All the pieces existed to make a working 3D printer existed even in 1970! and relatively cheaply. So why has it taken so long for [at home] 3D printing to actually become a thing?
Is it because of the internet somehow? Did just no one care in the 1970-2010s? Like there aren't even prototypes from 1970 from garage hobbyists for 3D printing.
What was wrong?!"
- omgsoftcats
Some of the greatest and most under appreciated technological achievements in the last 40 years have been in materials science and miniaturization.
I agree that the pieces did not exist in the 01970s, but the missing pieces weren't the computation.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bxv0SsvibDMTZ2tQMmpyOWtsRFk...
I do think that the limitations of memory (and disk) will require some ingenuity in 3D printing more than the most trivial procedurally defined objects!
If I decided, IDK, to write "cnow" instead of "know", or "J" instead of "I", I wouldn't be able to do so consistently. Not in a world that massively uses the other word.
Or it would take me twice as much time to double-check everything that I have typed.
(I'm sincerely hoping I'm missing something here and am going to look really silly asking this question.)
The system here was based around a minicomputer (or at least a successor patent of 1978 so described it) so we're talking tens of thousands of dollars for the compute involved in that scheme - but that first 1971 patent must have expired in the 90s by which time inexpensive compute was trivially available to match early 70s minicomputer capabilities.
Excerpts from the exceptionally excellent book "The Inventions of Daedalus - A Compendium of Plausible Schemes" which is sadly long out of print:
https://paperstack.com/img/photos/page%2090.jpg
https://paperstack.com/img/photos/page%2091.jpg
Early machines were industrial machines with huge price tags, proper linear motion systems, complicated extrusion systems and so on. There is a bit of a mental leap to go from seeing $100k+ machine and dreaming to design something that can be built for $200-500.
The problems were: no "reference designs", no tried and true go-to mechanical parts (like cheap chinese linear motion rails), extruders (they were DIYd!) or heated beds (early models were just PCBs) and so on - imo it just took someone to get this rolling and that may have well taken 30 years.
I think Reprap was first publicly shown around 2005. From then on it was taken on by more and more makers and refined. It culminated in the early 2010s hype with Makerbots and its contemporaries but they still cost > $1500 and were far from set-and-forget appliances, like 50% reliable and slow - we had one at work and I got fascinated but it printed at 5-20mm/s so parts would just take forever and often fail due to bed adhesion, clogs, ...
The last 10-15 years then have seen the popularization of 3d printers through the Prusa i3 and its clones (Ender and other cartesians < $300) and steady refinement of reliability through better materials. Then the last ~5years or so significantly bumped up the speeds through better linear motion components, motion systems and input shaping + firmware and ecosystems like Klipper.
Bambu imo got in at just the right time and refined everything that had culminated up to this point into a solid appliance. Imo their genius was more in the industrial design, making it reliable and affordable manufacturing than anything else.
Once anyone could build their own design, a community of hackers and engineers formed that continuously improved the designs with diverse ideas and experiments. That community is what made 3D printing what it is today. And it was illegal for them to do all of that (in many countries) until the patent expiration in 2008. That’s a big reason why it took so long. I think it’s interesting to consider whether this would have happened sooner if they had never been patented, though perhaps the expired patent created a legal safe haven where no one could take away the basic principles by patenting them. Anyway, patents play a big role in this story!
Edit: Some cool history here: https://3dprintingindustry.com/news/interview-dr-adrian-bowy...
Now you can get the steppers from Amazon for $8, a control board with stepper controllers for $20 with a built in 32 bit MCU. At scale if you're building a lot of them those parts are going to be even cheaper maybe even another order of magnitude. For a while it was difficult to actually even comprehend how much cheaper stuff was getting and what that lets you do. And then you see a resin printer for $140 and realize it's a cast-off I found screen one stepper and some extruded parts.
I had a Wanhao Duplicator i3 in 2015 and found it required a lot of tinkering and calibration every time I wanted to use it. I ended up selling it as it was so time consuming to get everything correctly set up that it just killed any interest I had in it.
I built a Prusa MK4 this spring; it calibrated itself and printed a great looking piece right from the get-go. The difference is night and day.
I say this as someone who doesn’t want 3d-printing as a hobby. It’s just a tool I want to occasionally use in order to get something else done and the less time I have to spend tramming and calibrating, the better.
Even something that seems as simple as "sous vide" cooking, which is basically a heater hooked to a thermocouple, took a lot of little innovations to make practical to hand to the masses.
And then, there's the general improvement in motors speed, precision, and cost, along with any number of advancements here and there and everywhere to make it practical.
Could someone thrust back to the 1970s and given a fairly substantial budget make some kind of 3D printer? Probably. But it's slow, extremely expensive, and can print various sizes of plastic bricks and spheres and other very algorithmically simple objects, and in rather low quality without many, many years further development. I can think of many ways of bodging on various improvements, but they're all going to have their own compromises, not be garden paths to what we now think of as modern 3D printing. (For example, someone could bodge together a machine that offsets a rod on the printer head, and then in the offset space, has an object to be "copied", by basically banging into the object with a very crude sensor, so there's no generation of geometry at all. But this is going to be clumsy, inaccurate, and full of very complex and disheartening limitations.) You're not going to be printing Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson's face embedded into a toilet [1] or anything, at 1MB of geometry. It will be commercially useless and inaccessible to hobbyists.
[1]: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6436138/files
3D printing is not one of them.
People have been doing CAD/CAM since the 01950s. Boeing started using CNC in 01958 on IBM 704s, and MIT's Servomechanisms Lab (working with the Aircraft Industries Association: https://web.archive.org/web/20090226211027/http://ied.unipr....) sent out CNC ashtrays to newspaper reporters in 01959: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_numerical_control#C.... Pierre Bézier started writing UNISURF in 01968 at Renault, who was using it to design car bodies by 01975. The Utah Teapot was created in 01975, and it consists of nine Bézier patches; you could print the whole dataset on a business card: https://web.archive.org/web/20141120132346/http://www.sjbake...
The IBM 704 was a vacuum-tube machine that could carry out 12000 floating-point additions per second and had a failure about once every 8 hours https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_704. The Intel 8008 (not 8088, not 8080, 8008) that came out in 01972 could carry out over 79000 8-bit integer additions per second, which is about the same speed. But much faster computers were already available, such as the PDP-8, in wide use for real-time control, and they very rapidly became much cheaper. Any computation MIT's Servomechanisms Lab could do in the 50s was doable by hobbyists by the 80s.
The reason 3-D printers mostly use stepper motors is that they don't require closed-loop feedback control. 2-D printers from the 01970s used stepper motors for the same reason. They were accessible to hobbyists; in the 80s I had a Heathkit printer someone had built from a kit in the 70s.
If you wanted to print Frank Sinatra's face on a toilet, I think you'd probably want at least a 64×64 heightfield to get a recognizable Sinatra; 256×256 would be better than the line-printer pictures we were doing. 8 bits per heightfield point would be 65 kilobytes, which would fit on the floppy disks we were using at the time. This would have been totally feasible, though digitizing Frank Sinatra would have been a nontrivial project, quite aside from printing him.
So I don't think computation was the limiting factor.
Your "basically banging into the object with a very crude sensor, so there's no generation of geometry at all" is called a "pantograph" and it has been a common way to copy three-dimensional objects and engrave letters with a milling machine for 180 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantograph#Sculpture_and_minti...
https://futurism.com/expiring-patents-set-to-improve-3d-worl...
Link: https://books.google.com/books?id=0bqdMvDMv74C&pg=PA32&dq=st...
Directly controlling industrial machines from a microprocessor was very rare before the 1980s.
1. Cheap stepper motors and electronics from China
2. Expiration of Stratasys patents in 2009
3. Widespread availability of CAD software and desktop computers powerful enough to run it
4. Reprap project made it easy for companies (and individuals!) to develop their own printers
And with waiting 5 hours to print it isn't unreasonable to wait an hour or two for the slicer either.
A complete set of woodworking or metalworking tools was a lot cheaper than a home computer. And there were entire magazines dedicated to proliferating free or easily obtained schematics/designs. Labor was also cheaper, and people had more time for hobbies.
I would also argue the point that it would have been relatively cheap. We are used to the ubiquity of cheap DC motors and precision parts being a click away. But if you were to rummage through a vintage Radio Shack to cobble together a home printer, I think you would struggle to construct anything precise enough with consumer available parts.
> a melting plastic
Don't sleep on the chemistry of filament. It has to be extremely precise and consistent. We benefit from the massive economies of scale today, but this was small batch stuff 20-30 years ago. And if we are talking about the 1970s the plastics were really primitive by today's standards.
A 10MB hard drive cost $3,000-4,000 in 1980.
That's $12k-15k today.
Just opening the .stl file and having it render (USABLY) on screen in high-resolution was probably not economical until the late 1990s-early 2000s.
I am used to computing tasks being human-perception instant. It takes tens of seconds to run repairs on 3d models, which means it would have taken tens of hours to do that same thing, if there was even enough RAM, in the 90s.
Mind you they were nothing like the tabletop consumer ones we have today. They were about the same of a large American refrigerator.
Since it was not really any special or amazing for us to have several of them, I have to imagine that industrial 3D printing capabilities were well established by the point.
Edit: as I recall they were mostly used to make parts which could be given a nice surface finish and then from which silicone molds could be made.
- Home 3D printing is often more of a hobby than a traditional prototyping or engineering discipline. People view it as a skill to have, and a fun use of free time. Note how the cheapest and most finicky ones are popular; they can be made to work well through careful operation, troubleshooting, procedures, customization etc. They are not set-and-forget, and I think the userbase likes that.
- Home 3D printer parts (the motors, frames, electronics etc) are almost exclusively sourced from China. We live in an AliBaba world; that wasn't always the case.
Those AliExpress clone kits were really popular in the community in the beginning
Easy. The printing process itself is not that hard.
It's the model _design_ that is tricky. We needed home computers to become powerful enough to run 3D CAD software, and enough people to get proficient with it.
RepRap started in 2005. Realistically, we could have had it maybe a few years earlier. But not _much_ earlier.
So really, for an average hobbyist the idea of a 3D printer controllable from a home PC wouldn't really be possible until like the mid 90s. So you really need to start your look at why it wasn't a thing at some point in history I'd start the digging there, not the 1970s.
Fused Deposition Modeling or FDM (1989, expired in 2009), Liquid-Based Stereolithography or SLA (1986, expired in 2006), Selective Laser Sintering or SLS (1992, expired in 2012), metal processes like Selective Laser Melting (SLM) and Direct Metal Laser Sintering (DMLS) (1996, expired 2016).
CAD skills are essential, and it turns out not as hard as you might have thought!
If you think of it as functional/decorative categorisation first of all, obviously some people will overlap but broadly speaking I think people are interested for one or the other, then within the 'decorative' camp you can go a hell of a lot further without and I think it's more obviously reasonable to not care about designing your own models. You never wanted to design your own toys, but there's appeal in printing things not available on Amazon, unofficial merch for a film you like, or whatever.
Not to say there isn't functional stuff (which I exclusively print) on these sites, but often it won't be quite what I want, so yeah I end up in Fusion. (And typically starting from scratch eventually, because for some reason people don't share source, and working with imported STLs is hellish.)
My friend is filling up hard drives with 3D models DMs share.
The way inkjet and laser printers work is also quite different from the way a 3d printer works. The similarity is mostly in the gantry, so there was nontrivial innovation required here.
To some extent 3d printing is probably also a reaction to decreased access to domestic manufacturing. It doesn't make a lot of sense to produce most parts in plastic if you can get a cast or milled part quickly and cheaply.
There's also the problem of 3D modeling and slicing. Again up until quite recently, 3D CAD was out of reach for most consumers. Either due to hardware capabilities or cost of the software. Slicing is its own entire branch of 3D processing and it took time to develop all the techniques we use today that make it fast and reliable. Slicing software could only exist after the printers were common.
As well, I expect the availability and materials science of the plastics we use needed some further development.
As I recall, 3D printers rose to prominence at about the same time and speed as we started getting genuinely powerful personal computers. You really needed a fast CPU, and printing became more accessible as the early I5/I7 generations became cheaply available.
While you absolutely could build an FDM printer with 80s technology, I don't think it could ever be practical or affordable. Even if someone invented all the computational techniques for slicing, the compute available back then was not even close. It would literally take an actual supercomputer to slice your model. It'd take many, many hours on any consumer computer. This would hold true until the early 2000s. At a random guess, I'd say the tipping point would have been around the Pentium 4.
So, same as most technologies we take for granted these days. Enabled almost exclusively by the speed and capacity of computer available to consumers.
Early home 3D-printers also required more of the user. It took a lot of tweaking to make them produce decent prints.
The 3-D printers you're seeing today are basically the series of RepRap designs, named after famous scientists who studied self-reproduction: Darwin, Mendel, and Huxley. The RepRap project, which started in 02005, is the reason this happened. For the first several years, it was about half a dozen people: Rhys Jones, Patrick Haufe, Ed Sells, Pejman Iravani, Vik Olliver, Chris Palmer (aka NopHead) and Adrian Bowyer. The last three of these did most of the early work. Once they got it basically working, after many years of work, a lot of other people got involved.
There were a series of developments that had to happen together to get a working low-cost printer. They had to use PLA, because the plastics conventionally used (mostly ABS) had such a high thermal coefficient of expansion that they needed a heated build chamber. They had to design their own electronics, because Arduino didn't exist. They had to figure out how to build a hotend that wouldn't break itself after a few hours. They had to write a slicer. They had to write a G-code interpreter. They weren't industrial engineers, so they didn't know about Kapton. They wasted a lot of time trying to make it work without even a heated bed, to keep costs down. They improvised leadscrews out of threaded rod and garden hose. They made rotational couplings from aquarium tubing. Lots and lots of inventions were needed to get the cost down from US$60k to US$0.3k, and lots and lots of time was wasted on figuring out how to get the resulting janky machines to be reliable enough to be usable at all.
Starting in the mid-90s, Don Lancaster was excited about 3-D printers, which he called "Santa Claus machines" https://www.tinaja.com/santa01.shtml, when he could see that they were possible. He wrote lots of technical articles about building what he called "flutterwumpers": "low cost machines that spit or chomp". https://www.tinaja.com/flut01.shtml. But nobody listened. I don't know if he ever built so much as a sign cutting machine himself.
Journalists like to talk about the patents, maybe because they're legible to nontechnical people in a way that difficulties with your retraction settings aren't, but when I was obsessively reading the RepRap blogs in the period 02005–02010, I can't recall that they ever mentioned the patents. They were just constantly hacking on their software, fixing their machines, having then break again after a few more hours of printing, and trying new stuff all the time. I don't think the patents even existed in their countries, and they were researchers, anyway, and generally patents don't prevent research. Maybe there's a vast dark-matter bulk of for-profit hackers who would have gotten involved and started up profitable consumer 3-D printing companies before 02005 if it hadn't been for the patents, but who never got interested because of the patents.
But what I saw was that businesspeople started commercializing RepRaps once the open-source RepRap hackers got them to work somewhat reliably. Before that, they mostly weren't thinking about it. After that, most of them spent a lot of years shipping very slightly tweaked RepRap designs. Josef Prusa got involved in the RepRap project and redesigned Ed Sells's Mendel, and everybody copied him, and he famously started selling it himself, very successfully. https://reprap.org/wiki/The_incomplete_RepRap_Prusa_Mendel_b... And more recently Bambu Labs has apparently gotten the machines to be much easier to use.
But for at home 3D printers it seemed like it was the hobbyists who did most of the R&D, then the companies came in later
The most expensive part of home is general the land it's built on.
There are all sorts of restrictions and rules that create this artificial scarcity. Even something as simple as buying a plot of land and parking a trailer on it is not legal in most places except in designated trailer parks. You can get a trailer for next to nothing. And lots of people live in them. But try finding a place where it is legal to put one down and live in one. If it were legal, lots of people would do that. Land plots are scarce and once you have one, you can't just do what you want with it in most places.
I'm just using trailers as an example here. Think prefab buildings and raw material cost. This isn't rocket science. We've been building shelters since the stone age.
There are of course good arguments for this to be made in big cities because of a lack of space. But it's equally frowned upon in areas where there's plenty of space.
The patents expiring was a big deal, since the main patent was on the fused deposition process itself.
The other factor was that normal desktop computers had become powerful enough to run sophisticated 3d modeling programs and make machine motion computations from 3d design files.
Before that, the precision available without gearing and feedback wasn't sufficient. There were systems but they were order of magnitude more complicated and several orders more expensive.
You can look at early calibration settings descriptions and they're still talking about e.g. "The number of X stepper-motor steps needed to move 1 mm for the PIC."
The patents, compute, research access, and dozens of other relatively small barriers created a thicket of challenges and no obvious way to reconcile them, even if you had all the right ideas and inspiration. I think the internet would have been needed in order for all those ideas to come together in the right way.
hard drives use voice coils, a completely different technology. The circuitry that does that evolved and certainly influenced the creation of microstepper controllers: the neat trick they do is treat the stepper motor as a voice coil in between full steps.
Hell, CNC machines existed back then too.
I mean, towards the end of the decade was something like the ImageWriter, which let you do bitmapped graphics, as a row of 9 dots at a time. At https://www.folklore.org/Thunderscan.html?sort=date you can read about the difficulties of turning it into a scanner. (Like, 'We could almost double the speed if we scanned in both directions, but it was hard to get the adjacent scan lines that were scanned in opposite directions to line up properly.')
The LaserWriter wasn't until 1985 or so. My first hard drive, 30 MB, was a present from my parents around 1987.
By the 1996, laser-based 3D printing based on cutting out layers of paper was a thing, available for general use in one of the computing labs in the university building where I worked.
The result smelled like burnt wood.
When I visited a few years later they had switched to some other technology, and one which could be colored, but I forgot what.
They will probably never be the sort of thing that exists in every home, but they could very well be the sort of thing that exists in every home workshop.