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MakerBot's 3-D printers will soon be able to produce items that look like bronze, limestone, and wood, thanks to a new line of plastic-based composite materials shipping later this year. But the launch may be too little, too late: Entrepreneurs and artists interested in working with metal and wood are already embracing desktop milling machines that can handle the real deal.
The calculation is simple: Buy a MakerBot Replicator, the leading desktop 3-D printer, for $2,889, and you can produce plastic prototypes or the kind of trinkets that you might find in a Happy Meal. Buy a small-scale milling machine like the Othermill, which retails for $2,199, and you can make jewelry and mechanical parts out of everything from aluminum to walnut.
"Once you can cut metal, you can make things that last," says Danielle Applestone, chief executive of Other Machine Co. "For the first couple of months that I was working here, I was scared of cutting with metal. It was louder, I was worried I was going to break the tool. But as soon as I jumped in, it quickly became like wax to me."
"Metal is power, it really is," she says. "You don't go back."
It should be noted that MakerBot's base model also went from $400 to almost $3K when Stratasys acquired them.
Original Submission
(Score: 4, Interesting) by anubi on Thursday June 11 2015, @07:36AM
Dave, your dad was in the fray right at the peak of being able to tinker with the lowest level of electronics. Assembly code so to speak.
In that day, everything was made with vacuum tubes and discrete parts - which could be disassembled and reassembled into something completely different. Everything out there was kinda like a pre-assembled "erector set" ( if you remember those old toys ). One could disassemble a couple of TV sets and get enough parts to build a guitar amp, record player amp, test equipment, whatever. Parts were parts. Everything had the same parts in them.
Transistors were just coming out. And even then, one could build lots of stuff with anything that acted like a transistor.
We now live in a world of custom designed ASIC's and the like. Like a water pump for a 1948 Ford, its designed for that and just that.
I open up a modern piece of stuff, and there is nothing in there for me to disassemble! Its a black blob with 100 leads going to it. I will destroy it by trying to remove it. I have no spec sheet for it either. Gone are the days I find a dozen vacuum tubes whose specs were published in tube manuals. Gone are the days of those simple transformer driven power supplies.
I took a phone apart and got all sorts of little things out of it. Old Western Electric 500 series phone. But there was little in it I could do anything with, other than try to get the ringer to work or get the talk circuit to run on a lantern battery. I think I am pretty good in salvaging stuff, but I cannot find a thing in a modern cellphone I can disassemble and reassemble into anything else. The thing is absolutely useless. I hate like the dickens to throw my old stuff away, because it was made with discrete parts and I keep thinking there has got to be some kid that wants to take it apart just to put it back together another way... think old Tektronix 545 oscilloscope.
I find old computers thrown out. Almost nothing to take apart. Maybe get a disk drive, CDRom, power supply, CPU, or memory. And they only fit other devices. The most interesting thing I found was disassembling the old monitors. They were usually chock full of transistors, resistors, diodes, capacitors, and assorted magnetics that could be rewired into any number of toys. What IC's they used were often documented. Same with PC Power supplies. Good for a SMPS controller chip, a pair of high voltage transistors, and some assorted resistors, capacitors, and magnetics. The modern flat screen monitors have little in them to work with. Maybe the LCD inverter.
I feel for these kids today. They do not get the "pleasure" of taking something apart and seeing exactly what made it work. I still remember smashing vacuum tubes because I was so curious as to what was in them. Ok.. nothing but wire. But I just had to see for myself. Same went for every part in a lot of electronic stuff I got into as a kid. And I mean "got into". Literally. As in: "I used a hammer to open it up". There was something to see in that old stuff. What was in a transformer. What was in an IF can. What was in a resistor. What was in a capacitor. Nothing was sacred. I was curious. It was junk. And it was *really* junk when I got through with it. I spent many afternoons as a kid disassembling stuff. It was quite some time before I actually reassembled something that worked. I still remember the thrill I got just getting the heater circuit of a vacuum tube connected to a lantern battery and watching the tube 'light up'. It would be two more years before I had learned enough to build an operable code practice oscillator.
I could not build anything from a bunch of defunct MP3 players or phones.
In college, they may teach theory, but it takes years of actually working with stuff to get a good feel for the art of making it work. Like building an operable air conditioner. The books may teach the exact thermodynamic equations that govern its operation, however in practice what good did that do if you did not get the lubrication system proper, all of your oil collected in the accumulator, and your compressor ground itself to death?
I believe a good trade school would be a better investment of a kid's time these days, as from what I see - few people can actually make things work. And our business elite still seem to value management skills of getting the least expensive labor more than they value the future availability of skilled labor. The way things are going, I believe businesses are going to have to foot the bill for tuition if they want a trained work force, and they will have to retain skilled tradesmen if they do not want to go through the procedure of training another one.
Right now, it seems there is a huge surplus of very highly trained craftsmen available, but trained in yesterday's technology.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by lentilla on Thursday June 11 2015, @08:11AM
Don't be too sad - every generation has its own mysteries and its own set of wonder. The new generation will find things to make - it's just a different set of things.
Perhaps the next generation won't be so good at scrounging a few parts, hammering them together, and getting something to work again. What they are likely to be better at is the next level above that - ascertaining what and where to source modules that build much more complicated machines. People that are conditioned to working with "parts" aren't always so good at remembering that the new generation of higher-order modules can be cobbled together in a similar fashion to the way that older folk constructed something out of discrete components. It's just progress at work.
There are still parts to be found in thrown away printers, scanners and DVD drives, so don't write the eulogy on that era yet. (Lots of servos and photo-interrupters, for example.) The flip side is that we can buy what amounts to "magic" for small amounts of money. As an example, one can buy sub-degree resolution (and accuracy) digital thermometers for a couple of bucks. Our forefathers would be so jealous.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by anubi on Thursday June 11 2015, @09:01AM
Point taken...
The printers, scanners, and disk drives have many interesting parts in them. Printers and scanners have motor drivers, optical position detectors, and interesting mechanical assemblies, shafts, and gears. Floppy disk drives have steppers, and HDD's have neodymium magnets in the head positioner, as well as interesting bearing assemblies.
I was just talking to some of my colleagues today over how impressed I am over what some would call the lowly Arduino.
I can build damned near anything with it. Very inexpensively. I was lamenting on whether or not to keep a drawer full of old 6502 parts and associated IC's. I could not justify keeping them, as I had nothing to support by keeping them, and there is no way I would ever design another 6502 based system when I have all these neat ATMEL 328's.
For me, those ATMEL 328's are an ideal example of the "magic" you referred to. Along with all the I2C support chips now available. Unbelievable precision. For a song.
I still can't get over just how inexpensive it is to build these things, and if I have a lot of really persnickety stuff ( like stepper motors or DMX lighting protocols ) to run, I can offload that to yet another simple eight-core Propeller chip (Parallax 8X32). For a fraction of the price I paid for just the memory board for my IMSAI 8080.
Cost is definitely no longer the limiting factor it once was. Now the problem is mostly bootstrapping one's knowledge up high enough to catch on and use these things.
However, let me say too that there will be some startup costs that cost every bit as much as my IMSAI cost me... like getting a good microscope and soldering tools to assemble tiny SMT circuit boards, getting books of SMT part assortments from China, as well as learning how to use EAGLE so you can get PCB's made. There is a lot more front-end training these days required before you can actually produce a unique thing of your own design. Its no longer an evening with a soldering iron, a breadboard, and a box of leaded parts.
The tools are more powerful than anything I have ever had before - and mostly free. Arduino compiler - free. EAGLE - free ( at least the training version that restricts you to small circuit boards - good enough for this kind of stuff ). Propeller compiler - free. Linear Technology even provides a free SPICE simulator. My main development computer is an off-the-shelf WalMart laptop that was less expensive than an Iphone.
Its things like this which make me believe a mentor that can bootstrap a kid is more important than ever, yet I see little effort being made to help the next generation get through that initial barrier of learning the tools.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 11 2015, @08:13AM
you have to do things at a higher/different level:
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/05/chinas-mass-production-system/370898/ [theatlantic.com]
http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4297 [bunniestudios.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 11 2015, @07:09PM
I needed a laser pointer at about 50mW - to measure the diff in altitude between two points at about 800m distance - the max allowed for selling in Australia is 5mW (for a handheld pointer). A scavenged red laser diode from an old DVD burner with a constant current driver, in a cheap chinese mount with a plastic lens have done the trick - I put everything in a box that's obvious is not to be held by hand, just not to risk running afoul with firearm and weapons legislation.