Hackers, Patents, And 3D Printing

November 16, 2024 by Elliot Williams 32 Comments

Last week, we ran a post about a slightly controversial video that claimed that a particular 3D-printing slicing strategy was tied up by a patent troll. We’re absolutely not lawyers here at Hackaday, but we’ve been in the amateur 3D printing revolution since the very beginning, and surprisingly patents have played a role all along.

Modern fused-deposition modelling (FDM) 3D printing began with Stratasys’ patent US5121329A, “Apparatus and method for creating three-dimensional objects”, and the machines they manufactured and sold based on the technology. Go read the patent, it’s an absolute beauty and has 44 different claims that cover just about everything in FDM printing. This was the watershed invention, and today, everything claimed in the patent is free.

Stratasys’ patent on the fundamental FDM method kept anyone else from commercializing it until the patent expired in 2009. Not coincidentally, the first available home-gamer 3D printer, the Makerbot Cupcake, also went on sale in 2009.

The Stratasys machines were also one of the big inspirations for Adrian Bowyer to start the RepRap project, the open-source movement that basically lead to us all having cheap and cheerful 3D printers today, and he didn’t let the patent stop him from innovating before it lapsed. Indeed, the documentation for the RepRap Darwin dates back to 2007. Zach [Hoeken] Smith delivered our hackerspace the acrylic parts to make one just around that time, and we had it running a year or two before the Cupcake came out of the company that he, Bre, and Adam shortly thereafter founded.

The story of hackers and 3D printers is longer than the commercial version of the same story would imply, and a lot of important innovations have come out of our community since then too. For instance, have a look at Stratasys’ patent on heated bed technology. At first read, it seems to cover removable heated beds, but have a look at the cutout at the end of claim 1: “wherein the polymer coating is not a polymer tape”. This cutout is presumably in response to the at-the-time common practice of buying Kapton, PEI, or PET tape and applying that to removable heated bed surfaces. I know I was doing that in 2012, because I read about it on IRC or something, long before the Stratasys patent was filed in 2014. They could only get a patent for sprayed-on coatings.

As [Helge] points out, it’s also easily verifiable that the current patent on “brick layers” that we’re worrying about, filed in 2020, comes later than this feature request to Prusa Slicer that covers essentially the same thing in 2019. We assume that the patent examiner simply missed that obvious prior art – they are human after all. But I certainly wouldn’t hesitate to implement this feature given the documented timing.

I would even be so bold as to say that most of the post-2010 innovation in 3D printing has been made by hobbyists. While the RepRap movement was certainly inspired by Stratasys’ invention in the beginning, our community is where the innovation is happening now, and maybe even more starkly on the software side of things than the hardware. Either way, as long as you’re just doing it for fun, let the suits worry about the patents. Hackers gotta hack.

Excerpt from 1995 Stratasys patent, showing the drawings of FDM layers, including brick layers.

Brick Layers: The Promise Of Stronger 3D Prints And Why We Cannot Have Nice Things

November 9, 2024 by Maya Posch 83 Comments

It is a fact of life that 3D printed parts from an FDM (fused deposition modeling) printer have weaknesses where the layers join. Some of this is due to voids and imperfect layer bonding, but you can — as [Geek Detour] shows us — work around some of this. In particular, it is possible to borrow techniques from brick laying to create a pattern of alternating blocks. You can check out the video below.

The idea of ‘brick layers’ with FDM prints was brought to the forefront earlier this year by [Stefan] of CNC Kitchen. Seven months after that video you still can’t find the option for these layers in any popular slicers. Why? Because of a 2020 patent filed for this technique by a 3D printing company which offers this feature in its own slicer. But is this patent even valid?

It’s no surprise that prior art already exists in the form of a 1995 Stratasys patent. The above image shows an excerpt from the 1995 Stratasys patent, covering the drawings of FDM layers, including brick layers. This covered all such ways of printing, but the patent expired in 2016. In 2019, a PrusaSlicer ticket was opened, requesting this feature. So what happened? A second patent filed in 2020 assigned to Addman Intermediate Holdings: US11331848B2.

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Patent Spat Leaves DJI Owing Textron $279M

May 1, 2023 by Navarre Bartz 46 Comments

Patents are the murky waters where technical jargon and legalese meet, and in this vast grey area of interpretation, DJI now owes Textron $279M.

At issue in the case were two patents issued to Textron (#8,014,909 and #9,162,752) regarding aircraft control systems for relative positioning to other vehicles and automatic hovering. The jury found that Textron’s intellectual property (IP) had been infringed and that damages amounted to $279M. DJI asserts that Textron’s patents are not valid and will appeal the decision. Appeals in patent trials are handled by the Federal Circuit and can be kicked up to the US Supreme Court, so don’t expect a final decision in the case anytime soon.

We’re not lawyers, so we won’t comment on the merits of the case, but, while it was a jury trial, it was one of many cases decided in the court of Judge Alan Albright, who has been the focus of scrutiny despite efforts to assign fewer cases to his docket amid wider efforts to stymie venue shopping in patent cases. Despite these efforts, the Western District of Texas is such a popular venue for patent cases that Berkeley offers a CEU on going to trial in Waco.

If you’re curious about more IP shenanigans, checkout the Honda mass takedown, the legality of making something similar, or why E3D patents some of their work.

E3D On Patents And Not Being Evil About Them

September 27, 2021 by Jenny List 24 Comments

In our community it’s certain that there will be many people with very strong views about patents. It’s fair to say that the patents system is at times not fit for purpose, with such phenomena as patent trolls, submarine patents, and patent war chests doing nothing but leading it into disrepute. So it’s interesting to read the words of 3D printer hotend manufacturer E3D, as they talk about why they feel the need to patent some of their inventions, and how they intend to proceed with them.

The result is a no-nonsense explanation of why their work being reproduced by overseas competitors has brought them to this point, and in short: they’re patenting very specific inventions rather than broad catch-alls, they are making what they call a legally binding promise not to enforce the patents against non-commercial or academic experimenters, and they will continue to open-source as much as they can.

Will it work for them, or is it the start of a slippery slope? We can see why the E3D folks have taken this step, and we hope that they will continue to act in a responsible manner. If not, as those who have followed the maker-oriented 3D printing business for a long time will know: treading the line between open-source and closed-source can be fraught with danger.

Hackaday Links: February 16, 2021

February 16, 2021 by Dan Maloney 12 Comments

This is it; after a relatively short transit time of eight months, the Mars 2020 mission carrying the Perseverance rover has almost reached the Red Planet. The passage has been pretty calm, but that’s all about to end on Thursday as the Entry Descent and Landing phase begins. The “Seven Minutes of Terror”, which includes a supersonic parachute deployment, machine-vision-assisted landing site navigation, and a “sky-crane” to touch the rover down gently in Jezero crater, will all transpire autonomously 480 million km away. We’ll only learn about how it goes after the eleven-minute propagation delay between Mars and Earth, but we’ll be glued to the NASA YouTube live stream nonetheless. Coverage starts on February 18, 2021 at 11:15 AM Pacific Standard Time (UTC-8). We’ve created a handy time zone converter and countdown so you don’t miss the show.

As amazing as the engineering on display Thursday will be, it looks like the US Navy has plans to unveil technology that will make NASA as relevant as a buggy-whip company was at the turn of the last century. That is, if you believe the “UFO Patents” are for real. The inventor listed on these patents, Dr. Salvatore Pais, apparently really exists; he’s had peer-reviewed papers published in mainstream journals as recently as 2019. Patents listed to Dr. Pais stretch back to 2004, when he invented a laser augmented turbojet propulsion system, which was assigned to defense contractor Northrup Grumman. The rest of the patents are more recent, all seemingly assigned to the US Navy, and cover things like a “high-frequency gravitational wave generator” and a “craft using an inertial mass-reduction device”. There’s also a patent that seems to cover a compact fusion generator. If any of this is remotely true, and we remain highly skeptical, the good news is that maybe we’ll get things like the Epstein Drive. Of course, that didn’t end well for Solomon Epstein. Or for Manéo Jung-Espinoza.

Of course, if you’re going to capitalize on all these alien patents, you’re going to need some funding. If you missed out on the GME short squeeze megabucks, fret not — there’s still plenty of speculative froth to go around. You might want to try your hand at cryptocurrency mining, but with GPUs becoming near-unobtainium, you’ll have to get creative, like throwing together a crypto mining farm with a bunch of laptops. It looks like the Weibo user who posted the photos has laptops propped up on every available surface of their apartment, and there’s also a short video showing a more industrial setup with rack after rack of laptops. These aren’t exactly throw-aways from some grade school, either — they appear to be brand new laptops that retail for like $1,300 a pop. The ironic part is that the miner says this is better than the sweatshop he used to work in. Pretty sure with all that power being dissipated in his house, it’ll still be a sweatshop come summer.

A lot of people have recently learned the hard lesson that when the service is free, you’re the product, and that what Google giveth, Google can taketh away in a heartbeat, and for no discernable reason. Indie game studio Re-Logic and its lead developer Andrew Spinks found that out last week when a vaguely worded terms-of-service violation notice arrived from Google. The developer of the popular game Terraria was at a loss to understand the TOS violation, which resulted in a loss of access to all the company’s Google services. He spent three weeks going down the hell hole of Google’s automated support system, getting nothing but canned messages that were either irrelevant to his case or technically impossible; kinda hard to check your Gmail account when Google has shut it down. The lesson here is that building a business around services that can be taken away on a whim is perhaps not the best business plan.

And finally, we watched with great interest Big Clive’s secrets to getting those crisp, clean macro shots that he uses to reverse-engineer PCBs. We’ve always wondered how he accomplished that, and figured it involved some fancy ring-lights around the camera lens or a specialized lightbox. Either way, we figured Clive had to plow a bunch of that sweet YouTube cash into the setup, but we were surprised to learn that in true hacker fashion, it’s really just a translucent food container ringed with an LED strip, with a hole cut in the top for his cellphone camera. It may be simple, but you can’t argue with the results.

Continue reading “Hackaday Links: February 16, 2021” →

Hackaday Links: February 7, 2021

February 7, 2021 by Dan Maloney 14 Comments

What’s that they say about death and taxes? Apparently that maxim doesn’t apply to Flash, at least when it comes to the taxman. As we noted last week, the end of the Adobe Flash era took with it a scheduling and routing app for the railway system in a Chinese city. This time around, it’s the unfortunately acronymed SARS, for South African Revenue Services, having Flash woes. They still have several online tax forms that haven’t been migrated to HTML5, so to keep the revenue flowing they built their own Flash-enabled browser. Taxpayers are free to download and use the browser while SARS works on getting the rest of their forms migrated. It sort of reminds us of those plans the Internal Revenue Service has to ensure tax collection continues after a nuclear apocalypse — death and taxes indeed.

Trouble for Nintendo in the EU? It looks that way, as consumer groups have made the case to EU regulators that Nintendo’s wildly popular Switch consoles are showing unacceptably premature obsolescence with the notorious “Joy-Con drift” issue. The problem, which manifests as players being unable to control a game due to constant movement despite no inputs on the joystick-like controller, requires a repair, one that Nintendo initially only did for free as warranty service for consoles less than a year old. For consoles out of the warranty period, Nintendo was charging €45, which is approximately the same as what a new controller would cost. This didn’t sit well with regulators, and now they’re breathing down Nintendo’s neck. They now offer free repairs for up to two years, but they’re still under the EU microscope. The interesting bit in the linked document is the technical reason for the problem, which is attributed to premature PCB wear — possibly meaning the traces wear away — and inadequate sealing of the Joy-Con mechanism against dust intrusion.

Last year looked as though it was going to be an exciting one with respect to some of our nearest solar and galactic neighbors. For a while there, it looked like the red giant Betelgeuse was going to go supernova, which would have been interesting to watch. And closer to home, there were some signs of life, in the form of phosphine gas, detected in the roiling atmosphere of our sister planet, Venus. Alas, both stories appear not to have panned out. The much-hoped-for (by me) Betelgeuse explosion, which was potentially heralded by a strange off-cycle dimming of the variable star, seems now to be due to its upper atmosphere cooling by several hundred degrees. As for Venus, the phosphine gas that was detected appears actually to have been a false positive triggered by sulfur dioxide. Disappointing results perhaps, but that’s how science is supposed to work.

Amateur radio often gets a bad rap, derided as a hobby for rich old dudes who just like to talk about their medical problems. Some of that is deserved, no doubt, but there’s still a lot of room in the hobby for those interested in advancing the state of the art in radio communications. In this vein, we were pleased to learn about HamSCI, which is short for Ham Radio Science Citizen Investigation. The group takes to heart one of the stated primary missions of amateur radio as the “ontinuation and extension of the amateur’s proven ability to contribute to the advancement of the radio art.” To that end, they’ll be holding HamSCI Workshop 2021, a virtual conference that will be focused on midlatitude ionospheric science. This appears to be a real science conference where both credentialed scientists and amateurs can share ideas. They’ve got a Call for Proposals now, with abstracts due by February 15. The conference itself will be on March 19 and 20, with free admission. The list of invited speakers looks pretty impressive, so if you have any interest in the field, check it out.

And finally, we got a tip this week about a collection of goofy US patents. Everything listed, from the extreme combover to baby bum-print art, is supposedly covered by a patent. We didn’t bother checking Google Patents, but some of these are pretty good for a laugh. We did look at a few, though, and were surprised to learn that the Gerbil Shirt is not a garment for rodents, but a rodent-filled garment for humans.

The Back And Forth Of Windshield Wipers And Patent Lawsuits

April 23, 2020 by Al Williams 50 Comments

Who among us hasn’t dreamed of having some brainstorm idea, prototyping it, and then have some huge company put it into worldwide production? The problem is, that’s not really as easy as it sounds in most cases. Take the case of Robert Kearns. Never heard of him? You use the result of one of his patents pretty often; Kearns invented the intermittent windshield wiper.

If he had sold the patent to one of the big carmakers, this would be a short article. Not that he didn’t try. But it didn’t go very well and while, in the end, he prevailed, it was a very expensive victory.

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