You are third...

Very hot off the press, Tinkercad is closing down.  Now you may never have heard of Tinkercad but it is (or soon to be 'was') a browser based cad program.  You design and develop your idea in 3D without needing a powerful computer because the grunt work is done online.  I knew of it but didn't use it but countless millions do, including many schools.

Schools only have one shot, due to limited curriculum time, to teach specific skills.  Though some graphic packages make it easier to understand the basics and then move onto a bigger better version, Ms Paint to a more powerful editing Program for example, 3D is not really one of them.  3D graphic program's tend to embed a workflow, almost a philosophy, that influences your thinking because each step is often built upon previous steps in many many layers of work.   This is seen most clearly in packages that allow you to go back and edit sizes in a script later on.  Fine detail work can happen later in the design process.  Other packages need you to define these sizes at the start or risk having to redraw from scratch.

Tinkercad is an example of what appears to be a bargain in education.  A free program ( for limited but still school friendly use) that allows you to save and store models, but when the owners of the program pull the plug, your lesson plans, guides, worksheets and videos are compost.  With traditional program's installed on your computer you cam use them for years after every one else has moved onto the next great version, witness the wide use of Office 2007 in many homes, with online editing and creation packages, if they pull the plug, your work dies.

So clearly there is.a lesson to be learned here.  I would suggest it could be 'don't put all your eggs in one basket' but sadly in education we often only have one basket that we can introduce students to in the limited time and attention span we have.  Perhaps the best lesson is this.  Use these online tools.  dip in and show them, but think carefully about building hours of your time into projects built around something built on the shifting sand of the web.

So why is this article titled 'You are Third'?  Because with web based free ( or even paid for program's like some levels of Tinkercad are /were) , Once something gets successful enough, somebody outside will choose to buy/invest.  Then the owner starts looking to make them happy, not you.  The Tinkercad developers have hinted at a new online system they will be launching.  Presumably now they have a serious investor on board, Tinkercad had to go as it could tread on the toes of the new business model.

So where should you look for the next  free 3D modelling system?  I think Autocads 123D is a strong contender, and there is always Sketchup, but all these firms look towards their investor and their own ambitions first and at any point in the future, like today, we may wake up and find the whole structure of our lesson plans, guides and storage ripped away.  123D and Sketchup don't require a network connection to work once installed, but it would be easy to add this at a future date if a investor put forward a compelling business model, them you and I and all the users, despite the marketing and PR proclamations, would be third...

Kick the tyres

A constant theme in my blogging has been kicking the tyres of new technology.  The analogy is not brilliant because though the phrase tends to be interpreted as giving a new technology or system a stress test to see how well it copes in real world conditions, kicking the tyres is a useless investigative factor in buying a car.

You can see I have been 'kicking the tyres' of my new 3D printer.  I can now go from switch on to start printing in about 5 minutes now which is pretty good, but if it was a photocopier, it would be wearing an axe by now with start rates that slow.

I showed the printer to a friend who was initially impressed and then said, 'when there's one with cartridges that works as quickly and smoothly as a printer, It'll be worth buying one'.  I think that's missing the point.  I believe it is unlikely the vast majority will ever have 3D printers in their homes because most of what we want to create uses diverse technologies and materials to manufacturing tolerances that would be very hard to replicate in the home economically compared to just buying a mass produced version.

Perhaps what we need is a new material.  As I said to a class one day, 'If we hadn't found wood was such an excellent all round building material, we would have had to invent it'.  Maybe that's the missing link, a material that's easy and VERY quick to 3D 'print', robust, cheap and can substitute for the endless plastic metal and glass parts that make up much of what we consume.  Or as Scottie would have put it 'Transparent Aluminium, Now there's a thing...'

Volume Control

Having started with 3D printing, and learned an awful lot in the last month about it, I have some salient observations that you should consider if thinking of buying one

1. Can you afford the time?  The downsides of printing in 3D is similar to that of laser cutting.  A small 6cm snowflake on a laser cutter might only take 2 minutes in acrylic but double the size and it takes four times as long.  With 3D printing, double the size and it takes eight times as long because there is eight times as much volume compared to the original.  So a small part which takes 6 minutes and is a great demo, becomes a 48 minute wait.  If you have a whole class wanting to have their work made, that's a lot of time to commit.
2. Bigger things look better and have better definition.  If you print a boat in 6 minutes, its going to be a pretty tiny (2cm long) horizontally stripy boat as the layers are a fixed height.  Double the size to 4cm and you get better detail.  Double it again and the layer lines are  lot less noticeable and you can start putting in finer detail, but that takes time to print
3. You have to fiddle.  With a laser cutter, once set up you can throw material on the bed and provided you dont do anything daft, it will work every time regardless of shape.  Cut lines do not interfere with each other.
   With a 3D printer every first print is effectively a draft.  My boat design (search ajbooker on thingiverse.com) has a raised front because the printer builds up a thicker layer due to flow of material.  This fouls the next layer and makes the print rough at that point. I redesign the boat to avoid this but then I have to print it again to check it works.  The software I check the design with only tells me it is printable, not the outcome quality.
4. When things go wrong, they take a while to put right.  I accidentally left the extruder head heater on (easy to do as it doesn't have a command to automatically shut down after so many minutes) overnight.  It  took me a day and the purchase of acetone (nail varnish remover) boiling water ina saucepan and a 0.4mm drill (not a common part) to unclog it.  In a workshop  under time pressure it would be easy to use what's available and damage the nozzle
5. All those marvellous things you see, take forever to print.  That cut skull that you can make 4" high?  Better put aside a couple of days for a good quality print and £10 of materials.  Overall they look great but large parts are a logistical nightmare but you HAVE to print them big to get the detail or mechanism working properly
6. Heat, Height, Habitat.  Thee ambient heat will affect how well your prints work.  In a cool room you might get different results to in a hot one. You have to not knock it while its printing and any feed problems will result in issues
7. There will always be a better printer out there.  I spent £320 plus Vat on my kit.  £500 + Vat and it would print faster and bigger.  £2500 plus Vat and it would print faster again with 3 colours or materials.  Educational machines have to earn their stripes by being in use for long periods of time, your printer WILL be an antique in a year, let alone three years

So should the above put you off buying one?  NO, but look before you leap!

Here's one I made earlier....

After much thought and checking of specifications, I finally bought a 3D printer last Month.  It is a kit from Printrbot, the Jr model which at this point is the cheapest 3D printer on the market.  It did well in tests carried out by Make magazine but it is clear to me that though excellent for the money (£320 plus Vat by the time it arrives from America by courier), 3D printing still lacks ease of use for the average school.

The good:

• Relatively easy to build
• Everything in kit including a kg of printing material
• Free software downloadable from net is robust and works well
• Twinned with a free 'STL' export plugin for Sketchup, you can design your own stuff
• Once set up, levelled, heated up and various bits adjusted, good quality prints
• All electrics ready wired and set up

The bits that show it's not ready for general use

• Instructions enthusiastic and often crowd sourced but assume an ability to solve problems due to manufacturing methods and iffy quality control of some parts
• You have to understand in depth how the 3D printer works to build a good one
•  To adjust software beyond basic settings, get your programmers toolkit out
• Parts missing in kit (bolts) that are not readily available in Uk
• Strong assumption that you need to strive to build it because that's the fun part

The last point I make above, that you have to strive to build it, will brings howls of indignation from other printrbot jr owners.  The difference is in education, tools need to work effectively without being an intellectual puzzle to get started with at all.  I call this the 3Rs, they need to be ROBUST, REPRODUCIBLE, RELIABLE.  In that way they can be used when needed. 

My printrbot jr took me two days of adjusting, fettling, fixing and problem solving to build but when I pressed the go button, it printed perfectly until another issue needed to be fixed.  After a week of tinkering its pretty reliable now but given the importance of adjusting belt tensions, attaching parts at just the right torque and adjusting clearances, I am not surprised that so many users post problems with their kits such as material feed issues, head crashes etc.  The 3D printer community tells itself that these things are easy to build and use, but by definition the people are a very technical subset of the population.

So should you buy one?  Lets put it this way, if you can assemble technical Lego kits but never bother designing you own ideas using the bricks, don't like experimenting or don't have the time or patience for constant tweaking, don't bother.  If you do though, it is amazing what so little money can now buy in desktop manufacturing.