> Maybe the answer is a tentative yes, given news like the recent case about guns and 3D printing.
In my observation these news lead to maker nerds "prepper-buying" (get such a machine before they become forbidden) quite a lot of such machines recently. :-)
> Yes. Met those guys in my TechShop days. They also insisted that 3D printers should be made with 3D printers, which resulted in a generation of flimsy, inaccurate machines.
I do believe that this vision is basically correct, but the implementation of these eager 3D printing enthusiasts was deeply flawed:
There exist lots of designs of really good 3D printers on the internet that are at least partly 3D-printed. So at least a relevant subset of the parts of a 3D printer can be 3D-printed. The reason why commercial 3D printers are typically not 3D-printed is rather aesthetics and the fact that for large-scale manufacturing there typically exist much cheaper production techniques.
As people by now have realized (and some of these points were told to these eager 3D printing enthusiasts from beginning on), the correct approach to get towards an exceptional "mostly 3D-printed 3D printer" is rather:
- Improve 3D printers so that even more parts of a 3D printer can be 3D-printed in high quality (e.g. by improving sensors and software to increase precision; make the 3D printer capable of handling engineeering materials; ...)
- Use a 3D printer to produce parts for machines that can be used to produce parts for a 3D printer, such as CNC mill, CNC lathe, pick and place machine (for populating the PCBs) etc.
Both of these aspects are hot topics that people work on.
In other words: Accept for now that many, but not all parts of a 3D printer can currently sensibly be 3D-printed, and invest serious efforts to develop solutions how 3D printing can be used to enable a high-quality production of these remaining parts.
Sure, and that's useful but not revolutionary nor exclusive to 3D printers. You can use a milling to mill a bunch of pieces for a milling machine. You can use a PCB printer to print the PCBs for a PCB printer. A 3D printer is much, much closer to this than it is to a self-replicating machine.
"One Print, Multiple Components: Pick & Place Tool
Some technical prints require additional components, such as magnets, threaded inserts, or bearings, to be placed during the build. Without automation, this typically means you have to pause the print and insert the part(s) by hand. Although PrusaSlicer made this process easier a while ago, The Pick & Place toolhead can do it for you, completely autonomously. This reduces manual intervention and improves placement accuracy.
We’ve co-developed the toolhead with the Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW) and it’s designed for models that combine 3D-printed models with off-the-shelf components. We’re currently targeting late 2026 with its implementation."
> Much like pitches from the Free Software Foundation of a world without copyright and IP.
If there exists no copyright, you cannot force an entity to release the source code of their software.
A world without copyright and IP is for sure an interesting thought experiment, but very different from the FSF vision:
In such a world, there would be much more reverse-engineering and monkey-patching of existing (non-open) software that gets copied around very liberally.
On the other hand, because there exists no enforcable copyright, companies would of course invest a lot of ressources into developing hard to crack copy protection schemes. Similarly, freedom-loving hackers would invest serious ressources into cracking such copy protection schemes.
Interestingly, I am not aware that this book was really popular or well-known in Germany (I honestly hear about this specific book for the first time, though I am aware that some marketers (who in my opinion did not really understand the Maker scene or 3D printing) made such claims).
Instead, at that time, in Germany nerds were getting excited about understanding how to build 3D printers (in particular partially self-replicating ones (RepRap)) and how 3D printing
- could be used to make yourself much more independent of the discretion of part manufacturers (i.e. some part is broken? Use a CAD system to re-design it and 3D-print your re-design),
- makes you capable of building stuff in small scale "that should exist", but no manufacturer is producing,
- enables part designs that are (nearly) impossible to manufacture using any other existing technology, and thus basically enables you to completely reimagine and improve how nearly every produced part that you see around you is designed,
- ...
I would say that the mentioned nerd visions of this time have at least partially been implemented and/or are on a good way towards this goal. It's just that the practical implementations did not come with a spectacular change in the overarching mindet of society, but rather are highly important, but not (necessarily) revolutionary changes in the lifes of people who want these changes to be part of their life.
> Then it was a lot of “self replicating printers” for quite a while, which never has been a real thing.
3D-printed 3D printers got quite far; the reason why this topic got out of perception by people who are not 3D printing nerds is rather that for mass production of 3D printers there exist much better processes.
What was realized was that up to a certain amount of parts, 3D printing these parts on a 3D printer works really well. You can find a lot of designs of such 3D printers on the internet.
Concerning the progress here, also observe that over the last years, home 3D printers got a lot better with respect to handling "engineering materials". These materials are very useful if you want to (partly) 3D-print a 3D printer, but this development is often not associated with "3D-printing 3D printers". :-)
Then you get to parts which can be printed on a 3D printer, but these parts will not be of the same quality as parts that can easily be bought, such as belts etc. The Mulbot is a design that takes this approach very far:
And then you get to parts that are nearly impossible to print on a 3D printer ...
So, after there was a consensus where the boundaries lie how much a 3D printer can sensibly be 3D-printed, people started looking at other manufacturing techniques that exist for producing parts of 3D printers, and started considering
1. could and how far could a machine for this process be 3D-printed (or produced on a 3D-printed machine)?
2. could we bring such a machine to home manufacturing, too (so that people can easily build such a machine at home)?
Machines that were considered for this were, for example, CNC mill (3, 4 and 5 axis), CNC lathe, pick and place machines (for producing PCBs), ...
There do exist partial implementations of such machines, just to give some examples:
- lots of designs of CNC mills that use 3D-printed parts. I won't give a list here, but just want to mention that the "Voron Cascade" project wants to do for home 3 axis CNC milling what the Voron did for 3D printing. Rumors on the internet say that the Voron Cascade is well on the way, but had quite a lot of delays with respect to announced release dates.
Thus: I hope I could give evidence that in the last years there still were a lot of developments towards the far goal of "self-replicating 3D printers", but these developments were rather silent, impressive developments instead of loud, obtrusive marketing stunts.
>
So why is it that every 3D CAD program other than FreeCAD seems to have something that solves this problem "well enough" that most people doing simple designs (aka everything you could possibly print on a 3D printer) don't seem to bump into it?
"This problem is not unique to FreeCAD. It is generally present in CAD software, but most other CAD software has heuristics to reduce the impact of the problem on users."
So, the problem exists in (nearly?) all CAD systems, but in the big expensive commercial CAD programs, a huge amount of manpower was invested to hide the problem better to the user ("heuristics to reduce the impact of the problem on users") so that the users will see much more rarely see such a problem, and thus often won't be aware of the existence of the topological naming problem.
> Is there really a clear separation between tech companies and surveillance/military or is it wishful thinking?
The separation was never completely clear, but there was a time when the separation was much more marked.
The reason was simply that programming culture at that time was more "chaotic", "anti-authoritarian", "open-source"/"free software" (in the erstwhile understanding of this being just a part of a bigger movement, not in the verbal sense), "radical privacy" (cypherpunk), "hacking" (including the legally dubious aspects) etc.
These values were quite opposite to those of the military-industrial or surveillance-industrial complex, so there was a lot of friction between the cultures of the tech companies at that time and these complexes, which made it not particularly attractive for these sides to partner - if only because of the frictions between the sides that were to overcome.
In my observation these news lead to maker nerds "prepper-buying" (get such a machine before they become forbidden) quite a lot of such machines recently. :-)
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