3D Printing- Open Sourced?

What do you do if, say, your phone case breaks or you need a new coffee mug? Today, you would probably drive to Wal-Mart or Target, find a product shipped thousands of miles from China or Indonesia, and buy it and bring it home. But what if you didn’t have to do this? What if, instead of wasting your time and money driving, finding, and purchasing a product made half a world away, you could simply upload a design file and print it out yourself?

With the growing commercialization of the 3D printer, this will soon not only be possible, but perhaps even quite common. 3D printing, once the province of architectural design and cutting-edge medicine, is rapidly expanding beyond this niche and into people’s homes and businesses. In similar fashion to the PC revolution of yesterday’s generation, advances in industrial technology accompanied by the constant tinkering of open sourcing hobbyist groups have whittled down the price and expanded the potential uses of the 3D printer to nearly the point of everyday practicality. As this process continues, 3D printing may soon reach the tipping point of the mainstream market– with potentially revolutionary consequences.

But what even is a 3D printer? And how does it work?

A 3D printer is exactly what it’s named: a printer that doesn’t only spray ink onto paper like your traditional two-dimensional HP Officejet, but creates actual objects in three dimensions. Essentially, you upload the precise design of your desired product to the printer, press START, and it whizzes away. Each printer works via many different processes depending on the material used, but unlike traditional machining that subtractively cuts excess away from the original, they all produce additively by gradually building the product up. This saves a great deal of resources, making 3D printing relatively efficient compared to the older means of production.

Once, this process was restricted to plastics and plasters that could be easily liquidized and extruded or sprayed from a nozzle, but with the development of technologies such as direct metal laser sintering and electron beam melting, strong, dense elements with high melting points (like steel and titanium alloys) can now be used.

What does this mean for the future? The possibilities are virtually endless, and like in the early days of the computer, still waiting to be explored.

Companies like EOS, Morris Technologies, and Stratasys are focusing on the more certain market, approaching precision-dependent manufacturers and concept companies with the large, specialized, more expensive 3D printers. It is likely that 3D printing’s most transformative near-future success will occur in this area. With a 3D printer, businesses will no longer have to invest large amounts of capital in the initial custom tooling and system preparation that is required for each of their new products. Instead, they will be able to print off sample prototypes and test them with the public at a fraction of the cost and risk. Entrepreneurs also will be able to use this same advantage to test the waters with their ideas. What will result is a new system of manufacturing dependent more on flexible innovation and unique, personalized products than the bulk production of the past.

The future of open sourced personal 3D printers is less clear, but potentially even greater:

This side of the story, the organization that has been at work the longest and probably has the best claim as the founder of the personal 3D printer movement is RepRap. RepRap’s goal as a non-profit, completely open sourced community project is to design the first entirely self-replicating machine. They envision a world in which many of the everyday products we depend on can be made at home by a device that we can completely remake– and that will only improve as it is used by more people. These people will actively share their designs on the Internet and through their continuous crowd-sourced improvements, gradually come up with superior products. Currently, the most advanced RepRap– the Mendel– can make well over half of its own parts, but it will take the successful adoption of circuit-board, sensor, and advanced microcontroller printing mechanisms (RepRap currently works on Arduino) for RepRap to truly become organic. However, even if it never quite manages to completely reproduce itself, the RepRap may soon become a boon for business, edging into the lower (read cheaper) echelons of the entrepreneurial market and performing the same water-testing function of high end 3D printers.

(Watch minutes 2:50-3:20 for a description of how a basic RepRap 3D printer works)

However, if RepRap accomplishes their goal of self-replication and can get regular people to actually buy into this project, they believe that they will have accomplished a paradigm shift in the means of production. Once a few people have a self-replicating machine they can easily share it with their friends, those friends on to others, and so on exponentially – open hardware in its purest, most grassroots form. As their website explains, they will have successfully put “a factory in every home.”

Is this likely to occur? If the PC Revolution has taught us anything, it is that we should never underestimate the possibilities of technology– even if we do not know quite yet how it will be used. Right now, a “China on every desk” seems a little farfetched, but the experts thought the same thing about the Apple II. The impact on business seems more assured, but I agree with RepRap at least to the extent that 3D printing will one day have a big effect on people’s personal lives. Perhaps twenty-five years from now everyone really will be printing off their own coffee mugs. Only the future will tell. 

http://reprap.org/wiki/Main_Page

http://www.makerbot.com/

http://www.economist.com/node/18114221