $30 per piece. Aside from the fact that the croco fob can't be milled
there is nowhere I could order three of them for that price.

 _3\. CAD software/Tinkercad_

We could certainly add CNC toolpaths but there is a lot more people who want
to 3D print than mill. Given how easy it's to 3D print through one of the
printing services compared to the hassle of going through a machine shop I
can't really blame them. The main benefits of CNC toolpath generation would be
home machinists, like myself, who could then use Tinkercad. That group of
people is pretty small.

 _People can draw things and make a machine make them already._

This is the part where we disagree. Or more properly I think your definition
of people is a few magnitudes smaller than my definition of it. To use your
analogy, machining is like plotting and 3D printing is like raster (matrix)
printing. I think calling it an implementation detail is missing the point.

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jamesmcbennett
1\. Both 3D printing and CNC are limited in my opinion, (having taught masters
students on the subject) it is the job of designers to test those limits, but
many things can be done in CNC machining that 3D printing is not capable of
and vice versa.

Example this chair I just made (designed by Phil Seaton.)
[http://www.fabsie.com/blog/2012/03/04/scissor-chair-phil-
sea...](http://www.fabsie.com/blog/2012/03/04/scissor-chair-phil-seaton/)

2\. Tooling cost of switching tools is only zero because you on about using
one tool to 3D print. Could speak about various aperatures of tools of 3D
printing various types of plastic to chocolate to ceramic. The main reason you
change tool sizes is to increase speed, i.e. bigger router bits cut faster and
you don't want to spend 3 hours to do something with a 3mm bit that can be
done in 12.5 minutes with a 20mm bit. (opportunity for 3D printing to grow.

3\. CAD Software is ubiquitous.

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shashashasha
They're even thinking about 3d printing on large scales. Here's 3d printing
concrete for buildings: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfbhdZKPHro>

And on the consumer side, you're definitely seeing more and more products
based around mass customization and 3d printing. See Nervous System (n-e-r-v-
o-u-s.com) and all the excitement around the Makerbot.

My girlfriend and I actually recently launched a sideproject around this,
<http://meshu.io>, letting people enter in locations to generate custom
jewelry that can then be printed into silver or plastic, using Shapeways.com
as our 3d printer.

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VMG
I was reading your description and had the vision of a randomly generated 3d
fractal-like sculpture based on your current location.

Then again, why base it on your location? Generate a hash from the combined
names of you and your partner and create a 3d sculpture from that.

I might be just rambling here but I certainly can see how 3d printing is
creating new businesses.

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shashashasha
I think the important thing for us is that it's both personal and abstract —
most things that are generated look random, or like a lot of faceted jewelry
out there, but the person wearing it knows which way it faces and what each
point means. It's a little different to say "this is randomly generated for
you via seed X, congrats". I think it's viable, and interesting, for sure, I'm
just more interested in the personal (see also an old project weeplaces.com)

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mkl
If anyone else is wondering what the second one was, "It is considered to have
begun with Bessemer steel in the 1860s and culminated in mass production and
the production line."
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Industrial_Revolution>

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hosh
This article does not go deep enough. If you want to know what society might
be like with this techonology:

\- Read Neal Stephenson _Diamond Age_

\- Read Peter F. Hamilton's _Commonwealth Saga_

\- Watch _Star Trek: Next Generation_ (replicator technology)

This isn't the "third" industrial revolution. This is a continuation of the
Information Revolution. 3D printing isn't really about being able to print
things from your home. It's about Software Eating Things.

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hosh
This is out of date -- here are some of the things that have been going on in
the past five years: <http://www.quora.com/Maker-Revolution/The-Diamond-Age-
Redux>

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knewter
Ha, I was halfway into that before realizing this was you hosh :) Nice
collection. The Diamond Age has long been one of my favorite books (of course,
it was the first one I re-read when I got an e-reader)

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dhughes
When reading that I felt like I was back in the early 1990s when "desktop
publishing" was the big thing and people bragged about having colour or high
resolution printers.

It's going to be interesting to see how this evolves, will we all have buckets
of printing sand next to our computers for our 3D printers?

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simcop2387
Odds are it looks like it'll be either a spool of printing cable (PLA, ABS,
Nylon, etc.) that you'll print with, or it'll be like you buy motor oil (UV
Reactive polymers). These are FDM (reprap and the like) and SLA [1] techniques
for 3D printing. So far the SLS (using a powder or sand) seems to be stuck in
the very high commercial range though it can be the most useful, it requires
far less fiddling with to get things to print out regardless of their shape
like a reprap does, and can get very good material reuse like SLA does since
unused material is just kept in the same state. It can also do one of the more
fun things, combine SLS and an inkjet printer and you can color the object
you're printing just like a normal printer [2].

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereolithography> [2]
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UP25fKsN0Io>

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pazimzadeh
I can't wait until 3D printers can print 3D printers.

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cheeze
They are working on it :)

<http://reprap.org/wiki/RepRap>

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keymone
a #D printer printing a 3D printer will be 4th industrial revolution, i tell
you.

