Erik's Blog: Discussing open source innovation, personal fabrication and a ...

We've been really busy with many developments at Ultimaker! Most notably: the Ultimaker Controller, reducing lead times, adding individual 3D printer parts and lowering the overall shipping costs. Also, we're releasing an improved version of ReplicatorG. Test versions are available at software.ultimaker.com/beta.



Together with Julius, I made this cool video of the UltiController:

Usually, during the weekend I spend my time working on Ultimaker as a company, or I have social obligations. For this weekend, my wife surprised me in an original and heartwarming way. She said she had planned a little trip, but instead the surprise was that I could do anything I wanted, EXCEPT work. So I spent the entire weekend just playing with my Ultimakers instead of improving them or improving the company. A whole weekend of 3D printing!

I was pretty emotional because of her altruistic gift! Funny, I feel like I already have everything that I could wish for. The only thing I can't have enough of is time!



These are the results, so far:


I'm really fond of how the lion turned out! It was a 5 hour print at high detail setting (sub 0.1mm layer height).

De afgelopen tijd zijn er een paar evenementen geweest waar ik nog niet veel over geschreven heb. Daar wil ik bij deze verandering in brengen.
Ik heb een presentatie gegeven op How Do You Do. Dat was een super gaaf event tijdens het STRP festival in Eindhoven, waar men tips en trucs uitwisselde op allerlei technische en media- gebieden. Ik vertelde wat over het delen 3D design. Hier is een leuk artikel over geschreven en ook een videootje geschoten:


Verder stonden wij afgelopen week als Ultimaker op RapidPro, waar ik ook twee lezingen heb mogen geven over open source innovatie en 3D printing. Dat was een druk bezochte beurs met veel interesse in de Ultimaker!

Last week was the 3D printing event in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. Ultimaker exhibited there together with about 20 other Ultimakers, shown by their proud operators (see this Ultimaker blog post). There were also RepRaps, milling machines and LeBigRep was printing on site with their HUGE printer. A lot of bioplastic was consumed!

At the event, I was asked to give the first presentation. Below are the slides and recorded video.

Start Movie

View it via direct streaming link or the event page at OpenWebCast.nl.

Bernhard, an Ultimaker power-user at MetaLab Vienna, has gotten the Sprinter firmware working on an Ultimaker. Sprinter is written by Kliment and Caru, based on Triffid Hunter's codebase, based on FiveD [update]oops, it's based on the Tonokip firmware[/update]. It has undergone some serious rework over time.

Inspired by his impressive results, I've also experimented with this a bit more. The travel speeds you can get out of this are a little better. Without accelleration the max speeds are around 333 mm/s (FiveD firmware) and with accelleration they were up to 533mm/s (Sprinter firmware). Somehow the firmware doesn't seem to step the motors any faster. When you set the FiveD firmware at travel rates above 333 mm/s it actually goes slower than at 333mm/s. So somehow there's some microcontroller congestion or it's possibly a bug. The benefits of smooth acceleration are especially important for machines with a lot of moving mass. The Ultimaker isn't the most spectacular example for acceleration because it already can reach the high speeds without software acceleration. For the Ultimaker, the biggest benefits of Sprinter firmware are expected to result from an increased buffer size.

Anyway, to show you the speeds we're now talking about, this is the result:


With the help of Bernhard we finally made a few discoveries as to what causes a less smooth print at higher speeds (becoming noticeable at 70+ mm/s). When using ReplicatorG, the print results were not really much different, except when fillet is enabled in Skeinforge. Fillet is meant to smooth out sharp turns, but it turns out that it smooths out any kind of line segment also lines that nearly have the same orientation. Perhaps this behavior should be change with an angle limit. But Fillet causes the buffer to run dry because there are too many small pieces of G-Code that succeed each other in a very short amount of time. About every two visible segments, four lines of GCode are actually sent. This is, not coincidentally, also the firmware of the FiveD software.
All Sprinter prints were done from ReplicatorG, which now also has an Ultimaker Sprinter machine profile in the newly released ReplicatorG version at: http://software.ultimaker.com/. Note that: This Ultimaker release is not a fork of the normal ReplicatorG, it just undergoes some more testing and has the latest, tested Ultimaker drivers. All Ultimaker commits are publicly visible and offered for integration upstream.

You should see this amazing solar powered 3D printer that sinters ordinary sand into glass. Both the source of energy and material are pretty much unlimited. I wonder if you could one day print entire sand castles, that you could actually live in! Of course we need to be able to 3D print those fresnel lenses out of sand... Plus we need to move the lens, not the castle (unless you're Mohammed). Perhaps that can be achieved in the way I proposed here.

Markus Kayser - Solar Sinter Project from Markus Kayser on Vimeo.

Given that with Ultimaker I've got my hands pretty much full. I figured I'd blog something short that I stumbled across (via Forrest Higgs!) that I've been fascinated about for a long time.

Good news, everyone! Finally, the Ultimaker is shipping.

It took much more work that we had ever imagined, and we knew it would be hard to design a complete machine from scratch and also make it easier to assemble, have a larger build volume, be robust and reliable. I really believe we've nailed it! One of the important strengths are the incredibly fast and accurate parallel kinematics and the optimized print-volume to footprint ratio (inspired by Ilan Moyer's design of the MIT MediaLab). Also, the extruder allows for mid-build refilling of plastic or color changes (inspired by Wade's extruder design). The Z-stage now also has leveling screws so you can more easily make use of that huge build surface. In total it really makes for an easy to operate and fast 3D printer.
The Ultimaker has just started shipping, and since we promised to publish all design files as open hardware, we've just published them to Thingiverse.com. Of course, business-wise it seems like a big leap of faith to do this, but we are confident that it will turn out very well! So happy hacking! We think the Ultimaker is really a good start, but it needs your ideas to be great!



Some pins are missing because the picture is only a snapshot, click to get the most recent map.... Feel free to add yourself!

I'm frequently wowed by progress in CAD software to become both more powerful and more easy to use. Still its good so see how great ideas took quite a lot of time to show up in programs that we use.

I was amazed when I first saw this video, especially the fact that it's still pretty high tech for CAD and that this was all developed on a system with less than 64k memory. They didn't have microcontrollers or computer screens yet, they used an transistors and oscilloscope...



Below is a more extensive coverage of Sketchpad, at 4 minutes the exiting part starts:


This video continues here, even showing 3D CAD:

Peter Hanna of Ars Technica wrote an article on copyright implications once 3D printing becomes more common. Surprisingly, when opening the article I saw a picture of myself (I had nothing to do with that, but I don't object, either )

The article is an interesting read, with some good observations concerning a pending conflict about IP in 3D content. Also, the discussion that followed is very interesting to read. My favorite response is this one by Conner_36: "This damn internet thing... it causes so many problems.". Another, more elaborate response about stifling innovation by RikuoAmero really sums up much of why I think strong IP is bad. Also, I liked this response by hpsgrad:
"Equally to the point, 3D printing has the potential to create a totally different, post-modern mode of production. Why should we cripple this new new mode of production in an attempt to protect the current one?"

"Alternatively, you might be afraid that 3D-printing has the potential to make it too easy to make stuff, and that as a result, nobody would bother to create new, better, and genuinely creative things. Again, I think that this is absolutely insane. The thought that people would stop making stuff because it's too easy to make stuff is simply bizarre."


Through this blog I'd like to add some perspective the discussion. Copyright and patents are ONE answer to a bigger question: How do we structure the provisioning of goods in society? Obviously, there are other answers possible, but the law is very slow to change and historically, for intellectual property (IP), has only gone in the direction of being MORE restrictive.

It is important not to forget why society grants intellectual monopolies (a monopoly better covers what IP really is). While policymakers are influenced strongly by those who profit from intellectual monopolies, there used to be a valid reason for society to accept these artificial monopolies on replicating ideas and designs. The rationale used to be: if inventors would not have the profit driven incentive, these inventions would not be created. This dilemma is more and more becoming a false dilemma. I recommend watching Glyn Moody's talk on this subject [1] and, also, Benkler's "Wealth of Networks" [2] for a scientific treatment of this false dilemma. Today, innovation is becoming democratized, even more so by 3D printers and other digital fabrication technologies. Anyone with internet access and an idea can design an innovation and print it in 3D on an affordable machine such as an Ultimaker or have Shapeways or Ponoko make it for them. Because the design is digital, groups can collaboratively create better designs. Moreover, it scales better than an R&D department: in the RepRap community about 200 full time equivalents are spent, voluntarily, to make a better 3D printer that can print itself. These are already more man-hours worked than the biggest player in the 3D printer industry could afford. But the big difference is: the 200 FTE's in the RepRap community are contributed by thousands of different individuals instead of a small team that works full-time [3]. Creativity, and the innovation that flows from it, works best when a heterogenous population of passionate individuals interact. Moreover, a big group that can openly discuss problems has access to a much broader set of knowledge. This is the reason why communities such as Thingiverse works so well and why licenses that embrace the freedom to copy and derive are important for innovation to flourish. This is what is called social production, an alternative to firm and market based production. In social production public good aspect is preserved.

We've been led to believe we're dependent on those who invent and produce on our behalf, while at the same time the tools to invent and produce are increasingly within our reach. In many cases, the user has the potential to create a better product [4], because it can be tailored to his/her needs instead that of the average wishes of a market segment that has a profit expectation. In markets with varied needs, there is under-provisioning because the tools or rights to derive were not available (one example of "market failure"). Nowadays, preserving these freedoms becomes more important to stimulate innovation than to restrict the flow of knowledge in favor of exclusive right holders. Those who sit on their knowledge in order to exploit it, will never improve it as fast as those who share, interact and mingle their knowledge with others. The same goes for design knowledge and we're missing out on a lot of design improvements.

Most objects made by manufacturers were originally developed by users, but it is not apparent where manufacturers get their inspiration from. In many industries, there is a systemic bias to think manufacturers are in most cases the source of innovation [5]. In many cases the most appropriate role of manufacturers is that of actual manufacturing, not invention.

We need to reconsider the role of intellectual property and to identify and counter policy bias that is suboptimal in terms of provisioning of goods in society (see also [6]). The role of governments should always be to preserve the flow of knowledge, not to promote ownership and the right to exclude for the sake private profit. If ideas are abundant when protection is not offered, why do we want to create all this friction? The fashion industry is an example where virtually no protection is available [7]. Any disruptive technology has led to a battle between old industries that want to maintain their outdated business models. The problem is that they are organized in influencing policy and even public opinion (to copy is to steal!). We should not expect policymakers to fully understand the non-rival nature of digital goods until we use it to create increasingly valuable alternatives. The emerging field of collaborative free and open design is a great example to enlighten them (details are in [3]).

[1] Glyn Moody on Intellectual Monopolies at FSCONS 2011.
[2] Benkler, Y. The Wealth of Networks, Yale University Press, 2006: "By lowering the capital costs required for effective individual action, these technologies have allowed various provisioning problems to be structured in forms amenable to decentralized production based on social relations, rather than through markets or hierarchies."
[3] E. de Bruijn, On the viability of the Open Source Development model for the design of physical objects. 2010
[4] Chapter 5: "Users low cost innovation niches" PDF
[5] E. von Hippel, Sources of Innovation by Eric von Hippel - Oxford University Press, 1988
Download courtesy of Oxford University Press at http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www
[6] von Hippel, E. and Jong, J. P. J. D. (2010). Open, distributed and user-centered: Towards a paradigm shift in innovation policy
[7] http://www.ted.com/talks/johanna_blakley_lessons_from_fashion_s_free_culture.html

The last few months have been very busy ones for us, we done quite some testing with the Ultimaker, started a company, searched for the right material suppliers, worked on our webshop and so on. We initially planned to start in December but the combination of starting a new company and developing an all new product took more time than we counted on.

As of today the Ultimaker is available for pre-order from our shop, yay! We will ship it in four to six weeks.

In addition to the many people who have contributed to the Ultimaker, we would especially like to thank the participants of first and second Ultimaker workshop at the Utrecht Fablab Protospace for providing such a lot of feedback to us, it has been really helpful in making the Ultimaker a great product.

Update: Yes, we will also ship to the USA and yes, it runs on 110 V and 240 V (some people were asking) and yes, there are still some spots left in the pre-order!