User:Robertkovax/sandbox

Personal fabrication
In 2005, Neil Gershenfeld described personal fabrication as “the ability to design and produce your own products, in your own home, with a machine that combines consumer electronics with industrial tools.”

The reason that we as researchers may have missed the beginning of the field is that the field initially took place behind closed doors — as a small, high-margin market in industry that was protected by patents. Starting in the 1960s with computer-controlled laser cutters and milling machines and later on in the 1980s with 3D printing, the relevant technologies were initially conceived as a fast way for creating prototypes for product development. At the time, it was called “rapid prototyping technology.”

The first industrial 3D printer, the SLA-1 from 3D Systems, was introduced in 1987 (Figure 1.1). Many other industrial systems followed with the invention of additional 3D printing techniques. With all patents being filed in the 1980s and 1990s by the future CEOs of large companies, such as 3D Systems and Stratasys, the market was locked down for several decades.

In 2009, however, the first major patent expired, thereby initiating the transition of the technology from industry to the world outside. Technology enthusiasts who grew out of hacker spaces and the crafting-oriented DIY culture had already created their own fabrication hardware (e.g., see the RepRap project, 2005) and now started commercializing their low-cost devices with products such as the MakerBot Cupcake CNC [2009]. These companies entered the market with the declared goal of targeting a market segment that industrial 3D printing companies had overlooked: low-cost 3D printers.

With more and more patents expiring, we currently see an increasing number of the 1980s and 1990s fabrication technologies becoming available outside of industry. While the last decade was marked by low cost 3D printers that extruded plastic filament, we now see a diverse spectrum, including low-cost printers based on curing resins [e.g., the Form1. Formlabs, 2012] and sintering powder [e.g., Sintratec, 2014]. As a result, newly founded companies picked up the technologies and are now competing in the market, resulting in fast progress and price drops by several orders of magnitude. Makers are playing a key role in this transition, as they make their own fabrication machines. This has resulted in hundreds of freely available 3D printer designs, as of today [Price Comparison 3D Printers]. These new fabrication machines are no longer closed-source industrial 3D printers that companies encapsulated to protect their IP, but instead open-source 3D printers that can easily be “hacked”, which has given even further momentum to the evolution of these devices. In the wake of this evolution, the maker movement continues to pick up additional fabrication technologies, including laser cutters [e.g., Glowforge, 2016], milling machines [e.g., Shapeoko, 2013], and water jet cutters [e.g., Wazer, 2016].

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