Although the concept of 3D printing is over 30 years old, it has seen a recent surge of innovation. Whether it’s an artist printing digital sculptures on a resin printer, a hobbyist printing a project on a plastic filament printer, or an aerospace engineer printing a working jet engine on a metal printer, 3D printing has never been more common and inexpensive. We’ve come a long way; even the hobbyist printers of today far surpass the slow, rickety Makerbots they came from. And likewise, 3D printing has a long way to go. Today’s printers are not user friendly, are very limited in terms of printable materials, and take up a lot of space. If these problems can be solved, we might be on our way to a decentralized manufacturing revolution.
If you compare the 3D printers of today to the 2D printers of today, the difference in usability is obvious. A new 2D printer practically sets itself up. All a user must do is take it out of the box, put the ink in, and plug in the power cord. The printer automatically calibrates itself, cleans itself, detects errors, and tells you when you’re out of ink. On the other hand, a new $200 3D printer would not be operable by the average consumer. Most people wouldn’t be able to assemble it, let alone mess with the software required to use it, grasp the concepts of what models will print well, and play with all the settings on the machine. These are all things that should be taken care of for the user. Even when more expensive pre-built hobbyist printers offer features like their own software ecosystem, automatic leveling and calibration, and an easy to use touchscreen interface, it falls flat. If something goes wrong, there is still no way for such a machine to detect what has happened, alert the user and allow the user to easily service it. 3D printers of the future should know if there are problems printing, calibrate themselves for you and make sure that all parts are user serviceable, so anyone at any knowledge level can use them.
While there is currently a wide range of materials available for inexpensive hobbyist printers, none of them are particularly useful. Currently, hobbyist machines can print in rigid or flexible plastic, with a wide variety of each available. The variety is mainly cosmetic, however, so while you may be able to print something that looks metallic, it’s still just as strong as plastic. If hobbyist machines could print in full color or in metal in the future, it would open up so many possibilities. Artists wouldn’t have to paint their finished prints in real life, and hobbyists and engineers could print parts in metal where plastic parts would fail. On top of that, it would be even more exciting if plastic and metal could be printed together. With such a capability and enough resolution, electronics could be integrated into prints. Imagine printing a robot servant for your home, and only needing to buy the circuit board that runs it. Maybe in the future, the circuit boards themselves could be printed along with everything else too. Either way, it would allow for some exciting innovations for both engineers and consumers.
Another big limitation of today’s 3D printers is that they must be larger than what they are printing. You can’t print a large object in a small machine without printing it in sections and gluing them together, and that becomes a problem as 3D printers scale up. If you wanted to print a desk, for example, you’d need a 3D printer the size of a small room! This scales all the way up to 3D printing concrete for buildings, which requires a huge setup bigger the resulting printed building. What if 3D printers could print things bigger than themselves? Instead of a stationary machine, 3D printers could be robots that can print by moving around the space they occupy. If one of these 3D printing robots is given a large space, it could move around that space in order to print a large object. It could even print its own scaffolding to reach the top of tall prints. A 3D printing robot with a constant supply of concrete could print a building much larger than itself by climbing onto each new layer that it prints. This concept would also allow consumers to print furniture and other large objects with a Roomba-sized robot. 3D printing without bounds would offer a lot of possibilities and a whole lot more convenience.
Imagine a world where skyscrapers are printed, not built, where you print the newest iPhone instead of going to the Apple store, and where every product you buy can be customized completely to your liking and manufactured in your own home. This is where we’re headed. While it seems very far away, these next steps for 3D printing will get us closer, and that is truly exciting. Hopefully, newer 3D printers start to adopt some of these ideas so that one day everyone can print anything they want in their own homes.
