-For those that attended; What stuck with you about RMRRF? What was cool or grabbed your attention?
-For those that didn’t attend-What’s got you curious about attending next year?
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I was worried that the open source and rep rap 3D printing is on it’s way out. But even if there are massed produced, higher quality printers out there, open DIY printing is going to still be a passion for a lot of people. And there are innovators in the open source space still.
I hope CNC and lasers will also have a similar growth to rep rap. There was a lot of talk of that too.
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I am seeing this as the quality of cheap turnkey printers now is such that you can buy a sub-$500 printer and have it spit out really good parts right out of the box.
The show had far fewer of the smaller build-it-yourself brands, and frankly some of those were really shoddy. (I won’t name and shame, but if you walked the floor you saw this very clearly.)
Some were interesting but pretty underwhelming. The Prusa booth not even attempting to show an MMU on a core one was weird. They had a few XLs running, and the MK4s+ or whatever with an MMU, but it seemed thinly stocked with printers for a major brand.
The BTT presence to me seemed heavily focused on modders, but had a hype show feeling to me.
LDO seemed to have its’ act together, understated but with a strong presence.
I still have no idea why Lulzbot shows up. For the money, the Prusa or Voron machines absolutely destroy the Taz family.
They have some large format printers, but the large prints they were showing were really shoddily printed. No doubt to try and sling plastic rapidly , trying to showcase that you can print large/fast. When I was hovering about, I watched a maker pick up the demo large print spin it about, then proclaim to a neighbor “This is crap!”
I can only guess they have some working school/institutional procurement chains that are still generating sales.
Voron continues to have a strong presence. Their giant printer seems to get a lot of attention from those who aren’t familiar with the Voron machines, but those are few and far between at this point.
There were a bunch of filament sellers, which strikes me that there must be a much larger market for filament than I realized.
I noticed during interactions with people at the V1 booth many expressed some variation of “now here’s something useful you could pair with your printer”. That’s encouraging to me.
Like Jeff, I found the teenage maker presence really encouraging.
One thing I really liked and hope to see a “things you’ve made” post about- Barry’s ‘go bag’ of cool tools. Dang, that was cool.
Cam’s Compass was a stellar hit with almost everyone who stopped an interacted with it.
ZenXY continues to deflect traffic to it just as in years past. Excellent way to start engagement with folks.
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I’ll give a shout out to @Jonathjon. That LR4 was clean, and now I want to clean mine up. I want to rewire mine to move the control box to the middle. Then I got to add the LEDs and Peter Plates.
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I’ve yet to get to attend a RRF - but I guess I just assumed that the last few years they’ve shifted more from people showing off printer designs to people showing off things to do with printers or new way to print things (i.e. hueforge type of techniques.)
At least that’s what I seem to see on-line as the place where people are still innovating on an individual / open source level and I guess I assumed physical events would be the same.
There does still seem to be a lot of room in the “machines made with 3d printers” space that v1e and compass fit into. And that’s what excites me and I’d like to see at a show. Projects using 3d printing to crate new tools and lower the barrier of entry for the home workshop.
So - I’m glad to hear it does sound like there’s still a good bit of that to be seen.
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Thank you for that!! I hate that it arrived with issues but I’m glad yall seemed to be able to sort them out.
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More so than ever. More capable more accurate printers, better materials are coming down in price and most new gen printers can handle them. I think, hope, we see more made with 3D printer projects.
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