Fast forward a few years, and my dad acquired a competitor who happened to have a 3D printer. Now my dad's company would make the design, print it out, and show it to the customer. One customer did not like this at all, so much in fact that they sued my dad's company. If the engineers could make these parts themselves, how long until they could make them with metal? How long before the die makers were turned redundant? The die makers have a lot of money invested in very expensive equipment to make these parts, and now 3D printers can make plastic replicas of them much cheaper (though there are obvious downsides in terms of scale and tolerance).
When the company filed suit, they dropped the contract with my dad's firm (which happened to be the die maker's only design shop) and spent all their contingency funds on the suit. The company was bankrupt before it ever saw court. So yeah, this technology has a lot of important industries very concerned.
Can a 3D printer really be acquired at this price level now? Does anyone have any model recommendations in this range?
(from http://reprap.org/wiki/RepRap)
I believe this is one, but you'll have to build it yourself after sourcing parts.
Our current and past soda bottles have become the great pacific garbage patch. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_Garbage_Patch
I think the future of recycling is going to be more largely affected by a reduction in consumption.
No need to turn into Al Gore from a lighthearted take on the future of 3D printing.
Oh, I agree 100%. I was thinking a phone could be ideal here. You'd just wave it through the air, drawing what you want, you could review what you've drawn in the screen and adjust parameters, and it could vibrate to give haptic feedback to help you draw in a straight line, or let you know when your path connects to another that you've drawn. Stuff like that.
Unfortunately, it looks like there's too much noise in the accelerometers to make the double integration to position meaningful. Something like Sensor Fusion[1] can make it more accurate by incorporating data from the gyroscope and compass, but even so it's not enough.
In any case, like you I hope someone develops something intuitive to really help 3D printing take off. The future should be interesting...
Making general models by waving a phone around would be difficult enough, I can't imagine trying to use it to create a model detailed enough to actually print a usable part.
Now, making 3D modellers is actually something I have a lot of experience with. If anyone wants to have a discussion about how we could actually create an interface for a 3D modeller targeted at consumer modelling of 3D printable parts; Well, that's a discussion I'd love to have.
I guess, it's easy for me to imagine a shape - i can draw that shape on a piece of paper, but i find it hard to express that same shape using modeling software.
Say, wrap some text around the surface of a sphere. I'm pretty sure i could, letter by letter, orient and kern text in OpenSCAD but it would take me a long time to do.
i imagine in the not to distant future there will be a motion tracker or kinect app to allow shaping stuff like clay - or maybe just use clay and scan it in.
In any case, all the software i've used feels clunky. iMovie for modeling will be a big deal.
(sorry, it had to be done)
