Reply With QuoteAgreed. I feel like oculus / VR will be great for visualizing the finished product before it becomes reality, but not at all for the actual CAD modeling work.Originally Posted by PBSteve
Star Citizen...end of game wish list
Uhh... I listen to progressive rock or any variant of metal when doing CAD work. (Tesseract, August Burns Red, etc.) Helps me focus.
Only abr I liked was constellations
Im into heavier stuff now like carnifex or black dahlia murder, but I am exclusively metal
People dont understand how you can focus when listening to that kind of music but it is the only stuff that lets me think clearly honestly.
But back OT, I think the whole UI change is somewhat unnecessary as current software is more than adequate at what it does. If there were true time saving benefits that genuinely reduced design time or made the design process significantly easier it would be a no brainer. But as of now I think it is still just something shiny that people like to mess with.
3d printing won't replace existing production due (among other things) to the lengthy production time per workpiece, and I would also say the relative unreliability of the equipment, but it's definitely not a stretch to say it's completely revolutionized many other aspects for the production process aside from that. I mean it's nothing too new since stereolithography has been around for ages, but the price point for the hardware always made it inaccessible, not to mention the constrained market of being served by only a couple developers makes it difficult for repairs/maintenance/sales/support/etc. Also, STL is a pain in the ass...(IMO)
But these days the advent of cheaper stuff really has me excited. Maybe I'm just a junkie but I've owned 3d printers for years and just love seeing all the new ones that are coming out these days. My first one was an "industrial" 3d printer in 2009 which was cutting edge technology at the time...I was the cool kid on the block and it made everything I did infinitely easier. Prototyping, production, whatever. We used it for mold impressions, cosmetic feature tests, reverse-engineering development, everything. It was running 24/7 for months. (then it broke...lol)
So then I'm playing around trying to get parts to repair, but part of my just didn't care much because I had already purchased a Cubify for home. So instead of fixing my $35,000 Dimension printer, I instead just bought another Cubify to replace it. Yes it couldn't do quite as much, but it was pretty damned close. Over the years I've found many things the Dimension was better suited to print, which is why I eventually fixed it, but it was more for trying to regain on the original money spent than anything else. The cheap-ass cubify outperforms the Dimension in many ways. (edit - I should clarify this is mainly due to natural advancements in the technology. it just got MUCH better over the course of only a few years)
In reference to the graph cockerpunk posted, in my opinion we're not reached the first peak yet. Hold on gordon, before you punch me in the dick let me explain...yes there's a lot of hype around printers these days, but I put forth that it's justified because the demand drastically outweighs the supply right now. There's a new printing startup company every month, and they're all making money at it,....which HINTS to the approaching bubble crash, but we're not there yet. We'll know that time when half the startups instantly run out of business and the the unique heavy hitters will be left. I'm no expert, but if past industries are to be used as example then the market has to be first saturated for the crash to occur, we're nowhere close to that right now. Printers are mainstream but are they THAT mainstream? (of course it doesn't help that the words '3d printer' have become a catch-all for any 2-3 axis machine that makes something, but I digress)
It's definitely coming, but at the moment we have many crowdfunded printers that end up getting funded 10x higher than their expectations. People want the technology...yeah it'll crash eventually, but when???? And now we have printers getting down into the sub-$400 range...yeah some of them are crap, but the wheat will be separated from the chaff and we'll end up with some really cool technology here within the next couple years.
Thoughts??????????
From a manufacturing standpoint I think a combination of additive(printing) and subtractive(milling) machines will find their usfullness but we're VERY far from those being practical. There are some companies that make spray-transfer printing/milling machines, like Deckel Maho, but as mentioned the accessibility of machines like that makes them impractical. Same with the SLS printers these days.
Let's go another direction. How mainstream will this additive stuff become, do you all think? I keep one of my Cubes at my mom's house and encouraged her to play around with it. She resists though for lack of CAD program knowledge. I think that's a big barrier facing them from becoming truly "household" parts. it's like the open source discussion you guys had a while back, where people can design stuff all day long but actually making it becomes difficult. With printers, people can print other people's designs as much as they want, but making their own is the tricky part. Is a VR system the answer to that?
Last edited by Ydna; 04-22-2014 at 12:29 PM.
Honestly, I would like to see subtractive technology hybridize with additive. If I were to throw a crazy suggestion out there, then it'd be something like a waterjet that constantly monitors the line pressure to control the depth. Basically like the reverse of a 3D printer... to follow the Mitch Hedberg naming convention it'd be a "subtract-er." (You say what it does and add "er" to the end.) Then do a finish cut with a more traditional mill. IMO, lathes are pretty efficient for what they do.
Panda, I won't tolerate your heresy any more. Matt Greiner is amazing on ALL albums. I'm also a big Killswitch Engage fan... Karnivool, Sevendust, Sky Eats Airplane all keep it interesting.
In for the music suggestions. :P
Maybe we should make a separate thread for them?
Pretty sure my stuff is too br00tal for you guys
If you make a thread I will post in it haha
OT; from a creation perspective Im thinking idealistically. I think the apex of human manufacturing (or any manufacturing for that matter) would be the ability to effortlessly create or edit any material into any shape as quckly as your mind can imagine it. Think of the ease of modern CAD software versus old school manual drafting, similar idea.
We will get there eventually, not in the forseeable future, but eventually
I will take all the brutality you can throw Panda... Mayhem is getting boring.
In terms of the low/consumer end CNC... there's a lot of room to grow for the technology.
Makerbot and other companies are really pushing the state of the art on what a consumer 3D printer can do. And I'm sure that in 4-5 years we'll be printing parts we couldn't imagine right now... with software that will be smart and efficient. That seems to be the way its going.
But where the consumer market really could see some jumps is in the subtractive processes: for example I want to maybe buy a CNC router table for my aircraft business, a 4x4' job for making formers and bulkheads. I know dick-all about electronics and such... but I know CAD. I know milling. I know all of you mostly will scoff at my 'naive opinion' but from a consumer perspective, any average person ought to be able to go and find a company that makes a simple kit with all the stuff one needs in a single SKU, delivered to their door, assemble the components, plug in the motors, tune the calibration, turn on the controller box, and it says "hello, world" and then eats your files and starts cutting stuff.
But no. That doesn't exist. For a consumer-level machine the offering is either complete chinese-made turn-key light-industrial jobs (which is great and all if you wanna spend $5000 or so) and/or glorified erector sets where you spend a LOT of money on plans, brackets, and some plywood sheet.... and you're on your own to figure out what motors and crap you want. A lot of places you gotta buy a table kit, gantry kit, router mount, motor kit, leg kit, dust kit, this that and the other... I get that it's all very 'personal' and some people want to save money here or there... but I'm surprised a company can't just come out with a decently good solution and market it properly and take all the guesswork out of the system for those who want something for some light use and to try it out, but where a 16"x18" table is just useless.
I wanna see a single price, know that's the total price, pay the price, and get a shipment with all the crap I need and know that it's all gonna fit together. I will pay for that. I don't mind putting it together, plugging the parts in, and adjusting the stuff so that the calibration comes out OK.
3D printers are taking off now because they offer just that. Because of their size and their material and additive process that negates needing to buy billets and sheets of material stock... its super user friendly.
I saw one kickstarter that had plans for an all-in-one CNC machine, and it could print, plasma cut, route, engrave, and more. That seemed like a great idea. I would LOVE to see a large 4x8 machine that could print a large part from plastic and then switch to a cutting head to drill all the holes, 3D finish profile certain details to remove the stairstepping, and then go in with a tool that could paint the part right there if I wanted. Especially if the one set of software would handle all those processes with the ease of high-end CAM.
That's a machine that makers would love. None of that is groundbreaking technology, it's about packaging technology we already have in a way that I my sister in highschool could set it up and make things if she wanted.
That's the future of CAD-CAM.
The problem with making technology like that accessible is that there's too much technical skill involved with the fabrication side for our non-technical brothers to simply upload a file and have it get made. Right off the bat you jump into machining-related technical issues like tool selection, spindle speeds and feedrates, how to hold the workpiece, and dealing with size tolerances (even if they're large and broad). Those are the things my students struggle around and once they get the problem-solving grasp they can take off, so to speak.
You might be thinking, well if the price were better then more people would be interested! True true, but how to make people interested without spending money? How to make the machines require less money without people interested? chicken and egg problem I think.
BUT i'd like to say that 3d printers fix many of those problems because the conversational software used to drive them takes care of all those factors in the background and you rarely have to intervene unless the part geomtry isn't well-suited for printing (thin-wall features or something). Well, maybe they still have calibration issues, but that's something you pay extra to obtain depending on the type of printer.
I think that's where the crux of it is located. There's lots of homeshop CNC machines but the only quick way to make them cheaper is to use oddball construction materials, which drives people away because the machines are more niche. it's like the difference between a wood lathe and a more "typical" machine shop metal lathe...to work with materials outside of wood/plastic requires a fairly large jump upward in rigidity, and the price follows it upward too.
Next problem: well the price wouldn't be so high if they were a bulk item that were widely used by more people..? Economies of scale??! True indeed, but then the question is how easy will it be for a laymen to machine something even if they were given the equipment to do it. That's when I think about the issues that 3d printers fix for you, like the feedrates and whatnot. You need no tool selection because the printer only has one "tool". No variables on depth cuts or tool engagement because the printing layer is very small and resolution is easy adjusted via software. No reason to worry about part deflection with a long&thin tool flexing aside then breaking, because the part has no tool pressure excreted on it. The printer has lots of internal adjustments, temperature, flow, feedrate, "pool" width for FDM machines, etc but those are all easy for the software to calculate. And the machines are so much easier to build because they don't have the rigidity problem! No tool engagement! yay!
I believe your issue with making a 4'x4' CNC is probably more related to logistics and reliability than anything else. The amount of flex you get with an "industrial" machine of that size is huge...I mean you can walk up to a bridge router-style CNC, put your arm on the head, and move it by a noticeable amount. Well, relatively speaking large amount. Like 0.010". The machine senses this then engages the servos to compensate for you pushing on it...but machines of that size are rarely used for anything other than drilling, otherwise the only workpieces you can actually mill (by that I mean put side-load onto the tool) is wood/plastic/ceramic/etc. For metal it's like pulling teeth.
In the industrial sense you can just beef up everything and make it more rigid, but then you need more expensive motion systems to reliably run it because the moving mass got jacked up. The servos driving lightweight industrial routers are already expensive.
I will say this though. I get students from time to time that are very self-motivated and interested in making stuff outside of the typical metalworking industry that most people end up inside, like milling foam, or wood, or ceramics, etc etc. Recently we had a guy that was into airplanes and he went out and bought something called a Blue CNC for like $300 (??? I don't remember, google doesn't help much) which was essentially a plastic router-style machine that had a work envelope of like 3'x3'. All he was milling was chunks of foam and he double-sided taped everything to the table to hold it. Easy for even in guy that only learned how to operate the machines last month. It was pretty interesting....but machines like that would do what you're talking about so long as you didn't have to cut anything more dense than wood.
Thoughts??
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