On 3/6/2018 6:11 PM, Dan Roganti wrote:
Herb Johnson wrote:
Dave McGuire did not post about "incredible things" made, but in fact CREDIBLE things - like that finger splint. He could have used popsickle sticks and string; but his local printer + thingiverse design = useful widget. (shrug) 3D printers may simply become like waffle irons and pancake mix: something you do when needed and ignored soon after. Of course they could do more; like icecream cones. ;)
I don't see how posting about incredible points of fact is useless/impractical versus credible, perhaps you meant being ambitious vs. practical. Because I think it serves to enlighten people about the state of technology available today.
Right. I'm saying that Dave McGuire is saying "I'm doing useful things with my 3D printer, today". If some of them are mundane, that's a working definition of "useful". Waffles are useful.
At work, where we develop end-to-end motion control systems, one of our many fields involves additive manufacturing, eg. 3D Printing. While Makerbot was hitting the consumer market with their initial foray into 3D printing with their Cupcake 3D Printer over 6 yrs ago, and the open-source 3D Printing group called Rep-Rap was still in it's infancy, we were delivering system capable of printing with biological tissue on the cellular level. Our client was a medical researcher out of Harvard developing 3D Printed Human organs.
Dan, thanks for calling out this technology. This is "incredible" when looked at from the past. It's important and potentially useful. But it's not cheap or something you'll do in your basement in 10, 20 years. I think you'll say, this is a multi-million dollars budget, probably tens of millions, to support the lab and the medical staff who "support" this "printer". It's only one part of a much more complicated service. And, I know a little, about commercial 3D printing of serious parts. Aircraft for instance. Same deal - multi-million dollars tools, or at least hundreds of thousands of dollars. Again - we won't print fuel injectors in our basements. The topic is now, printing plastic parts for replacing plastic parts in our vintage computers. herb -- Herbert R. Johnson, New Jersey in the USA http://www.retrotechnology.com OR .net