The 3D printers the community actually want: Your say in 2024

once again I've asked the community what's really important to them in a 3D printer manufacturers open your ears and eyes because here's what we really [Music] [Music] want this video you're watching now is a followup to one that I made a few years ago in that I put out a community post asking for your opinions on what you wanted in a 3D printer almost 1,000 people responded and in that video I shared some of the humorous responses but also identified Trends and opinions shared by many people finally I suggested some Concepts that could be viable that video had more impact than you might think so let me explain that and then we'll get to the new survey 3 years ago let's explore the context behind the first survey and at that time 3D printer manufacturers were flooding the market with cheap and cheaper clones instead of trying to introduce something Innovative the aim of many was to get their version on the market for a couple of dollars cheaper that's why a lot of respondents identified that they were sick of Corners being cut on Budget Printers they wanted something that was tested properly and just worked even if they had to pay extra for the privilege that's why I proposed a clone plus a properly developed printer with great features out of the box that cost more instead of less 6 months after the video I received this message from a 3D printer manual manufacturer they were pleased with the community sentiments expressed in the video as they felt it aligned perfectly with the printer they were developing that company bamboo lab this message was from Dr ta the founder who at that point had been developing the X1 for 18 months and was soon to release it not everyone loves bamboo lab and the approach that they took but there's no denying their printers have been wildly popular and disruptive of the home 3 printing market and that's largely because they delivered a package that met the needs and wants of consumers as identified in that video so will your responses predict what's to come once more let's find out once again I created a community post on YouTube largely recycling the same graphic but at least fixing the typo however this time to make my life easier I used to Google form to act as a survey as I'm compiling this video we've had almost 1,600 responses and on top of that some people either ignored or miss the survey link with 363 giving direct responses as a comment to that post thank you to everyone who took the time to respond what does a community want in 2024 let's work our way through the survey was divided into three sections and the first of those was called General snapshot in truth the questions here are me trying to work out if my audience's interests and preferences align with my own first up how many 3D printers do you own many people just had one printer but the majority was 2 to four and a small amount had more than five potentially running print Farms next I asked whether you mostly use resin or fdm 3D printing and unsurprisingly 3/4 of my audience exclusively fdm print with 20% only doing a little bit of resin next the preferred slicer for fdm 3D printing we're blessed with a lot of choice out there so it's not a surprise to see the option split however Orca slicer gets the win followed by pra slicer Cura bamboo studio and super slicer for those resin printing what's their favorite slicer as we saw in the earlier question most of my audience done print but for those that do it's a pretty even mix between Chu box and lchi next I asked if 30 printers are a tool or hobby I'm somewhere in the middle and it seems most people match my preference sometimes they want to make stuff other times they happy to Tinker so mostly a hobby and mostly a tool with the next most popular and then the purely a hobby and purely a tool being the least popular next I asked what type of things do you like to print I provided a bunch of what I thought would be common answers and people could tick more than one as well as enter something in other that I might have forgotten looking at the results it's clear that practical prints to solve problems in your life was very very popular 97% of people do this 3D printed parts and upgrades was over 3/4 decorative pieces a little over half prototyping before manufacturing elsewhere 38% prints to sell and profit from just over a quarter and cosplay and costumes being printed by just over 20% of people and then from here we have everything entered under other and I'm seeing RC cars and drones come up a lot as well as robotics the last question in this section asked what your go-to 3D file site was it seems that printes is the tight in here the favorite of more than half thing of verse Hing on in second place and then we go down to thans make a world Yi and others I found that interesting because my choices closely match yours is that me influencing you you influencing me or a bit of both let me know in the comments and now let's proceed with the juicy bits manufacturers in case you weren't paying attention this is the section that applies to you I first asked how interested you were in more expensive 3D printers that just work and like many of the questions in this section were're on a sliding scale from not interested to only interested and that gives us this nice graph and we can see that most people are trending in the direction that they'd still rather pay more for something that actually works although it's only a small amount who exclusively shop in this category this is unsurprising as it mirrors the responses from last time the next category is budget printers that need a little love to shine think race to the bottom and the three clones this one was fairly balanced but definitely biased more to the dented end plenty of people are willing to save some money if they have to do a bit of tinkering but a significant amount are down this lower end where it's a deal breaker the next category is a do-it-yourself kit where building the printer is the project I'm thinking Vons rat rigs Etc looking at the results I would say there's plenty of interest in these style kits in fact if we look at the shape of the graph it's very similar similar to the just works category the way I see it people want transparency when choosing a 3D printer they're happy to spend big on a tool that just works and they're happy to engage in a project that's going to take a lot of time that just don't want to be Conn by something that overpromises and underd delivers is a big one how important is open- Source Hardware and software to you and we have it makes no difference to me on the left through to I'll only buy things at Open Source on the right and as we can see our results are skewed towards favoring open source once again I fit with the majority it's very important to me but it's not an absolute deal breaker but manufacturers take note if all else is equal and your open source versus your competition you're definitely going to stand out so how important is cloud connectivity to you on the right we have people who will only Buy printers with Cloud connectivity and on the left people who will avoid anything that connects to the cloud and based on comments I expected bias towards the negative but not necessarily this strong manufacturers make sure if have anything clouded you can 100% turn it off AI is experiencing a huge surge in mainstream attention and popularity so how important is it to us 3 printers and what I've learned from this is that people are open-minded towards AI but they're not convinced that it really has a good place yet 50% said they don't mind it as long as they can turn it off and a third said that they like the ID but it was currently limited only 7% said it was a deal breaker and 81 people are looking to recreate the Terminator timeline I finished this section by asking about specific features to gauge what people were actually interested in and what were just gimmicks there's quite a few categories and people were asked to rate them from not interested at all up to extremely interested the first is non-plan R Printing and that means a fully three-dimensional tool path I've explored this a couple of times and this video is linked in the description and looking at this distribution curve people are generally quite interested I'm sure you're like me in thinking you won't use it on every print but it would be great if m 3 printers and slices could accommodate it next up multicolor printing multiple colors of the same material used in one print and again this is something that people are fairly interested in not everyone but most makers would like the capability so how does that compare to multimaterial where we have two or more different materials for instance some rigid and some flexible multimaterial we see a big shift where many people are very interested in it so manufacturers tool Changers idex and similar is a good path to pursue next up quiet operation and I'm not only talking about the volume while printing but also the volume when idle quiet operation was fairly popular I expect it probably a little bit higher I wonder if people will put up with a loud printer if it means it's fast and speaking of fast 30 printing it's become a lot more mainstream but is that from manufacturers pushing it or customers actually wanting it and here we can see that Fast Printing has become a priority it's probably not the most important thing but it is expected from most new printers something we don't see very often on 3D printers is active air filtration so do people care based on this distribution I would argue that people are fairly indifferent to air filtration but it's still a topic I'd like to explore further in future videos related to this what about having an enclosure potentially with active heating given people said earlier on that they're interested in functional prints it makes sense that these results are skewed towards having a printer that can handle high temperature filaments that warp hopefully more manufacturers include an enclosure as an option how about smart sensors and I include Auto calibration before you print sensors to detect mishaps during printing like filament Tangles or jams and even the printer sensing when it might need some routine maintenance for me this graph confirms that 3D printing has moved on and pretty much all new 30d printers are expected to be smart to some degree so does that interest extend to having a built-in camera so you can monitor prints and as a bonus use that webcam to record time-lapses of your prints looking at these results I would argue that they're fairly important but not as much as a priority as other items here a feature we don't see as much these days is click to print from either a website or mobile app currently the bamboo handy app does a pretty good job of this but to people actually use it and care this one's pretty emphatic one-click printing is a novelty and most people don't really care about it what about when we first receive the 3D printer unbox it and put it together do people want something that's already ready to go out of the box or are they happy to do some simple assembly an interesting result here a lot of people are looking for it's already printed that's a tool but they still don't mind putting in some work in the initial setup and assembly phase what about being provided with a slicer with pre-made profiles to suit their printer and different materials and quality settings I expected more of a skew towards people wanting this clearly they do but it's not the highest priority what about easy firmware modification either the m and Source provided or more ideally if it's clip of firmware being able to edit and make changes right from the web interface the response here is pretty clear people want to be able to tweak their firmware and they don't want to jump through lots of Hoops to do so something we don't see that much is the ability to upgrade a printer later whether it being adding an enclosure or a system like the prusia XL where you can buy a single tool head model and add additional tool heads as you see fit and can afford it later on and this is one of the strongest results here people like tinkering and customizing so manufacturers make sure you allow Vues for them to upgrade later on what about customization and any printer will have printable Parts released freely by the community but I'm talking more about a manufacturer's approach like how the Magneto excess frame has unused screw threads to bolt things to later and easily accessible electronic SP editions there's also printers like the rat rig where you can choose exactly what Hardware you use as well as upgrades depending on your requirements customization is similar to upgrades manufacturers pay attention we want to be able to make our printers our own do people care about environmentally friendly packaging which is not something most manufacturers address this is something I care about but the responses here are indifferent so manufacturers are Justified and not prioritizing this finally automatic part ejection like you get off the shelf with a belt printer or if you modify an existing design like I have with this Delta clearly most people don't really care about Auto Part ejection and I guess that makes sense as most people aren't running a print Farm therefore this remains a novelty rather than a necessity it's pretty clear from this what people do and don't want and I'll come back to this later the final short section was other stuff things that didn't fit elsewhere and I started by asking if the current level of technical support was good enough this is not specific to one brand but rather in General on the left no on the right yes so what I'm taking from this is me technical support has probably improved but there's plenty more room for further Improvement next up do you design your own parts and only one% % couldn't design anything at all and were limited to downloading others work 20% could make simple Parts 39% were 50/50 30% mainly did their own designs and 9% only did their own designs so congratulations to all of you for being a capable Bunch next do you engage in tuning slicer profiles yourself this one was pretty interesting very few people undertook no tuning but most people liked pre-made profiles and did a little bit of tuning or significant tuning to get things to their liking and 10% love tuning as an activity then I asked what Innovations had impressed you the most over the last few years and this is one where I have to read through the responses searching for Trends four areas came up the most the first being highp speed which people put down to input shaping Clipper and corexy another area with specific technology people appreciated a sensors like the beacon bamboo Labs liar and poop's linear Motors many people praise new found convenience with a being fitted is standard along with removable beds and smart sensors for Automation and finally multimaterial was mentioned a lot with bamboo Labs AMS prous tool changer and various idex printers second last I ask for your funniest or craziest ideas for a 3D printer thinking maybe I would have a laugh and maybe even get a project but as you can see there was a lot of I don't knows there so we did have a few people posting this but we also had some good ones some people were hungry some people wanted more character it's probably a but input shaving caught my eye but what I can't get out of my head is a 3D printer that gives birth to baby 3D printers plenty of people wanted a portable 3D printer and some of them were outrageous like a printer on a drone one that could drive itself around and one that even operated up in the stratosphere and some more serious ones a lot of people wanted to mix up the form factor of 3D printers adding multiple axes tool changes with CNC and Laser heads tilting or rotating beds multiple nozzles printing at at once Etc the final question was a chance for people to write something that they didn't have the chance to write elsewhere reading through here were some Trends 30 printing is in a good state but people hope it isn't ruined by mainstream success and close Source machines multicolor and multimaterial printing is good but there is too much waste it either needs to be reduced or a company needs to give us a cheap way to reuse it and people want manufacturers to think outside the box with 3D printer structure it's time to explore a new kinematics new forms of materials for instance pallets or print recycling like last time let's propose a possible 3D printer based on the survey results last time I proposed a modular core XY and I still think this is the best solution in summary this should have a cube frame so it's easy to add an optional enclosure but now I think it should have Clipper firmware unmodified by the manufacturer pre-installed and ready to go the printer should be open source wherever possible I think people want a complete ecosystem but with cloud and AI components completely optional and a big emphasis on upgradeability for instance adding a second tool head later on and that can extend to other components if you make everything modular you can change to what you want later on be that a tilting bed a pellet extruder or a rotating toolhead a proven solid base for those that want the simple things but endless possibilities for those looking for more that's it I found this interesting I hope you did too and I really hope manufacturers are paying attention thanks to everyone who responded sharing their time as well as their opinions and make sure to comment if anything has really rung true for you thank you so much for watching and hopefully the future of 30d printing is what we actually want good day it's Michael again if you like the video then please click like if you want to see more content like this in future click subscribe and make sure you click on the Bell to receive every notification if you really want to support the channel and see exclusive content become a patron visit my patreon page see you next time

Channel: Teaching Tech

Views: 94,177

Keywords: 3d printing, 3d printer, 3d printed, 3d print, survey, community, open source, manufacturers, what you want, corexy, toolchanger, idex, multi material, multi colur, non planar, slicer

Id: 41TH6Gg3c5w

Length: 17min 1sec (1021 seconds)

Published: Fri May 10 2024