Wednesday, March 20, 2013

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.