When compared to how hard this was a decade ago, the cost to build physical prototypes has effectively fallen to 0. This is both in terms of the money and time. I really believe we'll see a renaissance of physical goods in the next decade.
Previously you'd need to find a factory and contract with them to manufacture a minimum number of items. It would cost several thousand dollars at least and take weeks if not months to get your product.
Once you have the physical item in your hand, you can start the testing process which feeds into the next iteration cycle.
Or you made it out of wood. Or metal. Or clay. Or carved it by hand out of a block of plastic. Building and testing three or four versions of a tool is just a normal day for a shop carpenter or metal worker. Many of this guy's "inventions" are just jigs for holding things. Youtube is full of metal shops fabricating and testing jigs for strange use cases.
3D printing has been big for us. No, we don't make money directly from it, or not very much. And it's extremely expensive per unit.
But it allows us to design a part for injection molding, and then iterate it many times until we are happy with the functionality of it.
Once we commit to an injection mold, it might be $15k or $30k to get it made, and it'll take 6 months. But we know that the fit will be nearly perfect by the time those first shots come out. Then we can roll with making thousands or hundreds of thousands of parts per day at the efficiency of scale.
The way that 3D printing is used by hobbyists looks fairly different than the way it's used in industry. In industry, we're mostly still using traditional design-for-manufacturing principles for the prototype: for example, we're designing it so that it could be injection molded and ejected properly from a mold, even though the 3D print doesn't need that. That's because our intent is to merely confirm what we see in Solidworks in the real world, and to show a customer an idea in their hands in the shape and form it'd actually be produced at scale.
I'm not compelled by the idea that 3D printing is going to make a big difference by allowing very small runs of parts (except for prototyping in the manner above). That's because like everything, there is a power law when it comes to parts. Nearly all the revenue comes from medium and higher volume products. Sure, it's useful in niche applications, and for things like jigs, but as much as people love to talk about the power of long tails, it rarely is as good a fit to the real world as the power law.
But the idea that 3D printing is making a big difference in improving the design and innovation with those medium to higher volume products made with conventional manufacturing methods is absolutely true.
On the contrary, that future has been here for years. I print a ton of stuff for me (I'm printing one now!), they aren't prototypes (as in, I won't eventually make them "from something else"), they are the final part.
3D printing has enabled me to have custom parts, to my exact specifications, in record time, for pennies. It's amazing. Of course it's not going to make a difference to your revenue, the entire point is that, with a 3D printer, I don't have to come to you at all.
But I'm a realist. Look at the total poundage of all resin sales to the 3D print market. It would be generous to call it a rounding error in comparison to conventional resin sales. People like you or me are not the norm. The market for conventionally produced high volume parts is enormous compared to hobbyists 3D printing stuff at home.
That's because most people consume the same small set of products repeatedly, and they care about cost, and some of my machines produce at a rate of ten parts per second with part weights 90% less than what's feasible with 3D printing. It's just the way markets work: most volume is accounted for in a small percentage of products, and engineers will always be able to get much more efficiency out of a specialized machine designed for a small number of high volume items than a general purpose machine that can produce anything.
And it could boil down to the fact that mold making is a mature industry with a lot of established supply chain and lead time expectations, and nobody is trying to rock that boat.
Of course you don't want to spend all of that time to get a mold that you can't use because you screwed up on your end and forgot to add a needed feature. The world has not moved away from the benefit of a physical object that you can hold in your hand and see that it's actually right. And the 3d printed prototype can also let you check other things while the mold is being made, such as the fit of things like circuit boards, buttons, and connectors.
The molds also have to be machined to high tolerances. Take vents as an example. Vents allow the ambient air inside a mold to escape as plastic fills, but they must not allow the plastic to escape out the mold on the same route, so they must be machined to a tolerance of around 3 tenths of a thousandth of an inch. That in turn requires high precision CNC machining over fairly large spans, and with many subassemblies to make sure the two halves fit together just right.
Some kinds of molds can be completed faster. Usually smaller parts, or parts where a base size of a mold has already been completed and you are just using inserts. Or if the mold is not expected to last very long, it can be made out of weaker material, which also cuts faster.
I think there are some interesting software opportunities to improve mold build lead times. I suspect some of the design of the molds could be more procedural and automated than they are. That would help cut down the engineering time. And some people are exploring 3D printed molds, which is a cool idea, but currently they are very weak and not useful for production because nobody yet has figured out a way to 3D print high grade tool steel.
3D printing has actually likely increased the number of mold designs we're doing, because it makes it easier to innovate and iterate, and easier for a customer to feel comfortable with a design and move forward with it. It reduces customer utility and engineering risk, and so cuts the total cost of product development.
ignoring the initial outlay of 3d printing and materials
Previously you'd need to find a factory and contract with them to manufacture a minimum number of items
That's never how initial product prototypes have been made. His first versions may be less janky than historic prototyping, but I think we're risking rewriting history to make 3d printing more grandiose than it actually is.
Once we did basic usability testing with this, we went to a low-volume manufacturing run using silicone molds in Shenzhen and FedExed back, turnaround time about 10 days. Price $15k+. Once we were happy with this we did alu molds in Shenzhen for a batch of 500, and you don't want to know the price.
Today I can get 3 hour turnaround for items the same quality as the silicone molds, just by getting our own liquid printer for about $1k. This really does change things for prototyping.
https://jlcpcb.com https://sendcutsend.com https://www.pcbway.com https://www.knifeprint.com
That's a bit of an exaggeration. The cost to build prototypes of soft plastic objects in unusual shapes has significantly diminished. The cost to build electronic prototypes has decreased only marginally, mechatronics, robotics and most types of actuation are still a big boys club etc.
I strongly disagree. Not only have the non-recurring expenses in EE cratered thanks to extensive part libraries and reference designs but the cost of fab & assembly is easily a tenth of what it was a decade or two ago thanks to Chinese manufacturers. Open reference designs with design files are more common than ever, allowing anyone with a little EE knowledge to bootstrap even complex designs. The equipment necessary to solder BGAs at home have fallen to the hundreds of dollars, cheaper than a decent used Metcal.
6DOF robotic arms isn't even a big boys club anymore with several open source versions available off the shelf with fast turn around part availability from McMaster/Misumi and really cheap high tech parts like linear encoders, motors, stages, controllers, etc from Alibaba/express. All of these vendors allow hobbyists to prototype full blown industrial automation, let alone individual products. Open source 3d printers, CNCs, pick and places, and so on abound with plenty of quality open source firmware. People are even starting to tackle linear motors for high precision actuators, the kind you'd find in semiconductor fabs.
Many analog things can be modeled and evaluated using a fast enough CPU, which are cheaply available; see software-defined radios, for instance.
15 years ago I could place an order with a local rapid prototyping company at 3pm and have the part (3d printed) on my desk by lunchtime the next day for under £100 (or much less for very small parts). But those printers were tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. Now for well under 1k you can have a 3d printer yourself.
This person deserves a lot of kudos irrespective of HN finding his work "necessary" OR "worthy". There is a joy in solving a problem (scratch an itch) for the sake of it.
You can live the exact life you dreamt of as a kid with a $150 3D printer and $100 in various Arduino parts. The hard part is imagination and time, everything else is very easy. I would really encourage you to get into making things, it's extremely gratifying.
Here's a random thing I made last night, and the reason why I slept at 8 am:
EDIT: I was half expecting links to printer and arduino parts but coffee offer still stands because you just gave me my "duh!" moment.
I'll post the links to the CAD files and code shortly, I just need to find a name for the thing first.
EDIT: I found a name! I call it "The Timeframe". As promised, the code: https://gitlab.com/stavros/the-timeframe
From an engineering perspective, if someone is this clever and creative, I'd love to see him put this much effort into something genuinely useful!
Not to make this sound too grandiose, but I'm confident some children watching this guy will become engineers because they were inspired to build stuff. It is educational, and thinking "I'd love to see him put this much effort into something genuinely useful" seems to be missing the point on how useful this type of content is.
Many types of work require vast institutional support (particle colliders), but we should think about incorporating every day creation into our lives. The agency of making something of your own, instead of just buying something, lends dignity and power to our lives.
This rivals Bob's Burgers' "Spice Rack" and "Spiceps" that Bob and Linda invent in competition with each other.
Kudos, and much respect!
