3D printing & models

Notes

1. 3D printing has not yet reached its full potential. It went further than 3D TV, perhaps to a similar level as consumer VR, but there might still be many challenges. Hopefully it will be a force for good.
2. Not everything can be 3D printed.
3. But a lot of stuff can be.
4. But there are details.
5. Read the manual, ask living people, ask an LLM — but a paid one — and describe the problem as much as possible, with pictures.
6. There are a lot of things which might go wrong, and a lot which can be slightly improved.
7. There are things like elephant foot, or a slightly dirty printing bed, which degrade a print.
8. Calibrate.
9. Maintain (or ask people for help). It is like that book about motorcycles and Zen.
10. The fact that 3D printers operate in the physical world is astonishing. They are basically robots — not motile ones.
11. However, it also means it is hard. Connection with the physical world is hard: things can be broken, things break themselves. There is a famous joke about regular 2D printers being the worst pieces of hardware, and it kind of makes sense, because of that same connection.
12. There are health risks. Printing things which go into food and drink is probably a bad idea, unless one is absolutely certain.
13. There are the elements — UV, sun, salt, water — and a lot of other stuff outdoors and indoors which can create damage.
14. Remember about humidity.
15. The next big thing might be self-correcting 3D printers, with a camera on the printing head, able to fix things on the go. Whether this already exists is not known here.
16. The connection with LLMs also seems interesting, especially because printing gives grounding — a reality check, a way to touch the grass.

Models

Printable parts live with the project that uses them, next to the rest of its files.