Not a surprise to me though since I am operating in the CNC industry I have seen the same struggles and changes, albeit, from a slightly different perspective.
I work with the Smoothieware/Smoothieboard project. It seems, from my observation, that most people are not working with hardware like they were a few years ago. The "homebrew" machines and shadetree makers are becoming few and far between.
The lie has been heavily sold to the maker community that you are "wasting your time if you make something yourself" since it is cheaper to offshore even small 3d prints and machining projects. Not only that but people have been convinced that they don't have the ability to make a machine.
Instead of spending time learning something new/valuable (i.e. Reprap) it is now popular to just have someone else do it...be it AI or a factory in another country with subsidies that create massive differences in bottom line.
The ability to make things at home is disappearing. People cannot/will not learn to make their own machines. Companies that make machines that care about their community and customers are disappearing.
> The lie has been heavily sold to the maker community that you are "wasting your time if you make something yourself" since it is cheaper to offshore even small 3d prints and machining projects.
> The ability to make things at home is disappearing
I do not know what you are talking about.
3D printing at home is more popular than ever. Even families I know who don’t have a computer at home, only their phones, now have 3D printers and use them.
> People cannot/will not learn to make their own machines
I think this is an appeal to 3D printing purity that drove me away from many of the communities. In the early days we all swapped tips and shared reviews of parts (like the Smoothieboard I still have) with other people who liked to build machines because that was the only way to do 3D printing at hobby level prices. When asked what we used the 3D printers for, the joke was that they were used to print parts for our 3D printer. It wasn’t really a joke, though. We spent more time keeping the printers working and trying to tune them than we did printing other things we needed.
That has flipped. Now it’s easy to get a cheap 3D printer and start getting parts out of it without thinking about the printer much. This is great if you’re a person who wants to use the output of the printer. This is boring if you think the value is the process of building and changing the printer hardware all the time.
I’m tired of hearing takes about how this is wrong or bad. Most “makers” want to make other things, not spend their precious free time trying to debug failing prints. There are more opportunities and knowledge available now for people who do want to build their own machines and it’s very cheap. People who want to do that can, but don’t look down upon the people who don’t want to do that.
It's just a colossal misread of the demographics. The community was always a mix of people who wanted to build a printer, and people who wanted a printed thing. The community has massively exploded since the early years, and it's almost entirely made of people in the latter camp who, critically, no longer have to go through the former campsite to get there. It doesn't mean there aren't people in the first camp, or even that there are fewer of them. They're just a rounding error now.
You can tell when it happened, because the E3D v6 nozzle pattern went from being a de facto standard across everything to something you need to buy an adapter for, and nobody really seemed to blink.
The Groovemount was the "standard" for a while there (Makergear, Jhead, etc) then when E3D came in they used the same idea but changed the measurements.
It was pointed out to the devs...they left it the way they modified it.
So E3D was incompatible with the mounts that were the "standard"...others later followed and also made their own mounts.
The E3D clones advertised themselves as "jheads" and "E3D" when they were neither...rode on the popularity of other hotends via false advertising. It also happened with the electronics that were popular at the time leading to a lot of issues when people were confused about what firmware would run on the boards they purchased.
Ccecil · · focus · HN ↗
Not a surprise to me though since I am operating in the CNC industry I have seen the same struggles and changes, albeit, from a slightly different perspective.
I work with the Smoothieware/Smoothieboard project. It seems, from my observation, that most people are not working with hardware like they were a few years ago. The "homebrew" machines and shadetree makers are becoming few and far between.
The lie has been heavily sold to the maker community that you are "wasting your time if you make something yourself" since it is cheaper to offshore even small 3d prints and machining projects. Not only that but people have been convinced that they don't have the ability to make a machine.
Instead of spending time learning something new/valuable (i.e. Reprap) it is now popular to just have someone else do it...be it AI or a factory in another country with subsidies that create massive differences in bottom line.
The ability to make things at home is disappearing. People cannot/will not learn to make their own machines. Companies that make machines that care about their community and customers are disappearing.
Maybe it's by design? I don't know.
Aurornis · · focus · HN ↗
> The ability to make things at home is disappearing
I do not know what you are talking about.
3D printing at home is more popular than ever. Even families I know who don’t have a computer at home, only their phones, now have 3D printers and use them.
> People cannot/will not learn to make their own machines
I think this is an appeal to 3D printing purity that drove me away from many of the communities. In the early days we all swapped tips and shared reviews of parts (like the Smoothieboard I still have) with other people who liked to build machines because that was the only way to do 3D printing at hobby level prices. When asked what we used the 3D printers for, the joke was that they were used to print parts for our 3D printer. It wasn’t really a joke, though. We spent more time keeping the printers working and trying to tune them than we did printing other things we needed.
That has flipped. Now it’s easy to get a cheap 3D printer and start getting parts out of it without thinking about the printer much. This is great if you’re a person who wants to use the output of the printer. This is boring if you think the value is the process of building and changing the printer hardware all the time.
I’m tired of hearing takes about how this is wrong or bad. Most “makers” want to make other things, not spend their precious free time trying to debug failing prints. There are more opportunities and knowledge available now for people who do want to build their own machines and it’s very cheap. People who want to do that can, but don’t look down upon the people who don’t want to do that.
regularfry · · focus · HN ↗
You can tell when it happened, because the E3D v6 nozzle pattern went from being a de facto standard across everything to something you need to buy an adapter for, and nobody really seemed to blink.
Ccecil · · focus · HN ↗
The Groovemount was the "standard" for a while there (Makergear, Jhead, etc) then when E3D came in they used the same idea but changed the measurements. It was pointed out to the devs...they left it the way they modified it.
So E3D was incompatible with the mounts that were the "standard"...others later followed and also made their own mounts.
The E3D clones advertised themselves as "jheads" and "E3D" when they were neither...rode on the popularity of other hotends via false advertising. It also happened with the electronics that were popular at the time leading to a lot of issues when people were confused about what firmware would run on the boards they purchased.