I got one interesting and somehow abrupt remark related to
my hobbed bolt. The idea was that it was both difficult, and may be ridiculous to make one's own crappy part nowadays, while you could buy one, shiny, made on an precise and industrial machine. But who's the chicken and who's the egg? And which is better really? I think the answer is worth a post on its own
here.
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An early greek steam engine.
Rough but essential, and you can make it at home. |
An age of steam(punk?)
3D printing at home let you feel like you are in the steam age: as an individual, it is still possible and somehow easy to explore variants and improve things. You can understand all of your robot or 3D printer, and you can have access to the full source code and components. You are free to follow what other people did, but what is extraordinary is that there seems to be a lot to discover and improve in this field, without the need for a highly specialized education nor a lot of money.
I see a parallel with the
DIY drone thriving community : ten years ago, a 4-rotor camera-equipped flying machine was almost science fiction, and in any case it was so expensive that no one in the community could tinker with them. The few who could buy one would not try to disassemble it, risking their warranty and ruining the closed-source device. But as soon as the price dropped down, gyroscopes became cheap and so, all sorts of incredible improvements were made, just because they can be made easily and because there are a lot of people that explore a lot of possibilities.
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A fully autonomous drone: this was science fiction only a few years ago,
and you can now build your very own variant, yourself and cheaply. Source: arducopter |
Many big companies are dealing with patents and stupidly put their money in their lawyers more than in their research. This gives room for individuals to innovate and amaze the world, possibly also because they just don't care or know about the stupid
patents or copyrights in the first place!
Do it yourself: learn, be an inventor, be known?
Designing and testing your own experiments makes you think, understand and learn more. I am a self-taught mechanics, that really knew not much before beside motorbikes engines may be. Also in electronics. I even started computing (well, before taking the longest path possible in this field at school). I also like cognitive science and artificial intelligence... and now mechatronics are an incredible playground because they mix all of them and because they became very cheap.
For sure, you can buy tons of robots, but it is much enlightening to try to do make something as half as "intelligent" as what you can buy for a few bucks. And sometimes you find something that nobody though about, which you may feel better even than getting a lot of money working for a big company (I did work for a big company, and that was certainly not my most pleasant years).
You could try to buy a "closed-source" printer that would work straight "out of the box"... as advertised, because I
do not believe this at this time. Or you can make one from scratch, which is very hard without prior experience.
But now you get all the shades in between. You can buy a kit and start tinker with it, until you feel confident you can try a new designs. There are tons of variations around the common printers, but still, smart people come with outstanding designs all the time: if the
rostock is becoming commonplace to you, check the
morgan or even the recent
PiMaker ! What is amazing is that all these were designed by individuals, not big companies...
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| The Morgan 3D printer |
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| The rostock 3D printer |
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| The PiMaker 3D printer |
You can make parts that work better than the market!
Making something yourself surely does not mean it will be bad. It may even look crappy but work very well. Think about it twice: the companies that make and sell stuff want to produce lots of items with consistency, reliability... and lowest cost.
Hence, there is room for better precisely crafted hand-made parts. And even when they do not look as perfect of what comes out of a machine, it certainly does not mean they will no work fine.
For example, my
bolt is efficient enough to strip the PTFE tube itself when fully locked, something I never experienced with a commercialized bolt so far. Now, yes, it is ugly... but it is efficient and quite easy to make! So long for the fundamentalists of lathes and milling machines, or the dumb consumerism ;)
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Shiny machined bolt vs crappy hand-made bolt? Beware!
Neither the look nor the price are indicators of efficiency nor reliability. |
Get a life and have fun! You will kill the system :)
It is also fun to make! May be some cannot make it, but it gives no good reason for them to tell anyone he cannot make it. For example, my bolt was willingly made with crude tools, because I wanted to know if it was possible, and also because others can improve on it or make more beautiful ones. I have no problem with people that prefer to buy shiny milled bolts, unless they tell me my bolt cannot work better than their purchase. I just love when people achieve outstanding results while bypassing the marketing system: marketing is mostly becoming a pollution that play no significant role in the DIY community. Real community-tested efficiency is a much better proof.
There may be a paradigm shift here in the industry, where hobbyists invent new things that the market sells afterwards, while big companies cannot afford the responsiveness while risking a too small profit in the first place!
