Arduino 3d Printer

[Jay Vaughan]

Seriously, I’ve sort of orbited around the guys at metalab who kicked off the whole 3d-printing revolution - I quite literally have the very first cocktail shot-glass that Bre Petits printed for Roboexotica because I was standing there when he constructed the printer and turned it on for the first time, and since those days have followed wizard and clifford and the rest of the gang pushing things massively forward .. 

The point is: have thought to myself every 6 months on average “soon it’ll be good enough to invest in” but .. until we get laser-sintering/metal deposit style 3d-printing, its all sort of a hack rig.  

Well even though the quality and ‘purity’ of the subject is not quite there yet, thus waiting a while may be prudent, there nevertheless are an infinite number of uses for the things you can do with even a basic, cheap 3d printer in the low-quality/low-tech range, of course - replace any plastic part that breaks, with a new one, build yourself an infinite number of small, useful tools, use 3d-printing as the basis in a production line, and so on .. but pretty much all of that is for an engineers house-hold so far.  There isn’t a Tron-like user-interface to 3d printing.  Yet.  

Actually 3d-printing is only half the effort - 3d design is still the problem.  

Things like OpenSCAD have to be learned before one becomes a real 3d-printing ninja - going from “looking at the broken plastic thing” to “printing a new one” can often be a gargantuan step, but man .. when I see wizard23 or clifford.at fire up OpenSCAD and start constructing geometry on demand, its .. well its a beautiful thing.  Like watching for the first time an assembly coder doing their thing, only instead of a PDP-10, its .. the physical universe .. that is being manipulated/transformed.

You know whats better than having your own 3D printer?  Knowing your friends have one when you need it.  ;)

j.