Fr Robert Ballecer, SJ : did u look at BQ @ CES? What did u think?IS OPEN SOURCE 3d Printing wh...

[G+_Joel G. J]

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ : did u look at BQ @ CES? What did u think?IS OPEN SOURCE 3d Printing what might help the platform?

[G+_Eddie Foy]

The whole home 3D printing started as open source.  The RepRap pretty much lead the way.  And since the open source version hit pretty big, the cat is out of the bag.  The big boys can close source their stuff, but we can figure out what they did.  Was printing up a few mounting sleds  for Raspberry Pis today.  But on the whole, people 'want' open source because its free or much lower cost.  not really for the hacking aspect.

[G+_Brandon Jasper]

Open source pretty much sets the standard for the hobby level printers.  The ones you really want such as the Ultimaker 2 and TAZ 4 are open source.  If there's a problem the community will come up with a fix.  Closed source, non-user maintainable examples like Makerbot's 5th generation machines with their 'smart' extruders that constantly jam and are sold in three packs is an example of what to avoid like the plague.

 

And as to what she talks about being scalable.  Lulzbot has over 120 TAZ machines printing parts for new printers 24/5.  They're a great example of the manufacturing concept.  Distributed manufacturing is also something that's becoming more viable because of 3d printing technologies.