Anybody here pride their research skills and want to do some (10-20h) of paid

3D Printing
,
1

Anybody here pride their research skills and want to do some (10-20h) of paid (albeit small) research on 3D Printing and distributed manufacturing?

2

What do you want to know? Many of us are drowning in the amount of information regarding this kind of thing.

3

have my own theories, that need some of that info to be applied. If you like, I’d walk you through it. andre /at/ authentise /dot/ com

4

more info on topic here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NUv1gTSuqobEWBHbJaVz_7g6Y2j7zyVEK3AtJPszudk/pub

5

There just doesn’t really look to be 10-20h worth of work there. The short of it is that no, 3D printing is not going to change distribution channels, at least not any time soon. It’s not going to be ubiquitous; the big holdup is the ease of 3D modeling which will likely not get much easier or less time consuming than it already is. There are also entrenched industry interests which will likely use things like copyright to stifle any change to that industry. In a utopia, maybe these things could happen…but capitalism and protectionism this day and age has a nice way of slowing pretty much all progress down to a halt.

6

And just after I hit reply, I run across this article which corroborates my predictions: http://www.3ders.org/articles/20130827-authentise-to-offer-one-time-print-software-for-copy-protection.html

7

Another hopeless DRM scheme? No thanks!

All of these plans for streaming gcode makes it clear that we need software to record them and “reverse” slicing software to reconstruct the original models.