SCALE: 3D printing and the early days of Linux

Kyle Rankin is a systems administrator by trade, but a 3D printing aficionado by hobby. At SCALE 11x in Los Angeles, he presented the Sunday morning keynote address, which looked at the history and present circumstances of the 3D printing movement—and drew parallels with the rise of Linux.

Rankin described himself as a "software guy" not a hardware hacker, a fact that slowed down his entry into the 3D printing world, where most projects demand quite a bit of fabrication and soldering-iron skill. In many of his other hobbies, he said, he ends up using a Raspberry Pi or other embedded Linux systems instead of the more common Arduino microcontroller, since he can solve his problems with software. Consequently, he followed the home 3D printer world for more than a year before finding the right product and making a printer purchase. That purchase was a Printrbot, an open hardware printer that includes pre-assembled electronics.

Apart from finding the right hardware, Rankin said a big challenge to getting started with 3D printing was justifying the up-front expense to his wife's satisfaction. Initially this was a big obstacle, he said, because the only answer to the question "So what can you make with a 3D printer?" seemed to be "parts for another 3D printer." As time went on, however, the array of printable object possibilities broadened, including hard-to-find parts for fixing broken appliances, household tools and objects, and baby toys.

How did we get here

Rankin then outlined the history of the home 3D printing movement, which he said included a number of parallels to the growth of Linux. For example, initially 3D printing was the exclusive domain of high-end devices costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, and affordable only to corporations. But as happened with "Big Iron" Unix, eventually lower cost devices (under US $30,000) became available at universities, at which point do-it-yourself-ers began asking themselves whether they could build similar systems at home.

In 2004, Adrian Bowyer announced the RepRap project, which Rankin said was akin to Linus Torvalds's initial post to comp.os.minix announcing Linux. RepRap was designed from the beginning to be an open source software and hardware project to create a 3D printer that could be built by anyone, without the need for specialty materials—any parts that were not easily available off-the-shelf must be printable with a RepRap itself. As the project picked up speed, Rankin said it evolved into the Debian of 3D printing, thanks in large part to its commitment to avoid parts that were only available in certain regions.

In 2006, a RepRap device first printed a workable part for another RepRap, and in 2007 the first device printed a complete set of RepRap parts. Around this same time, community members started up side businesses printing and selling these parts, which Rankin likened to the Linux CD-pack businesses of the 1990s. In 2008, early adopter Zach Smith founded Thingiverse, a site for publishing and sharing 3D printable object models; the site proved to be the most important contribution to the 3D printing movement since RepRap. In 2009, Smith and others founded MakerBot, a for-profit company centered around selling open source 3D printers, which Rankin said was akin to Red Hat's foray into building a commercial business around a Linux distribution. Like Red Hat Linux, derivatives began to appear, such as the modified versions of Makerbot printer kits sold by Makergear.

Over the following years, the designs and capabilities of 3D printers evolved rapidly. The RepRap Prusa Mendel was released in 2010, with noticeable improvements in simplicity and buildability over earlier designs—to the point where the Mendel is still the most popular RepRap model today. In 2011, Printrbot appeared on Kickstarter, with a funding goal of US $25,000. Printrbot's aim was to create an end-user focused printer that was easier to build and use than the earlier designs, with the motto "a 3D printer in every home." Rankin compared this to Ubuntu with its emphasis on creating a quality end-user experience. Like Ubuntu, Printrbot proved popular, ultimately raising US $830,000 and starting a deluge of 3D printer–related Kickstarter projects.

December 2011 saw the release of the RepRap Mendel Max, which was built on a tougher aluminum extrusion frame, which enabled significantly faster printing by eliminating vibrations. In early 2012, Makerbot revealed another leap forward, with a dual-extrusion option for its Replicator printer. Dual-extrusion printing allowed for cosmetic options like multi-color prints, but it also allowed users to print different types of objects (such as by using one print head to print "support structures" in a water-soluble plastic). In September, however, Makerbot announced that it was taking its printers closed source to combat against clones. Around the same time, Thingiverse (which is owned by Makerbot) changed its terms of service to say that it owned all user-uploaded designs.

There was backlash against both moves. Rankin compared it to the backlash against Red Hat when it stopped providing public downloads of its distribution and began taking trademark action against people who redistributed Red Hat clones. The 3D printer community backlash was greater against Thingiverse, he said, including an "Occupy Thingiverse" movement spearheaded by Josef Prusa (who created the popular Prusa Mendel model of RepRap). The Occupy Thingiverse movement flooded the site with a manifesto document written by Prusa, which can still be found in many Thingiverse design searches today.

3D printing today

Rankin concluded his talk by describing the current state-of-the-art in 3D printing. He compared the most recent models from most of the vendors in terms of size, cost, and printing specifications. Prices continue to drop for the hardware, he noted, but ironically the cost of the plastic filament used for printing has shot up considerably—primarily because investors in the plastics futures market saw the rise of 3D printing coming and bought into it to turn a profit.

Nevertheless, Rankin described several recent changes that make the investment in a printer worthwhile. Ease-of-use has improved markedly, he said. Again comparing it to the Linux world, he said today it is no longer necessary to call the local 3D printer expert to guide you through the build process, much like the days when one had to go to an "install fest" to get Linux installed and a working xorg.conf file crafted. There are also more interesting designs for printable objects. He showed a set of LEGO block designs collected from the now–public domain specifications of the original LEGOs, plus an array of connectors for joining LEGOs to other brands of blocks. There are also extremely high-quality toy designs available for printing now, such as the elaborate fairytale castle set and a wide range of Nerf weaponry.

But 3d printing technology is still marching forward. Current work focuses on increasing print speeds and finer print resolutions, but there are other interesting projects in the works, too. One is the effort to create a cheaper alternative to the now-expensive plastic filament used as printing material. The Filabot project attempts to grind up recyclable plastic into usable filament, albeit with less-than-perfect success so far, while the company Formlabs has been working on a desktop printer that uses stereolithography to print, eschewing plastic filament altogether. The next big topic for research is 3D scanning, Rankin said; if affordable 3D scanners become a reality, people will be able to print solid objects without ever touching modeling software—or perhaps "3D fax" machines will arise.

Finally, there are controversies to expect as 3D printing becomes even more mainstream. One is copyright and patent law; as more and more objects become reproducible without permission, people should expect businesses to make moves to try and protect their revenue streams. Rankin noted that some 3D-printable materials can be used to make molds as in lost-wax casting; this means functional metal objects are possible, which are a more likely source of copyright and patent contention. They may also raise legal questions: Rankin cited the case of a Thingiverse user last year who posted models that could be used to print firearm parts, including the lower receiver—which the US government considers the "actual" gun (and is where serial numbers are located). The designs were taken down by Thingiverse, but as is always the case on the Internet, they are still available elsewhere.

Home 3D printing remains largely a hobbyist activity today, but the comparison to Linux is an eye-opening one. Linux, too, started off as a hobbyist project, and it grew quickly to dominate computing. Rankin emphasized that open source software powers most of the current 3D printing revolution, from hardware designs to modeling to driving the printers. It may still have a ways to go, but for a movement less than a decade old, its progress is already remarkable.