May 2016
Beginner
240 pages
4h 55m
English
Content preview from Getting Started with 3D Printing
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
Start your free trial
An Introduction to 3D Printing
Feel fortunate! You are living at a time when technology is increasingly helping people become masters of their environments. A 3D printer puts the power of a manufacturing plant on your desk and opens worlds of opportunities that you (and the rest of humanity) have never experienced before.
Industrial 3D printing has been around since the 1980s. The technology became available to hobbyists and consumers in 2009 when the RepRap project brought together thinkers and coders from around the world to create a freely open codebase. This gave anyone the ability to build a personal 3D printer, such as the very early example shown in Figure P-1.
Using an open source design (which grants a free license to a product’s blueprints), ...