Hello fellow community members!
We just help launch print+, a very cool Kickstarter campaign that allows anyone to create their own 3D Printed Headphone. The concept is dead simple: print+ sends you a kit with all the essential electronics and non-printable parts, all the customer has to do is print the parts and assemble the product.
For the first time we’re seeing a well designed, quality consumer product made with FDM desktop printing. And it has got me really excited 
Hope you can appreciate it!
Cheers!
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1283143817/diy-headphone-kits
And that is exactly what we’re trying to prevent…that people throw away perfectly good stuff. Headphones electronics are indeed very basic. But fixing a headphone isn’t. Just last month I had to discard of my perfect Sony headphone because a flimsy hinge broke. I had to throw away perfect speakers, cushions, and many more parts in near perfect condition. With print+ we created a fully modular headphone of which you can replace each part individually. So if something breaks or gets worn out, you’ll be able to replace it or reprint it, so you’ll never have to discard it. You just endlessly upgrade it. The print+ headphone is super simple to assemble and doesn’t require any soldering, glueing, screwing, a lot of DIY projects require quite a skill level. You might think it’s very basic, but many people won’t even dare to touch a speaker that needs a couple of wires soldered to it. With print+ we want to enable as many people as possible to start making (and fixing) their own stuff - locally - therefore we designed it to be very simple.
Not really. If you’d point me out to where I can download the STLs to do so, I would. But that’s unfortunately not the case, the part that broke is not suited for 3D printing, it’s a very thin and precise part, that also has to slide in and out other precisely made parts. If it was a part that could be fixed, it would still take quite some time and effort (measure broken part, CAD model part, print, test, modify, print, assemble, etc.).
You and I are probably quite well equipped to fix our own things, but what about the other 80% of the people, what do they do? They’re faced with products planned for obsolescence, unfixable and that have to be replaced every few years. People can hardly do anything about it.
We like to change that, give people a choice, that if they want to, they can get a product that is shipped to them in a package 1000% smaller than if they would get the fully assembled product. A product that they can then make themselves. Fix. Upgrade. Customise.
And yes, I’d like people to buy our kits, so we can develop many more modular products people can print and fix themselves.
Right now we’re just starting out with a very basic product. We’d like that more things are made locally and recycled locally. Who knows what what kind of products we’ll make in a few years? With print+ we’re actually doing this so we’ll gain insights we’d otherwise not have if we’d only think about it and not actually execute the idea. The ultimate goal for print+ is that there’s no need for print+, at least not in its current form. Unfortunately I imagine that’ll be a long time, because it’s a pretty bad situation we’re in.
It’s just my two cents 