It’s hard to overstate the impact desktop 3D printing has had on the making and hacking scene. It drastically lowered the barrier for many to create their own projects, and much of the prototyping and distribution of parts and tools that we see today simply wouldn’t be possible via traditional means.
What might not be obvious to those new to the game is that much of what we take for granted today in the 3D printing world has its origins in open source hardware (OSHW). Unfortunately, [Josef Prusa] has reason to believe that this aspect of desktop 3D printing is dead.
If you’ve been following 3D printing for awhile, you’ll know how quickly the industry and the hobby have evolved. Just a few years ago, the choice was between spending the better part of $1,000 USD on a printer with all the bells and whistles, or taking your chances with a stripped-down clone for half the price. But today, you can get a machine capable of self calibration and multi-color prints for what used to be entry-level prices. According to [Josef] however, there’s a hidden cost to consider.
From major development comes major incentives. In 3D printing’s case, we can see the Chinese market dominance. Printers can be sold for a loss, and patents are filed when you can rely on government reimbursements, all help create the market majority we see today. Despite continuing to improve their printers, these advantages have made it difficult for companies such as Prusa Research to remain competitive.
That [Josef] has become disillusioned with open source hardware is unfortunately not news to us. Prusa’s CORE One, as impressive as it is, marked a clear turning point in how the company released their designs. Still, [Prusa]’s claims are not unfounded. Many similar issues have arisen in 3D printing before. One major innovation was even falsely patented twice, slowing adoption of “brick layering” 3D prints.
Nevertheless, no amount of patent trolling or market dominance is going to stop hackers from hacking. So while the companies that are selling 3D printers might not be able to offer them as OSHW, we feel confident the community will continue to embrace the open source principles that helped 3D printing become as big as it is today.
Thanks to [JohnU] for the tip.
I hear people talking a lot about Voron, but haven’t investigated it yet… How does it compare to modern commercial desktop FDM printers?
Print quality and speed – It’s pretty much on par or better than Bambu printers (I guess it all depends on what toolhead you want to have in your printer). All depends on how good you’ll assemble it. And that’s the biggest potential roadblock for most people – you have to assemble, configure and calibrate it yourself, which takes a lot of time (at least first time) and some knowledge. This is where Bambu has the edge.
I follow a guy in Shenzhen who is always tinkering with the latest Votron stuff. Personally, I just want to be able to create useful objects in parametric 3D CAD and have them appear as quickly and as well made as possible. Bambu does that for me, better than the CR10 and QuDi 2-nozzle jobs that are collecting dust.
Did somebody say Voltron? Form feet and legs! Form arms and body! I’ll form the head!
lol, so many typos. Votron, QiDi, and actually an Ender 3+ not CR10.
Yeah I feel there are two main camps really like there are in other verticals (motorbikes, cars, coffee, robotics to name a few). You are either buying a thing primarily as a tool because you need what it provides or you want to tinker, learn or experiment without limitations. There are shades between them of course.
You can make a competitive machine (feature wise) from the Voron designs. You can even make it better (for your specific use case). It’s most likely a bit more expensive than a commercial one and a lot more tinkering is involved. If you want to just print a pretty thing you saw on the net: get a commercial printer and rely on support and spare parts. If you have a specific use case or love the challenge: build your own Voron/RatRig/etc.
You can also buy a complete Voron from a company that builds them and then rely just on COTS (commercial off the shelf) parts and not proprietary parts.
COTS is Voron design ethos.
When i first saw FDM 3d printer, people were doing silly stuff like making nozzles by drilling holes in M6 COTS hex bolts. Nowadays you can get nice nozzle for less than $1 and i consider that a COTS part. I feel like everything will become a commodity in couple years when used by enough people…
The CEO of bamboo labs called out Voron as inspiration for the X1C so there’s that.
A well built “stock” Voron Trident or 2.4 is probably still as fast as any of the new prosumer printers at the same print quality and will have higher quality components and may be more reliable. Since the USPS shipping changes (pre-COVID) it’s definitely not cheaper and it’s a long (but enjoyable) build; and quality control is reliant on the builders attention to detail and part selection.
Vorons are also not a “product” so it’s less plug and play with slicing; especially if you’ve got customizations (slicers have “voron profiles” but the they’re not “your voron”). The flip side is that there are some great mods (beacon probe, nevermore filter) that may not have competitive commercial equivalents.
Multimaterial is still not really a thing on Vorons (OSH toolchangers for voron are in beta at most), multicolor systems are a thing with ERCF and BoxTurtle and they’re reported to work decently well but aren’t as polished as the AMS from bamboo.
TLDR Vorons are still technologically competitive in this day and age if your willing to put in the work and a little extra cash… that’s no small ask though
Mild disagreement on the cost. I build a Vz235 (2WD right now) for about 1/3 the price a X1C is sold here. It’s in part a consequence of tariffs but not all of it. If you know how to source effectively you can pay a lot less
The Vorons are just as good as commercial and sometimes better depending on how you build them. It is arguably the project from which most commercial CoreXY printers now were derived from and a reason as to why features like Input Shaping and Pressure Advance became widespread. Being one of the main platforms on which Klipper and its many features were developed and tested on.
Building from “Commercial Of The Shelf” parts is rarely cheap though, with even kits from LDO being fairly pricey and requiring printer parts. Rendering it often more of a printer for those who already have one and are looking for a companion that is ready for bigger tasks (Voron2.4 350mm) or for dealing with very small parts while the main printer works on the bigger whole (Voron V0.2). At least that is how I view them.
OTPH you can buy a Tronxy X5 for a cheap, reasonably performance coreXY and flash Klipper.
(anecdote)
You can, if you’re willing to roll the dice on a dodgy bed level/tramming compensation sensor, crappy wiring, a proprietary LCD and the straightness of the threading in the extrusions, which themselves may not be straight.
I had a clone CR-10 that was more reliable in every aspect that wasn’t speed.
(/anecdote)
My Tronxy X5SA is very reliable and turns out great prints. All I had to do was replace all of the electronics and the entire printhead. And brace the frame. And shim the Z rods.
This is what the VzBot started its life as, if you look at all of Vez’s old youtube videos, you can follow along and even maybe migrate a different path, like I did. I’ve got some of the same stuff Vez does, and other things I took a different direction – like the bed on mine being belt-driven at 3 points.
There is also the Sovol SV8 which is basically a voron build with custom parts (steel frame instead of aluminium extrusions, and injection moulded parts instead of 3d printed), they even support the voron project with each sold SV8.
And its way cheaper.
I’ve got Bambus at work and a Voron 350 at home. Voron is sort of the last word in build-your-own-printer these days. The build process is probably not difficult for anyone who reads this site but I found the firmware/software to have more of a learning curve. I’d say that a “stock” voron is slightly behind bambu but with tuning and various upgrades it can be made to be better than one. They have mostly the same features. My own is slightly slower with a bit worse print quality (though I haven’t put in the time to tune everything super well). However, I can print with more materials (up to 8 at once) and have a larger print area.
Repairs are also much easier on the Voron; it’s mostly a bunch of M3 and M4 screws. When something breaks on the Bambu (which will happen) it’s a lot harder to fix – a lot of custom tiny screws and fragile ribbon cables.
If you’re doing anything weird or custom (beyond import model, press slice button, wait for print) you will appreciate the flexibility that bambu lacks. A lot of the innovations you see will appear on a Voron first. That said, the community can go in circles. For just the bed leveling probe, they started with an inductive sensor, then it was a mechanical switch the toolhead picks up, then a switch built into the toolhead that uses the nozzle itself, and now they’re back on a different inductive probe. Obviously, what’s best for your printer is your decision.
In total I spent probably only a little more than a Bambu H2D, but 50x as much time over a few years.
Thanks! More information than the article!
I’m just an average 3d printer user and do not understand all this, altho I see and understand the “build your own printer” idea. I didn’t forge my hammer, wrench and chuck, I bought my lab desk and chair…
I paid about 209 € for my Ender-3 V3 KE new, currently it goes for about 240 € at ebay. I then spend around 40 € for new axis. I see Voron 350 kit for about 1400 €. Can’t look at Bambu, gives me Schnappatmung.
Is that price difference justified? Is it really that much better? (<— this is the honest question here!)
I have no idea. I just replace my printer after 3-4 year use and buy the latest feature set. Repair? No, just replace it with a better device.
Depends on your use case. For moderate use by folks who just want the prints, turn-key units like Bambu are fine. Probably superior if we’re being honest. It’s at the other edges of the market that self-built shines.
If you’re a tinkerer or hobby user, there are both savings and improvements to be had in a kit or self-designed printer..
If you’re doing FDM at manufacture scale, having units you can easily service can help with uptime which should result in more profit if the numbers are right.
I think that for most people, Voron/RatRig isn’t worth it over Bambu! That’s why they have been so successful.
But in terms of improvement over a cheap Ender, you will see it immediately in speed, for which both the Vorons and Bambus (and maybe the Creality K series) are at the top. At work, it’s the difference between making 1-2 prototype prints per day, and 3-5 prototype prints per day. At home, it can be the difference between waiting half your weekend for a print to finish vs only a few hours. Multi-day prints become a day. Day long prints become overnight. The speed was the main thing I wanted out of my Voron, and I’ve been pretty happy with it.
The main difference is that if you build your voron, you have learnt how to repair / upgrade it with of the shelf parts forever, you can swap the mainboard (or just add one, with klipper you can add as many boards as you need)
If your bambu lab printer breaks, you are dependent on the parts provided by bambulab, for example, if you break a bearing on the x axis, you have to replace the entire x axis.
Ender-3 V3 KE is Klipper with 500 mm/s speed and 8000 mm/s² acceleration (says Creality). I can’t complain, much much faster than its predecessor, a simple Marlin driven thingy.
My main complaint is the “chinese”[1] lovelessness to their products. As soon as the product is on the market, it is abandoned. Just the ultra bare minimum is done to fix errors, nothing more… So a hackable firmware would be worth some money for me.
And with its current quality of print, I think the next printer will have an enclosure to print with ASA. OTOH, I’m forced to print indoors, so I need to solve the fumes-problem somehow.
[1]: aka lower price range manufacturers.
I had a CR10S until last year, had Bambu, Markforged and even Stratasys printers at work, built a custom or two myself, and honestly the quality of print from the CR10 is just as good as what you’ll get from any of the others if you know how to calibrate and tune it. BUT – it will take about 3-4X longer to print and doesn’t support a lot of the materials you can run on the newer, enclosed machines. I bought an Anycubic Kobra S1 Combo for $560 USD this year because it was about half the price of the Bambu with the same feature set (and although they had some quality control issues I correctly figured I could handle it), and my coworker picked up an Elegoo Centauri Carbon which is a fast, Klipper-based coreXY, high-temp machine for $299 USD, and it’s been working great! I’m printing PCTG and PACF and ASA CF filament for car parts and little structural mounting brackets though, so I mostly wanted the enclosure and high-temp capabilities. So, bottom line, you won’t see a big quality difference with a newer printer, you will see a speed improvement and the ability to print better materials and get wifi and network printing. If you aren’t interested in those things and you are happy with the speed you get from the Ender, keep it. If you want those things, Bambu was the first and arguably the best, but there are “fast followers” in the market now at a much better value IMO that are more budget friendly.
The best way I have to explain it is there are two very different hobbies, 3D printing or making things with 3D printing.
Some people enjoy the tinker aspect of printing. They get a new printer, print a dozen mods for it, then get another printer to do the same. At any given time they might have one working printer. These are the build-a-printer tribe, and the modded Vorons that crank out sub-2-minute benchies are like crack for them.
The other hobby is making things, including with 3d printing. This group usually wants a printer that “just works”. Bambu has made massive inroads in this group, especially with the AMU.
It makes a lot more sense once you understand that these groups have very different definitions of “great printer” and sources of enjoyment.
Open source is in a weird place stuck between these two groups. Consumer 3d printing would not exist without man-years of effort in open source projects like RepRap and Slic3r. It hurts to have been part of that and then see closed-source companies (like Bambu) creating walled gardens around them. It also hurts to see a vendor that’s committed to open source (Prusa) struggle because they get kneecapped on price by third party companies that clone their parts but never give anything back to the community. We’re stuck between a rock and a hard place.
ELEGOO Centauri Carbon.
$299 for an enclosed, self leveling, fast X-Y printer capable of printing nylon and polycarb.
I’ve got no complaints, but I’m used to tinkering w 3d printers.
Replacing an Ender w all the upgrades, cheaper.
Biggest problem has been getting new clamps to attach a glass build plate.
Printer was backordered, but delivery is under 30 days.
Proprietary firmware, which isn’t super great, but improving.
Not unreliable.
I absolutely love mine
I’ve built three and they are solid work horses
You kept buying electronics, steppers, ICs, hot plates and everythig else from china, now they’re fugging you without a lube. Who could’ve predicted that?
You enabled chinese by buying cheap clones of STM32 microcontrollers instead of genuine stuff made by STmicroelectronics in their EU fabs.
of course hes gonna say that….he wants to sell his printers and his printers only…
Exactly! Open source hardware and firmware have a very strong and loyal customer base, and I would venture to say that part of the appeal of open source is building and customizing a printer (or other product) to do what you want, how you want, and when you want. Although my original CR10 was a bit fickle, converting it to dual z with linear rails and direct drive allows me to print a variety of filaments at very reasonable speeds and very low cost.
Yeah that was clear when i booted up my prusa and was greeted with his face yuk!
i think i agree with the punchline at the end of the article
i feel like when something becomes truly popular, people get a funny view on it. 15 years ago, it was a thousand people hacking on it and 0 people buying off the shelf products and now it’s a thousand people hacking on it and a million people buying off the shelf products. and people are crying about the end of the hacking, but truly it didn’t go anywhere.
same pattern happens again and again all over technology.
i started with a reprap kossel kit a decade ago, and when it died i bought an off the shelf printer. but i was really barely hacking on it…i did print replacements / upgrades for a lot of the components, but that was because they were crap, not because i had novel ideas about how they should work. i was just copying the real innovators then, and i’m just paying a company to copy them now.
only regret i have is i bought a fancy hot end i never bothered to install, and now i probably never will because the stock hot end on my $170 printer is so nice!
The difference is the work of those hackers got their fair share of recompense in the early days, even if it is just an acknowledgment of their contribution and access to everyone else’s improvements on their work. Where now the big mostly Chinese brands steal all the work of others, make all the money from it, and don’t even feed back into the open source as they are supposed to…
It leaves a rather bad taste, and actively hurts the innovators – it isn’t that a million people are buying just to use, it is that they are buying to use and the folks that actually did the work to make it possible get nothing, and will get nothing for any ongoing efforts.
I mean Prusa stagnated with costs, speed and quality for years. It wasn’t until Bambu that they actually got off their asses and improved their own product.
The 3S was so good, it was really hard to justify changing it based on the market at the time. When that came out and for the next couple of years, who would ever have paid a lot for faster, because nobody had seen faster that was good and nobody felt like it was going to be useful.
i couldn’t possibly agree less. hackers hack hackily. finance bros worry about how to monetize an invention. the relationship between hackers and finance bros is never good for hacking.
my contribution to 3d printering is basically 0 but there are a few fields where my hacks have seen some modest popularity and in no way have i ever been harmed by someone else making money that i wasn’t even interested in. if you’re working for pay, you’re a professional, not a hacker.
And if somebody else is making serious money off your work without even bothering to credit you…
I’m not saying these folks need the money, as they probably were/are doing it because they like the challenge, and seeing where others take the idea building collaboratively. But its pretty soul destroying to do something good and open source it for everyone to then have that work taken by somebody, usually without any accreditation, and perhaps improved without sharing back violating if not the legal terms than the spirit of the licence you open sourced it under, and all while they are making serious money. You get nothing, not even the benefit of some other genius’ (who was probably paid a wage by the company that ‘stole’ your work) improvements to build on again yourself.
people whose precious soul is destroyed by seeing others profit from their work (a) aren’t like me, and (b) don’t really like open source either.
and of course you get whatever improvements are made in these chinese labs and factories. even if they don’t publish to your satisfaction, they do share the device itself with you, and at a competitive price. secrets don’t last long.
Oh goody now I have pay them to keep playing from the latest patch…
So yeah “(b) don’t really like open source either.” really isn’t true – the open source COLLABORATIVE world can be loved. While being stuck on the outside having to pay up to get an iterated version of your own work back, that you likely didn’t really need and in a form you don’t even really want – as these off the shelf machines are getting more and more tinkering unfriendly. Which is somewhat justifiable being altered for extra cheap mass manufacturing rather than easy production in the Shed, but still sucks more time and effort out of your own efforts…
If you are completely unbothered by this turn good for you, but the community at large is still harmed as so many others in it won’t keep playing.
i’m not harmed by a $170 printer that’s of an insanely high quality and function. if i was keen on reprap, i would appreciate having the cheap printer to print parts for my custom rig. if i was keen on customizing my commercially-purchased printer, i would appreciate spending so little for such a high quality basis for my tinkering. it’s all win. there’s no part of the community that doesn’t win from cheap high quality tools. there’s no part of the community that wins by the rarity of high quality tools.
this is really elementary stuff. any business model that relies on an undersupply of high quality tools is antithetical to hacking, and to open source. you’re speculating fearfully about what might happen when bambu has a monopoly, which hasn’t happened. and won’t happen. and if it did happen, would provide the perfect environment for its undoing.
I’m still using my scratch built Mendel90. Except I’m not because I have upgraded it multiple times. I suppose it is a little less open source now than it used to be because my current extruder is not. That’s about it though.
If I was convinced to buy a factory built closed-source printer… it would be one that I felt I could work on. And as time went by I would be keeping it up to date by applying open source upgrades.
I’m kind of reminded of the desktop wars by this discussion. Linux desktops hold a very small minority share right? That is so often the excuse for hardware or software manufacturers not supporting it. But I started using computers in the 80s, I remember that. There were companies making money then. But how many people had a home computer in those days? Probably fewer than run a Linux desktop today. It didn’t make it un-profitable!
Long live OSHW!
A harsh reality is that if you make something commercially successful that others can freely replicate. You will get a lot rushing in to do just that. Exploiting more favorable logistical/labour conditions and not having to invest Time and resources in its development to undermine you in the market. With the constant risk that eventually a party may seek to hijack the development and wield patents to force the market into becoming practically “theirs”.
And yeah. While quite a few will care and stick by your creation out of principle. Most people are just conditioned to go for whatever seems like a good deal with no care about what went behind it. Even if knowing that can avoid regrets later like BBL’s little stunt where they locked down an API to only listen to their own apps.
I completely agree, but I would like to point out that this is true only if your goal is to dominate the market. You cannot do that with open source hardware for the reasons you gave. But you can stay in business, and keep making good products that dedicated people use and like.
I think people too often conflate capitalism with standards for morality or success. Why is the goal by default to make as much money as possible? If that’s the goal then it’s not at all surprising that negative adaptations would result. If your goal is something else, then open source can be competitive.
It’s not. It’s just that those businesses that make money can grow, and naturally take over the market.
Nobody is in it to make as little money as possible.
But nobody tries to ‘make as much money as possible’, unless they are poor.
Having a few bucks gives you the power to say ‘no’, because you don’t need the money THAT bad.
The whole ‘corporations must always chase immediate profit’ is idiotic, oft repeated, leftist derp.
Government, on the other hand, can’t see past the next election cycle.
Isn’t it the law, though? Can’t company leadership be sued by shareholders if they refuse to maximize profit?
No.
They have a fiduciary duty to the shareholders.
But that doesn’t mean ‘blind pursuit of short term profits’, that’s just commie derp.
Long term growth is a much better strategy, which strategy they choose is up to the board.
Anybody can be sued by anybody else for anything at any time.
Dangers are shyster bills and angry judges.
If I had a dollar every time I heard this.
https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/ael-2013-0006/html
Why TF are you posting links to some idiot sociologists opinion paper Ostracus?
That paper is a good example of commie derp.
Fact free, pure opinion.
If that’s your purpose, good work!
@HaHa
But in a world of just-in-time infrastructure and razor-thin profit margins, isn’t chasing short-term profit evolutionarily superior? You can choke out your competition with short-term gains faster than their long-term strategy will pay out. Even in nature, competition often leads to dead ends for this very reason.
If the management is the shareholders they can do whatever they like. If it’s majority or controlling interest shareholders there are some (weak?) laws protecting minority shareholders.
“They have a fiduciary duty to the shareholders. But that doesn’t mean ‘blind pursuit of short term profits’”
But that is what is almost always done as there are great incentives to do so.
Clear example: the transfer of US manufacturing and IP to China, a country which has always IN WRITING stated that it would not become a Western style “democracy” despite the profit seeking blinders leading to wishful thinking that it would which has led to a dangerous dependence by the US on what is now recognized as a competitor to US global hegemony.
Of course, this can also be seen as rather convenient situation:
Make money CREATING a military adversary, China, by heavily investing in and moving industry to it and then make even more money OPPOSING it while STILL investing in it’s further strengthening by the need to buy products manufactured in China that we no longer produce domestically!
The perfect, accidental or intentional self-licking military industrial complex ice cream cone.
Occasionally, “commie derp” is correct:
“A capitalist will sell you the rope you hang him with.” – Communist adage heard in various forms being the fundamental message of a much longer Vladimir Lenin quote
Of course, in the current US case, it’s “Invest to build rope factories in China, agree to transfer IP as a part of the deal or just allow it to be stolen without consequences, and then be forced to BUY the rope they hang you with.”
Anon:
Chasing short term profits pleases speculators.
Long term growth pleases investors.
Every sane corporate board wants investors, not speculators.
As you say, they can make money either way.
But speculators are fickle trend chasers.
As a stock picker, your job is deciding who to invest your money with.
Both types of company continue to operate.
Winston:
Nixon went to China on the theory that it’s better to trade with them than go to war.
Remember at the time China was ruled by a genocidal psychopath that actually believed Marx was not an idiot.
Right now, we’re seeing how well mercantilism works out for China.
It sure looks like what a classic open market advocate would expect.
Corrupt markets rigged to benefit children of the standing central committee.
Producing insanely rich air thieves, misinvestment, huge waste and market bubbles.
Government paralyzed as the CCPs owners need to lose money, but that is forbidden.
Welcome to capitalism!
Time will tell though, it could be worse then I expect.
The situation with China now is a replay of what happened between England and China with the tea trade a couple hundred years earlier.
China only wanted western money, silver and gold, to build global financial and ultimately political dominance over all their trade partners. England wanted the tea (and other exotic goods), but couldn’t sell any goods back in trade for the lack of demand by the Chinese, so the trade became deeply unbalanced and England was about to bankrupt itself to satisfy the popular demand for luxury goods made in the far east. Sound familiar?
End result: war with China, and relocating tea production to India and other places.
It’s not that similar Dude.
They were a monopoly on one sought after thing.
Now they are a diversified economy.
Pounds used to theoretically represent pounds of silver.
Silver is a physical thing you can run out of.
It’s a major downside to any kind of ‘real’ currency.
Gold strikes cause inflation.
Nation level spending can cause deflation.
‘Modern’ currencies are held up by belief, like blocks of flats in a Monty Python sketch.
Exchange rates are ‘managed’.
The opium war is apt in it’s way though.
Synthetic drugs have reduced the political importance of the places natural drugs come from.
The CIA hates synthetic drugs.
Fentanyl/Speed has disturbed many old, hidden power/financial structures.
Which nobody will even talk about, for fear of being treated like a loony.
I’m a ‘Monster Raving Loonie’ and proud of it.
Vote Vermin Supreme.
Everybody gets a pony!
What are your thoughts on Dodge v Ford?
Anyone who thinks ‘corporations must always chase immediate profit’ has not properly engaged with leftist economic thought.
In fact, I’m not even sure I’ve heard anyone else say it apart from you.
Liar.
Simpson Manufacturing (ticker SSD) significantly funds a charity, and that information is publicly available. You can know how they operate before you buy the stock. Other corporations make charitable contributions, and they’re quite public about it. Some engage in disaster relief. Contributions to colleges are common.
The “fiduciary duty” laws for a corporation are a failed attempt to prevent a board of directors, CEO, or takeover, from gutting a company.
I found it really strange that Joseph was using the Chinese firms’ patent applications, which surged in 2020, to tell a story about uncompetitive behavior. The number of patents issued are usually used in economics as a proxy for innovation.
I’d bet my bippy that the top yellow line in # patents is Bambu, and I’d bet that a good percentage of those patents actually represent actual innovation. I bet 2nd-highest is Creality. They’re not sleeping either.
The big Chinese firms are focusing not on copying, like they used to, but on pushing out new features — at least as far as reliability and ease-of-use are concerned. And that used to be Prusa’s niche, so it’s no surprise that they’re feeling the heat.
Whether they have unfair advantages in the form of gov’t support, I can’t say. They certainly have a home-turf advantage by being located in Shenzhen, like the US computer firms used to have in Silicon Valley.
But as always, the real innovation — the real left-field, wacky new ideas stuff — comes from our community, and we see that every week on Hackaday. Whether this is good for business, either Prusa’s or Bambu’s, is kinda moot for us?
Unfortunately no, that’s not how it works. Patenting something in Europe is expensive. And nobody will help you. Also if you are trying to be “open-source company” than you may not want to spend money and effort on patents even though you create a lot of new things. In China meanwhile, a lot of things is government subsidized – including help with patent applications.
Also claiming “good percentage of those patents actually represent actual innovation” in current climate of rampant patent trolling is IMHO incorrect.
Bambu are the ones that implemented vibration compensation and vastly upped the speed and quality (also self leveling).
Prusa was caught sleeping and now are acting indignant
Input shaping, aka vibration compensation, was in Klipper (open source) two years before they shipped their first printer. Self Leveling was in Marlin 4 years before Bambu was founded.
I agree that Prusa sat on the Mk3 for far FAR too long, but Bambu’s big innovation was shipping a fully-assembled non-kit printer with out-of-the-box reliability and print quality instead of letting the end user figure it out.
This is correct. Prusa botched the XL by vastly underestimating the work entailed to ship it and hence it was a year late and at a quality / repairability bar significantly below the MK3s+. This undoubtedly sidetracked them right as Bambu was ramping up and forced them to scramble to do MK4, CORE. Sat on Mk3 too long indeed.
A patent is a piece of paper that allows you to spend still more money on lawyers trying to enforce it.
If you don’t have a six or seven figure legal budget to enforce your patents, they are just expensive toilet paper.
“If you cannot win a battle, no must not enter it’ (para) Sun Tsu.
Asking a patent lawyer ‘should I patent this’ is like asking a barber if you need a haircut.
Don’t do the patent search, much less apply for the patent.
Knowing about a trolls patents makes you liable for much higher damages.
Even if you can’t defend a patent, it still means nobody else can patent the same thing, which means they can’t turn around to sue you for selling your own invention.
Not how that works in practice.
They absolutely can patent the same thing, get the patent, sue you and win, including their lawyer bill.
By outspending you.
There are a few exceptions, old exceptions.
Even in those cases, it was the inventors grandchildren that collected (e.g. delay windshield wiper circuit).
If prior art really mattered, the patent is unneeded, just the product and date is enough.
But you’ll spend six figures on shysters making the argument, it will take years.
The best bet for someone without a big legal war chest is not to do the patent search.
They’re expensive, never definitive and make you liable for punitive damages as everything after will be called ‘willful’.
IIRC you defend a trademark and enforce a patent…
Just stay out of court, unless you are lawyer getting paid.
Even if you beat the odds and win, you’ll never get the time back.
Process is punishment enough, by design.
As I see it, the real cost of parenting something isn’t the cost of filing the patent, but the much greater cost of paying the lawyers to defend the patent if somebody infringes it.
Yes you’ll get costs if you win (which won’t cover your internal costs), but the cost of losing is too great for many small businesses. For them, patents are a waste of money, and they’re better of going down the trade secret route.
What a patent does, it gives you the ability to block other patents that are too similar to yours. This doesn’t require great costs to hire lawyers – you can simply point to your patent and say “this invalidates your claim” and they have to prove to the patent office that it doesn’t.
Even if you don’t enforce your patent, the other companies rarely try to compete because that would mean price war, and there’s not much profit in that. The exception is countries like China where all the potential competition is basically controlled by the state anyways, so it’s a systemic cartel. They only have to beat the western company whose IP they’re stealing in the first place.
Have you ever tried that?
If you got to the patent office before the patent was issued, they might look at your patent.
If the patent was issued already, they’d say ‘Courthouse is that way’.
Disputes are not the patent office’s job.
At the current rate of patent issue, it’s a fulltime job to look for new pending patents matching yours.
You won’t find them all.
What I have seen in other industries: China makes patents for existing features. And floods the market with chepa products. This will kill lots of competitors. The rest can be pushed back with the patents and then the prices can be put as high as possible sinc ethey basicly have a monopoly. See 3-5 Semiconductor industry Resources like Ga, In and GaAs and InP. There the same patent war is happening.
This is exactly what bambulabs is doing. Though to be fair there wasn’t a pre assembled product at the time with the same performance (just open source projects (Borons, Vzbots, etc)
i don’t actually have an end point about patents and competitiveness but i just wanted to provide some context
you’re out here typing “floods the market with cheap products” and i’m out here typing “dang!!! i can’t believe how good this $170 printer is.”
we are not the same.
My controversial take: Patents are one of the greatest evils of our world.
Not super controversial. I mean, there’s even a real strain of academic economists who think that they’ve gone too far. There has always been a compromise between putting a value on the idea and the damage to society that the monopoly creates — “second best” is the key word.
How you draw the tradeoffs, whether the legal side of things can be captured by corporate interests, and whether it incentivizes firms to sit on their laurels, are known issues.
When you have the resources to patent ridiculous ‘innovative’ features like rounded corners (Apple, patent D670,286) or keyboard layouts (Nokia, many patents) on smartphones you can control the marketplace with vexatious litigation and buy up or drive smaller companies out of business to the detriment of consumers, patents aren’t inherently evil in themselves, but the way they can be used makes them an instrument of evil and they’re no longer really fit for purpose.
but thanks to patents, once the patent expires, the public domain has a thorough description of rounded corners. they’re not just a trade secret that lasts until someone leaks the secret.
@Greg A
I’m pretty sure that in the absence of patents, trade secrets would be leaked or reverse-engineered fairly quickly nowadays. We’d be better off without them.
“Many similar issues have arisen in 3D printing before. ”
Reminds me of MakerBot’s story with Bre Petis announcing in 2012 that their next 3D printer will not be open source
https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/pulling-back-from-open-source-hardware-makerbot-angers-some-adherents/
China supports its engineers. When you bring it back to first principles that’s all it is.
“China supports its engineers. ”
Errr, uhm, yes … truly a worker’s paradise.
And for the record, yeah, I have spoken to lots of folks who work/worked there.
Got any proof or are you just talking out of your arse? I’m a software engineering subcontractor located in Slovakia, working for Chinese company and man it’s night and day difference compared to US or EU corporations that focused on total exploitation of local “resources”. In fact I’m studying Chinese to reach at least HSK4 or maybe HSK5 and I’ll be looking for a wife there, and to buy an apartment.
What kind of proof are you expecting, a bunch of people’s names? Got any proof for anything you just said? It’s the internet, it’s always hearsay until it’s self-doxxing
Ohh, do I have an impersonator or is it just a name clash…?
FWIW, I’m a UK based tech for a household name electronics co.
Being snide about it being a “worker’s paradise” is asinine because opinions on working conditions are always biased and colored by whichever side of the propaganda you consume.
The factual proof is in how China subsidizes their industries vs US and the EU. The factual proof is the increasing legislation and tariffs against Chinese imports.
If we want to get an actual foot into the race, maybe we should back politicians that actually want to subsidize industries for long term national growth, instead of, say, coal lmfao
It’s even worse if the software is locked down.
I bought an AnyCubic S1C (as far as I know it’s a Bambulab clone) at release based on YouTube video’s. I did not know that the software was locked down and that it didn’t run on Linux. So I had to install a Windows virtual machine just to run the software, which also didn’t run in proton. Ok so I had that sort of working, but couldn’t connect. Turns out, you couldn’t connect to the “makeronline” part that the software requires to print if you use a VPN and I don’t want to use the internet without a VPN from within the EU, for obvious reasons. And you have to have a username and password and connect over the internet to the printer. This caused me so much headache. For the first weeks I was not able to print the way I expected it to and was trying to figure out how things work so I couldn’t send it back anymore as that time had passed.
Turns out, some hero made firmware called Rinkhals. It’s installed next to the original firmware. Now I can finally connect over my LAN (didn’t work with stock firmware even though it was advertised that it could), use a normal slicer, don’t have to run a Windows vm, no internet required, the printer is (at least) twice as fast, it has mainsail, way more options and it’s finally epic.
My printer was almost a paperweight if it wasn’t for him. I wish he didn’t use the github insane donation system that wants all sorts of personal details, or I would have donated to him already.
That must have been really bad videos if such important downsides weren’t mentioned
That must have been really bad YouTube videos if all of that was never mentioned.
One of the reasons removing the dislike counter was ifiotic on Google’s part.
Especially considering the reason why they did that in the first place. Very dumb short-term thinking that was bound to backfire.
What do you mean? They got what they wanted. The guy spent a ton of money on a tech gadget, from a sponsored video on youtube; mission accomplished. Whether he’s happy or not doesn’t matter; unhappy consumers probably spend more anyways.
“It’s hard to overstate the impact desktop 3D printing has had on the making and hacking scene. It drastically lowered the barrier for many to create their own projects, and much of the prototyping and distribution of parts and tools that we see today simply wouldn’t be possible via traditional means.”
2026, we’ll see if it can be an end run around “making things in America”.
Nah, he’s just greedy.
No. He just wants to remain relevant, sales is just a potential method for that. You don’t name your product and company after yourself unless you have a tiny bit of an ego trip.
Unless it’s really hard to find a good name without running into previously trademarked names. Naming the company after oneself is a tradition that comes from before the 20th century.
You know, you can open-source and distribute patented designs online. You can even create them at home. You just can’t sell them.
If sales are restricted then it’s not open source. It’s rule #1 in OSI and all other open source definitions:
https://opensource.org/osd
Restrictions on sale are at the heart of the GPL.
But good open source licenses like BSD don’t put such restrictions on the code.
BSD does not protect you, it allows someone to copy from you and sell your work without compensation to you. In GPL that compensation is the “pay it forward” freedom that you gave, so others, regardless of the middle man, also get.
Huh? What are those so called restrictions?
GPL doesn’t care whether you sell your software, it only cares that your source is provided.
I have never seen this in GPL, could you point us to where this is mentioned in the license file?
“Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. If a license does not permit users to make copies and sell them, it is a nonfree license. If this seems surprising to you, please read on.”
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html
@matt wilkie Yes you are allowed to sell your open source project. But GPL doesn’t restrict sales, anyone can modify and sell it they want and follow the license rules (credits, sharing file under the same license and so on)
It’s more than that just not being able to sell the patented tech itself, you can’t even sell the things you print because you’re the making money from unlicensed patented tech.
That’s a good point, I was mostly being a wise-ass about being clandestine but it would be a nightmare to get wrapped up in some lawsuit that involved legal discovery searching all your 3d-printed additions to machines checked for patents and jeopardizing every single thing that came out of the shop. Has that happened? Any lawyers around here with such niche experience?
What I dislike very much in the Jo’s article is that he tries to push down open source while the real issue is the patenting system being screwed. I don’t understand what is his grip against open source, he failed where Adafruit is successful, that’s it. And the issue he describe is not just patents but many brands in many markets are getting cloned too (you know those bags with a L and V).
I didn’t interpret it as a gripe against the philosophy and practice of open source. Open source exists in a large part as war against broken portions of IP law and policy. The two go hand-in-hand.
More recently the meta-game has matured from local open source hacker rebellion into “move your production to a country that flagrantly violates IP and doesn’t do anything about it.” That’s getting off-topic.
It’s is at least its second article where he says that open source 3D printers are (almost) dead. He fails at sourcing many parts of the MK3S, did false promises that MK4 and XL will be open source (he even had to remove the open source logo), he tries to make his own definition of open source hardware through a questionable page on their website (they don’t follow open source hardware definition), etc. At this point he seems to really have something against it. And going close source is not solving his problem, as explained in his own article. Open source has always fought patents, nothing new.
I dunno what “innovation” hackaday is referring to. 3D printing technology has been stagnant for 15 years.
Every printer on the market is a cookie-cutter clone, usually of printers from the early 2010’s. They use the same arangement of axes, the same mechanics, the same bearings. They use the same motors. The same sensors. Calibration isn’t even very new, printerbot developed it over a decade ago. Everyone uses firmware that is nearly indistinguishable from firmware from a decade ago, speaking the same tired gcode over the same fake serial port to the same slicing software ingesting the same STL and OBJ files.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, this ossified formula killed innovation in 3D printing the moment it formed. To take one example, multi-material printing is still just as much of a pain as it was a decade ago. None of the model formats support multiple materials in the same print, it’s still impossible to include flexible portions, it’s still a pain to import the different parts of the model as different files, and it’s still basically impossible to design them on tinkercad and other popular modelling programs.
The biggest shakeup I can remember was when microsoft tried to crash the scene half-hardheartedly with windows 8, but in the process introduced a voxel-based format that could support multiple materials and gradient color. Or when makerbot before them invented the idea of putting multiple files in a zip file, allowing more information about the object to be included.
Oh, I would be remiss if I didn’t give some credit to klipper, whose innovation was to split the control software between a microcontroller and a PC.
Literally everything you said is wrong.
You wrote: “3D printing technology has been stagnant for 15 years.” Assuming you mean FDM printers…
I still have a running Makerbot and a couple of Printrbots that I made years ago. I also have some old Taz’s and Prusa MK3. The two Bambu X1C’s are so much better.
It’s much faster (by hours), less prone to problems, can handle MANY filaments, and changing out extruders is pretty easy. When it does fail… it see it and stops the print. It also tells you when calibrations issues exist (auto detection on axis tension for example).
What you are left with is a fast, better, printing experience.
Maybe you expected a Star Trek replicator experience… I dunno I just know I’ve never printed so much more than I did before.
i think your comment is a testament to expectations.
when i got my first printer in 2014, it was hard to shop for one. there were a few that were ridiculously expensive, and they had constant bad reviews! there were a bunch that were on kickstarter, and many of them took years to (under-) deliver. i wound up paying $600 for a kit for a printer with a tiny print area, an unusably bad hot end (which i replaced with an authentic J-head that was milled out-of-spec for its own mounting bracket, and which was PEEK or PTFE-limited to like 240C max), and an extruder that was nothing but frustration until i replaced it with Greg’s Greg’s Wade’s geared extruder.
and i thought i got a great deal!
people were mostly using ABS and PLA, and i don’t know if there was even a “PLA+” sort of filament yet, there certainly wasn’t the wild variety we have today.
so now for $170 i got a printer with a full 12″ x 12″ build area, a heated bed, a powerful extruder, and a hot end that has such a high temperature limit that i haven’t even bothered to look it up. out of the huge variety of filaments compatible with this printer, i chose PETG. and when i looked at the reviews for PETG, i find that even 2 years ago the forums were full of people complaining that the previous generation of extruders caused nothing but trouble with PETG. everyone was either giving up on PETG, or replacing their extruder (and hot end) with after market components.
but my cheapo printer, out of the box, does a great job on PETG. it’s better than my old printer in every single way. and it was so cheap! and the hardest part of setting it up was figuring out how to get it out of the box.
and that’s just me, unambitious guy aiming for the path well-travelled. i just tried to look up the thermal limit of a hot end built with PEEK, and i couldn’t find it because now all the forums are full of people asking what is the best temperature to print PEEK at!! people are out there printing PEEK, printing with UV resin, laser sintering steel and aluminum, just everything you can imagine is being done.
so it’s possible to have the kind of expectations where this looks like standing still but from my perspective this is maturing very nicely.
for the record though i’m bummed about marlin.
Prusa has been sitting around on their cash cow with little innovation for years until bambu came around. Now they just want to grasp some hope by appealing to the open source community. Voron, ratrig and a bunch of open source projects are thriving. They are a dinosaur that needs to go extinct.
Is there technically anything stopping people from putting new brains into a Bambu printer? I think the answer is no, and while some might howl about licenses, it’s worth taking a look at the situation from a distance. The trouble will really come when consumables get locked down, and that is in everybody’s business plan.
I get that some folk want to tinker around and be able to modify their printers, but for me a 3d printer is just another tool on the bench, like my power supplies, multimeter or oscilloscope – I want to turn them on and use them because they are there to support the projects I want to work on rather than ending up a project in their own right. To that end, for me, the choice between open and closed source is less pressing than “Working out of the box”. For all their failings and criticism for being closed source, Bambu sold me a printer that within an hour of opening the box I was able to get the results I was looking for.
As long as there’s healthy competition in the marketplace, seeing it as just another tool is probably fine, because the competition will keep any single entity from going too far. This is the case for all of the tools you mentioned, including 3D printers at the moment. However we should always be wary of creating another John Deere situation.
yeah tbh “i want it to just work” is my biggest reason for loving open source. in something as complicated as a laptop, i always classify the stock configuration as “doesn’t work” by my standards, and i need source in order to fix it. and my first 3d printer, i definitely had to spend some time hacking on marlin before i was happy with it. but on my new printer, it ‘just works’ and i certainly appreciate that i haven’t had to figure out what it would take to flash new firmware! it might as well be closed source and i’d be just as happy
I did a substantial (if informal and statistically meaningless) walk-around survey of a couple of huge machinery/manufacturing trade shows asking what they use for prototyping (asking the question of whether they use 3D printing and what type). The answer boiled down to “what we have on hand” which might be a 5 axis mill in some soft material, could be some flavor of additive manufacturing, and occasionally files sent out to a contract provider of some sort.
Parts and tools would be produced with or without additive printing, but there would be a lot more iteration and much less efficiency. Remember, cars are still final-modeled with clay, and various parts have to come down to a testable prototype. For physical items, all of the calculation and virtual imaging has to be made real at the end of the day somewhere, somehow.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYHBCZdMlqw
Honestly it was inevitable that 3d printing would become mainstream and popular. I upgraded a Prusa mk3 that I pre-ordered on release all the way up to mk4. I’ve tinkered with Enders and a Tevo and spent a lot of time explaining 3d printing to people. Bambu has made 3d printing easy to get into, and that’s how something becomes mainstream. It’s a recurring theme in technological advancement. The majority of people don’t want to experience the pain and frustration of learning things the hard way and slowly building a skill. People want to get as close to push a button and get a print as possible. Prusa and Voron are not meant to be that. They’ve been focused on those of us that like learning the skill to be able to do whatever we want with 3d printing. Bambu isn’t built for us. It’s a failure of adaptation that Prusa never prepared for competing at that level. Prusa has missed the opportunity to develop it’s own easy button solution.
As always, the solution is to ignore patents and licenses, and publish anonymously online.
Also, all hardware is open source. Just get out your calipers.
That’s my general attitude as well… And while I think the piratical DIY mindset has value, some others here raise a good point: anything you produce on scofflaw hardware is at risk if somebody decides to sue you and take everything you’ve made ON the machines, not just the machines themselves. Only a concern if you’re doing business, but still. It’s legitimate that it forces you to be “just a hobbyist” or else constantly worry about a SLAPP.
I honestly think that, particularly with 3D printing, that sort of individual lawfare is a losing strategy. Reminds me of the occasional pirated music lawsuit in the 90s and 00s, where they would get somebody’s mom from Iowa to “pay” a million bucks to the record industry or whatever. It’d be horrible optics for the companies involved, and everyone would forget about it after a week or two anyways.
Of course the guy now trying to pivot to selling ultra expensive closed down 3d printers is going to claim that open source is dead. They only really had reliability going for them, while all the open source innovation happened with projects like Voron, VzBot, ZeroG etc, and now that everyone has caught up or are catching up on their one remaining unique offering (toolchanger), it’s time to start blaming the Chinese for stealing. TbF, some companies have done that, but it’s also worth mentioning that most of the custom parts/kits for open source designs also come from Chinese companies, Phaetus, Fysetc, Mellow, Trianglelab etc often work closely with creators to prototype and/or sell kits for their designs).
Plus, if we’re pointing to patents, Stratasys famously has had patents on very obvious 3d printing components in the US, singlehandedly holding back the entire field.
Sounds like Josef prepares his audience to move from close source to patents.
NOT TRUE —————————
OPEN SOURCE IS THE FUTUR !!!
OPEN SOURCE IS THE PRESENT AND THE FUTUR CLOSE SOURCE IS LIKE WIN 3.1 IS THE PAST -*-
WHY ALL MY MESSAGE DONT PASS
it s ok now
I don’t understand what he says in the “WTF happened” paragraph. “R&D costs are tax deductible around the world. But definitely not 200% as in this case” does he claim chinese companies get 200% of their R&D costs as tax benefits?
“From our understanding you have to prove the true innovations to qualify and of course a patent application is clear proof! It doesn’t even have to be granted!”
The article he links above about china’s state subsidies doesn’t mention patents at all. And no company has to show patents to have R&D be 100% tax deductible.
Maybe he just forgot a link to source his claims…
The fact that companies such as Sovol, can mass produce very reasonable printers for less than Prusa and still open source their designs makes me think that Prusa is not correct. Perhaps Prusa is using the wrong business model?
Joseph is so far removed from the scene it’s sad. He is completely wrong. His innovation died when he could no longer piggy back on RepRap and now he is trying to sweep the OSH community that made him wealthy under the table. If anyone is considering buying a Prusa after this article is made, don’t. Go invest your money in a LH Stinger, same price, OSH, great community support, and years more advanced than a 2016 style Prusa.
Prusa has run a great 3d printing company and been really good at open hardware. But as they say in investing ‘past performance doesnt predict future results’. Ole Joe made a turn a few years to trying to try and justify a turn to closed source for themselves. You could hear it in interviews the more they got in bed with Simplify3d and their patent licensing based business practices. Prusa the company clearly sees that tasty money on offer, but the community has been paying them top dollar for their printers, parts, and support based largely on their openness. As soon as they turn to closed practices they’ll be ditched like the old news thay made themselves into.
They see their only hope as doing a lot of PR to convince the community they have to accept the change. Meanwhile groups like those supporting RatRig and Voron are picking up the baton as Reprap stagnates. Open hardware remains as long as we want it to remain. The speed of the advances may vary but as we’ve gotten massively capable printers ramping up their openly innovated tech over the last few years that slowing was going to happen anyway.
Competitive market created one problem that no one want to develop a product. Because to make a back bone that work well ,it required 14 year at least. But a company or individual just Simply replicate it and sell .
I have did something about development topic on manny community. The answer already quite clear . one of post about project scale in PCB dev and low level gain around 50k view and up .but noone interact ,contribute and response. After it couple a day , i see a tone of concept or conspiracy about it ,and these video just release about 1 or 2 day ago .i think it s Ai recommend but my youtube profile is built on field theory and it s impossible because i used my sis account to do it . Ai cant recognize my sis sentence style as my style
People dont want to dev honestly. They want wealth by going to get from other .okie i got your idea let expand it.
Well China is literally on the ropes and could collapse legitimately any week. it could be 6 months from now it could be tomorrow but it’s happening. Zhang Youxia doesn’t have time to wait for things to stabilize because if he waits that long he’ll probably die (xi will kill him). So he will force things even though Xi and Hu (who wants xi to somply step down and Zhang to stfu) could wait till the unrest dies down.
Point being the tariffs totally forced the issue for them because it got rid of their ability to just pay for whatever so they have to do whatever they think they’re going to do now and whoever’s going to get away with the money and needs to do it now because not that many people are going to come out of this with anything and the people at the top all want to be the one who gets all of it
Lol. China is collapsing! Any day now!
It might be time to consider that maybe you’ve swallowed some western propaganda.