I only got to play with CNC 25+ years ago when I know a CD of MasterCam Level I was ~ $5K and I remember going to a trade show in Valley Forge PA and being wowed by a small desktop printer at a booth where they’d laser scanned a small model of a Bonneville streamliner and printed a copy ~3-4" long. I was even more wowed by the cost of all that stuff and figured never in my lifetime.
I’ve been watching some tutorials of Tinkercad, Fusion 360 etc. and I’m stunned at the level of software available these days for the asking as well as the machinery one can now have in their shop for reasonable $$$.
If someone could point me towards a site that details the history of 3D printing going from the fairly large company ($$$)level to hobbyist level I’d love to read it.
And of course I welcome comments from industry ‘oldtimers’ who are no doubt far younger than me (70).
I think if you look up the reprap project, and the prusa i3 project, you’ll get a pretty good idea. The makerbot story also seems pretty important, although it seems less so in hindsight, because they went proprietary.
The basic summary is that the FDM patent expires. Reprap starts making machines that can make themselves. Some iterative design changes after that to reduce complexity and costs. The prusa mendel and follow on printers are very good at that. Producers in china start to make the kits, really cheap. The designs are open source, so there isn’t any requirement to pay designers. The huge volume of parts (which are getting pretty standardized) causes prices to drop even further. At that point, companies can make incremental improvements to the printers and have a pretty good idea how many of them they can hope to sell, so you see a lot of new players not selling printers, but just better parts for the printers.
Alongside that, the software from cura, and slic3r are incredibly important, and open source/completely free. It would not have been possible to have such growth if every $200 printer needed $100 in software to work, or only printed gcode made by hand. Things like octoprint are nice to haves and incredible for free, but they are not essential like slicer software.
Thanks Jeff! I will do some reading, I did a quick search of the reprap project and was surprised to see it started in 2005 which to me seems relatively recent but I guess in the march of technology is multiple generations.
Bygones be bygones and this video is a good narrative of one of the big movers and shakers. There were a quite a few key folks who contributed to the project also and stuck with it.