https://reprap.org/wiki/RepRapLogo
Then overhangs got good enough that people just started doing normal holes again. :)
While it’s done a lot of cool stuff and enabled rapid prototyping etc it never scaled the way I really thought it would
[0]: there may be a better turn for this however this is what I mean: that is one machine that can output a wide variety of different things using the same common material, IE maybe one day it produces ball bearings and the next it could produce a bunch of car pistons, with only having to make minimal changes to the machine itself if not changing anything at all
Dan Gelbart has a response (with caveats)
That said, for smaller scale products, news businesses, or things where 3D printing is the only way the thing can exist, these services exist.
Thanks to the author for being willing to put so much of their hard-earned experience into a resource for the rest of us.
Notably, in fusion 360 this would all be designed in "plastics" mode, and yet that mode is oblivious to whether the part is printed or moulded. I wonder if any CAD engine can do "production-aware design" that constrains design to the capabilities of standardized machines, e.g. keeping a metal part 3-d millable. I've seen strict design rule enforcement with PCBs, and I have seen sheet metal macros, but nothing for general mechanical CAD.
"But what if I want to do x" is what I heard the most. Like, sure, if you want to make your part on a 3-axis router and then drill one sideways hole, then put that in the markup. CAD always seems to have a feature stack, so apply a 3-axis design rule and discard it before the last step. Similar for multiple setups on a mill, or for surface treatment.
The gold standard still seems to be a signed and printed drawing that is never complete and full of implications. Mapping a design to a factory, or even pricing it, is an art form that has resisted automation. I expected this to change with all the "industry 4.0" push from ten years ago, but somehow that just meant adding wi-fi.
Thinking about the problem, it seems like it would be extremely difficult to come up with a set of design rules that cover everything somebody might want to print.
But would it be possible to literally simulate the printing process? Maybe using some kind of CFD code? I mean, for arbitrary designs this could get really complex. But, there’s a hard limit—the thing actually has to get printed, which is a slow mechanical layer-by-layer process, and the end result has to fit in the print chamber, haha.
At this time, none that I'm aware of. I am considering some manner of FreeCAD workbench that would integrate slicing to allow specific printing techniques to be applied to specific features of the part. I'm still not sure exactly what it would look like or integrate into the workflow yet.
>CAD engine can do "production-aware design" that constrains design to the capabilities of standardized machines, e.g. keeping a metal part 3-d millable.
by modeling a part by only using subtraction based on tooling:
https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview
you'll need: https://pythonscad.org/ but it's allowed me to do pretty much everything I've tried out in it thus far, and I'm putting the finishing touches on a joinery module which should let one make pretty much anything of wood, and metals should be much the same --- even turned out a thread cutting program as a proof of concept a while back.
Each of the points could basically be expanded to an article on their own. E.g. they don't mention for vase mode that you can get much better results using a big nozzle with it.
1. The majority of 3D modeling is not done parametrically, meaning there is not a lot of data. The little data there is is generally in OpenSCAD, which isn't very powerful or extensible for useful CAD. 2. Generally, when you want to do CAD, you need to come up with a way to define everything precisely. Like I want this hole 2 millimeters from the bottom, and this exact edge next to the hole to be beveled, etc. Saying all that to an LLM is slower than just making the whole.
That said, these still can be useful for beginners, and there are things like Adam AI that are starting to catch on for simple stuff.
Then there's the possibility of an agent automating an actual CAD program. This has already been done with game dev, e.g. Unity MCP.
I've been playing with 3D printers for 7 years, and I even assembled mine at home during the pandemic. Some topics described here I already found out by practice and I think most people with experience in 3D printing also do that.
But having everything studied, compiled and explained in that level is just, again, amazing! Not only that, but there are so many other topics covered here that I still have to learn.
Great work, thank you!
Predatory licensing agreements and cloud software which presumably allows the company to access/steal designs.
I've had an MK3S+ for years and even though it's a primitive machine in comparison to the current Bambu hardware I see no reason to upgrade to something else. It just keeps printing whatever I throw at it and the results continue to be very good. In fact, I seem to have better luck with it than the Bambus I sometimes use at various hacker/makerspaces.
If you just look at the numbers (speed, volume, ...) against Bambu hardware they're not as good, but the reliability and simplicity make up for it IMO. The main missing feature is multi-material support, but that's something I'm not really interested in due to how wasteful the current technology is.
But they cost more than Bambu. Most Chinese things tend to cost less than alternatives, for obvious reasons.
As a big fan of the company I'm hoping this will make them price-competitive to Bambu (or even considerably cheaper) while the tariffs rage. I'm not a fan of the tariffs, but if it gives a boost to the Core ONE launch, welp ... good for them.
Most consumer-level 3D printers are derived from the RepRap project, which was about making a 3D printer that prints 3D printers. So if you want your own printer, find someone who already has one to print the specialized parts for you, add a few standard parts (screws, motors, etc...) and build your own, which you can then use to make 3D printers for others. You can then share designs, improve, etc... Totally in the open source spirit, of course, the software part is similarly open source, usually GPL licenced.
And this spirit is found in most of the consumer-level 3D printing world. With open source firmwares and slicers, easy to modify machines, and standard parts. I think one of the the companies that exemplify this the most is Prusa. They 3D print their printers using their own printers, and open source most for their work.
But then BambuLabs came along, and they have proprietary components, a proprietary firmware and a cloud-based system. Their slicer is open source, they don't really have a choice because it is based on GPL software, but they recently made it harder to use the forked version some people made (namely OrcaSlicer), and they did so via an automatic update. Of course people didn't really appreciate.
But maybe the worst part is that BambuLabs printers are actually really great and popular printers, for an affordable (but not cheap) price. And many people think that from now on, proprietary will become the standard.
If you don't care about that, then BambuLabs printers are maybe the best you can get. If you care, go with Prusa. If you are broke and don't mind getting a new hobby, go for something like an Ender3.
I've heard that Bambus are much better. I have a Raise3D E2 from the Ender era, and it's rock solid. A step up in price, but no finicking. Just works, when new, and now.
I don’t actually think Bambu makes unreliable printers; to the contrary, they are excellent machines that, if anything, are much more reliable on the whole than Creality. But they’re kind of like sports cars, in that their target market is either people who want something fast and flashy and are willing to throw money at any problems to make them go away, or for technical types who want something they can take out on the track and don’t mind wrenching their own machines. The problem is that Bambu printers are marketed and touted as being great for beginners, and while they certainly make it easy to get into 3D printing for nontechnical people, I think most of them will end up ultimately being disappointed at either the lack of customization they allow or amount of time, effort, and money required to diagnose and fix them when something goes wrong.
It's where Bambu forked much of their software from, they're equally easy to use after recent updates, very reliable and easy to service.
They also added US-based manufacturing recently, and I think you can get US-made Core ONEs, which given the tariffs may mean they're soon to be cheaper than equivalent Bambus.
Some people will groan that every 3D printing thread must have a Prusa fanboy, but then again the company inspires that attachment also not without reason :-) I've printed for thousands of hours on my MK4(S) and I've had zero issues, and it's pretty great they offer upgrade kits to turn this into their next-newer model.
Super off-topic, but I've always kind of been let down by the appearance of 3d printed text. As noted, engraved seems to be better than embossed, but it still just looks kind of weird. I envy the clean, crisp labels that seem to be commonplace on commercial injection-molded plastic parts.
The toner transfer technique seems kind of promising. I think I've also seen people spray painting 3d-printed parts, and then lasering away the paint to draw text, which is interesting (if somewhat more materials- and equipment-intensive).
Really cool article though.
I’m not making my own designs yet. It is too difficult. Modifiying a little here using Blender is where Im at
* Sketch a 2D design on a surface * Make the elements in that design depend on each other (this is parallel to that, this is equal to the other, X is at an angle to Y) as much as possible * Pull the 2D shape up into 3D space
Now you know how to design your own things! The rest is just learning the buttons, but there's usually one called "sketch", one called "constrain", and one called "extrude".
[0]: https://archive.org/details/StructuresOrWhyThingsDontFallDow...
I've found wood screws work well for this. The wood screw can cut its own threads without needing to use a tap.
It does put some stress on the part, though. I mostly print in PETG, which is strong enough; but PLA might split if the hole was parallel to the layers.
> A design limitation of threaded inserts is that they are not reliably usable for screws inserted from the back side. During insertion, heat-set inserts often push some molten plastic into the hole beneath them, preventing easy insertion of a screw from the back side.
A trick I sometimes use:
1. Before installing the insert, insert the screw from the back side
2. Screw the insert onto the protruding screw
3. Use a soldering iron to install the insert+screw together into the plastic
Because the screw is filling the hole, the molten plastic can't block the hole. Instead, the molten plastic forms itself around the screw, and it acts like a Nyloc nut.
- A: Fillet edges in the filament direction - B: Have a sharp edge for the seam.
How would you crack that nut, as A prevents B. For example, on a rectangular box, maybe fillet 3/4 of the corners, and leave the 4th sharp?
Another useful trick to minimizing material in a print is to not print surfaces at all. Most of the mass in a print is concentrated in the shell. If the top and bottom surfaces are not particularly critical to the function of the part, then you can remove either surface. The slicer can still fill in the volume enclosed by these surfaces with infill. If you use a planar infill, such as a rectilinear, hexagonal, or triangular infill, the parts can look quite nice. This trick works particularly well on mostly flat parts.
I use two TPU parts printed in this manner daily: A phone case [0] and a relief strap for a pair of headphones [1].
[0] https://www.printables.com/model/615154-google-pixel-8-case
[1] https://www.printables.com/model/577575-hifiman-comfort-stra...
3D printing as a pursuit can be time-consuming - there’s always a risk with these things that you take them on as a dilettante and they end up gathering dust in a corner. I initially scraped by with some middling Blender skills (leaning into non-destructive operations where possible), but that is far from ideal - you really do need CAD. But to anyone considering jumping in, I would say: if you get an A1 (get the full size, not the Mini) and use Claude to write your parametric OpenSCAD scripts, the time commitment is such that you can _just about_ indulge in this hobby as a dilettante - eg, as a project for your kids. Without LLMs, I think it would be too much of a commitment unless you’re really dedicated, or already have CAD skills.
Anyway, gonna go read this in full.
Now, it just works. It doesn't matter what I throw at it. Made me get into the CAD hobby too.
>use Claude to write your parametric OpenSCAD scripts
Can you talk a little about it?
Stefan's CNC Kitchen is a good channel if you want to see experiments with things like temperatures and materials. https://www.cnckitchen.com/
Or you could look at the original RepRap research and how it's evolved. The MK4S+ is just a very refined version of the original bed slinging printers. There are also papers on slicer development. There has been a trend towards thicker nozzles as slicers have gotten better (eg using 0.6 by default instead of 0.4).
Otherwise advances in printer technology, particularly first layer calibration, have improved massively in the last few years. So things like bed flatness and adhesives are much less of an issue with auto-levelling/probing nozzles. Bear in mind Ultimaker has been doing it this way for years, but it became mainstream (cheap) more recently. Any of the major modern enclosed printers (Prusa Core/XL, Bambu) shouldn't have adhesion problems with standard filaments. It's also highly filament specific, though the really high end machines (Markforged) are reliable in my experience because they discourage any deviation from their recommended materials and print settings.
For example MarkForged - a $10000+ printer - shipped their desktop FDM machine with Elmer's purple glue. They said it worked best in their testing and it still works for me.
And thank you, I've seen Stefan's work and it seems to be about as good as it gets. I'll take a look at the original RepRap research too, probably some interesting bits in there.
I agree that the really high end machines from Markforged and co look dead reliable, but they remind me of that old quote, "you can make anything on a lathe but money." It took me a fair bit of scrolling through slick marketing pages to find out that they are 5-figure machines that print at half the speed of consumer printers and can't print ABS (but can print $200/kg high strength proprietary filaments!) Instead I just got a handful of the major modern enclosed printers.
Here is what I have gathered so far, in case it helps anyone: 1) print ABS enclosed in a chamber temp of a minimum 50C, ideal 60-80C. 2) use quality filament, Polymaker filament is good; issues are plastic composition and diameter variation. 3) dry the filament properly. 4) the fumes will destroy your lungs and eventually the printers themselves, so they need to be vented out, and also filtered inside the enclosure. 5) bed flatness is critical. 6) use a good bed adhesive such as Magigoo.
https://www.reddit.com/r/3Dprinting/comments/7n0go2/my_first... for an anecdote.
I am also in a bit of an unusual situation because of the size of the parts: voluminous enough that shipping from the manufacturer is no longer negligible.
Oh, and unfortunately can't do resin because of strength reasons. 3D printed ABS is already pushing it.
What amount of bridging is ok?
Slicers also come with presets for different filaments these days, which generally do a reasonable job and knowing about temps & co is largely optional to getting going.
lawn•8h ago
I've been meaning to try my hand at CAD and designing models to print but I haven't quite made the jump.
One thing that has given me pause is a good CAD program for Linux, does anyone has any good tips for a complete Newbie where to begin?
q3k•8h ago
Joel_Mckay•8h ago
https://www.youtube.com/@4axisprinting/videos
Best of luck =3
titaphraz•8h ago
Here's a playlist for FreeCAD 1.0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_yh_S31R9g&list=PLWuyJLVUNt...
But he has a bunch of other videos.
pcl•8h ago
retrochameleon•8h ago
rekenaut•8h ago
nullc•7h ago
sho_hn•38m ago
wkat4242•8h ago
Not entirely sure if it's available for Linux.
I probably shouldn't use autodesk but I'm not trying to make the world a better place. Just to unleash my creativity.
malfist•8h ago
wkat4242•7h ago
And I rather spend my limited free time creating stuff than to learn a new tool. Unless it is actually a more powerful one for the purpose that enables me to do things I can't now. But this doesn't seem to be the case.
It's the same reason I use BambuLab printers. My hobby is making stuff, not tinkering with printers. They're just tools, a means to an end.
Ps forgive me my defensive attitude but I often get people at the makerspace that take my choice of tools as a political statement. But I don't care. I just want to use what does the job for me.
WillAdams•6h ago
https://www.cadsketcher.com/
and
https://blendercam.com/
WillPostForFood•6h ago
sfifs•1h ago
seltzered_•8h ago
The learning curve is still there, but I felt more empowered to adjust/share 3d printing designs made in it over dealing with quirks of GUI-based CAD applications. The discord community on there is rather helpful too.
https://build123d.readthedocs.io/
https://github.com/bernhard-42/vscode-ocp-cad-viewer
I'll still use FreeCAD on occasion as a secondary viewer for stl files, though my hope is to use build123d entirely including for describing joints as well.
today54•5h ago
panki27•7h ago
WillAdams•7h ago
- Solvespace --- small and lightweight, the UI may be a bit off-putting
- FreeCAD --- hugely improved in the recent 1.0 release, this is a large and impressive system
- Dune 3D --- the new kid on the block, it has the advantage of a modern appearance and UI standards, and the consistency of being a one-man project
If one moves away from traditonal/contemporary CAD there are a few other options:
- BRL-CAD --- intensely old-school, this is one of the oldest opensource codebases
- OpenSCAD --- programmatic CAD, this has inspired more successors than I would care to count (esp. look up libfive and Matt Keeter's Master's Thesis if you are academically mathematically oriented)
For that last, one of the more successful hybrids is "OpenPythonSCAD" which is just what it says on the tin --- Python in OpenSCAD:
https://pythonscad.org/
which I have been using for a project on the other side of the fence --- making DXF and G-code for CNC mills and routers:
https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview
EDIT: One additional tool to note is Fullcontrolgcode Designer, which to bring things full-circle, is the 3D-printing version of the above:
https://fullcontrolgcode.com/
yehoshuapw•2h ago
lucasoshiro•7h ago
Start with Tinkercad: https://www.tinkercad.com. It runs on the browser, it has some limitations, but it is really simple to use, just open and model whatever you want joining and extracting shapes and importing SVGs for extrusion.
After that, if you know any programming language you'll find OpenSCAD easy to learn. I gave a course last year about it, the slides are available here: https://lucasoshiro.github.io/posts-en/2024-03-24-openscad/. They are in Portuguese, if someone shows interest I can translate them to English, but I think they are easy to follow even by non-speakers.
caditinpiscinam•6h ago
- Tinkercad (browser) fun and great for very simple projects. Like the MS Paint of 3D.
- OnShape (browser) seemingly pretty powerful, but not the easiest to learn in my experience, and has some annoying bugs.
- Plasticity (desktop) I played around with the free trial and liked it a lot, found it more intuitive than OnShape.
- Womp (browser) not CAD software, but easy to use and great for making free-form/organic looking designs.
- Blender (desktop) not CAD software and haven't used it myself, but I've seen others use it to design 3D prints.
the__alchemist•6h ago
Vox_Leone•5h ago
One of its standout features is the `hull()` function, which computes the convex hull of multiple shapes. When used skillfully, `hull()` becomes more than a geometric operation — it’s a design primitive that lets you smoothly bridge components, create enclosures, and generate complex organic forms without manual sculpting. It's like having a smart “connective tissue” for your model.
If you're comfortable with code and want exact control over your 3D prints or CAD designs, OpenSCAD delivers precision with minimal overhead. It rewards clean thinking and composability — making it ideal for rapid prototyping, parametric part libraries, and even mechanical design.
anoldperson•5h ago
ansgri•2h ago
So, maybe it’s not a bad idea to start with a free version of something more ergonomic, just to avoid getting too discouraged.
tgsovlerkhgsel•5h ago
Consider signing up via your favorite YouTuber's sponsorship link to support them.
Downsides are that the CAM plugin is paid-only (irrelevant for 3D printing) and you're obviously trapping yourself in a commercial, proprietary walled garden that might start charging subscription fees or otherwise rug-pull you once it gets popular enough. I've decided that the ease of use benefit is high enough to warrant the risk - I'd rather risk not being able to edit my models in the future than not creating them in the first place because the alternative software is too painful to use.
It's helpful to understand how the software works, because it's different from what you might have experienced from other software: It essentially stores operations, like "start with this sketch, then extrude this part of it to a height of 10 mm, then add a fillet". You can go back and edit previous steps and the following steps will be directly re-applied.
In sketch mode, you can just draw, but you can also add arbitrary constraints, e.g. "these points have to be exactly 3 cm away" and it will adjust your sketch to match the (new) constraints. This makes it really easy to change some aspect of the part later. This is common in CAD software, although OnShape's implementation seems more intuitive to me than e.g. Fusion 360.
If you want to do actual 3D CAM (for CNC machining), Fusion360 seems to be the only free option (not available for Linux).
In general, with all CAD software, the common "just poke at it until you figure out how it works" approach doesn't work well, although once you've understood the basic concepts that I've explained above and know some CAD terms/concepts like creating 3D parts by extruding or rotating 2d drawings, Onshape will mostly let you get away with that approach. You probably should still watch tutorials before you start.
q3k•4h ago
The free CAM available in F360 has been artificially limited to only allow extremely slow travel speed. It's almost useless.
tgsovlerkhgsel•4h ago
You certainly won't want to use it for mass production, but for hobbyist use where getting the model and CAM config right, setting up the machine etc. are the biggest time sink and most parts are made in quantity 1, I found it acceptable.
q3k•4h ago