3D Print Streaming

Just curious if Shapeways is looking into trying to get into the 3D print streaming business? I think this is the future of 3D printing and I for one would jump right on the band wagon and offer files for home print.

Curious to hear thoughts and opinions of the other Shapeways shop owners too.

TDR Innovations

One form of "Streaming" already exists here at Shapeways - any designer who wishes to participate can set their model(s) to be available for download.

If you're talking about some way for a patron to pay for permission to download and print a copy a model, there is no current way to secure the file(s). Once downloaded, the model could be printed an infinite number of times and/or shared with other printer owners.

The hardware of the printers themselves would have to have such a DRM feature, and they do not. If a DRM feature were added to the printers, it'd be about 10 minutes before someone figured out how to hack it, like DVDs.

I think the genie is already out of the box when you talk about pay-to-print. It's too easy to hack open the data.
We can easily talk about building an open-source library of (free) generic parts, but pay-to-print is probably a dead issue.

Take a look at some of the other forum threads here, particularly the one where some Chinese firm copied a designer's model. There are also several threads discussing why Shapeways can't at this time have a fancier viewer - if you move the data to the local browser, the data can be extracted without paying for it.

Yeah this is something we have talked about but as Stony is noting, Designer's who make their 3D designs available would need to be aware of the licensing and the possibilities that come a long with downloading. Pay-per-print on home machines doesn't seem like its going to be possible and most of the people who own machines like to tinker and customize yourself.

That said, there are other ways that this type of an idea could become profitable. Think along the lines of Kickstarter or Patreon, where instead of people paying per print they'd crowdsource you for the cost of making the designs and then you make them available for free use. It could happen lots of ways.

tdr.innovations what would you like to offer? Under what terms would you feel comfortable doing so? What tools would you want on Shapeways that make this possible?

When I say streaming files, I am talking about having slicing software located at Shapeways that the customer configures for their particular 3D printer and it then streams the G-code program directly to their home printer.

I know the geometry for the part is encoded in the the individual "go" commands that are in the G-code file, but reconstructing a 3d model from these "go" commands has got to be very difficult, if not impossible. If the 3D model file is reconstructed from the G-code file it has to have a degraded resolution since the G-code file is based on the slice thickness the customer sets for his streaming file

Pinshape.com has this feature available. Are you guys familiar with this technology?


TDR Innovations

Au contraire.... taking those "go" commands and converting them back to a digital model would be trivial.
Two terms... search google for them... "breezenham algorithm" and "SVX format"
It probably wouldn't take an full hour to code up.

You must understand.. there is nothing "magic" about a home 3d printer. They actually run on very very low capability processors.
You don't need high level computing power to move a print head around.
That translates to .. it'd be easy to use a higher power computer to reverse engineer gcode.

What is the advantage of this, and why would anyone want it? It's not clear to me.

The advantage is the customer prints the product out on their own machine at their residence. The customer never posses the STL file instead the commands to control his printer are streamed directly to his computer and on to his printer. Thereby eliminating shipping charges and only having to pay for the rights to print the file one time.

As far as someone reconstructing the 3d file using some computer program, you will never stop someone who is determined to steal you property. Just as locks on your house only keeps out honest people and stupid people, if someone is determined enough and smart enough he can steal everything you have no matter if it is in your living room or your computer. Right now someone could order any product on Shapeways and have it 3D scanned and steal the design.

So dismissing the technology because someone might steal your design is really not the right approach. You make it optional to designers and you price the product so stealing it is really unprofitable for the thief. More than 99 percent of the customers would have neither the desire or ability to steal and reconstruct the degenerated 3D file. The less than 1% who do steal the file will have to compete with the original designers price for 3D printing. Now, someone may steal the design and develop a mass production process to deliver the design at an extremely low price, but these are the guys that would steal the design via 3D scanning anyway.

I am currently modifying my files to allow them to be efficiently printed on a home FDM printer because I know home printing will be the future for my clients. I design scale model car part and I know the plastic car modelers out there will migrate in the home printing directions in order to get the parts they need to build their creations.

TDR Innovations

The problem is not that everyone will steal your file. It's that one person will steal it, and then upload it to Thingiverse. Good luck with that.

Very true, but not always catastrophic.

If you are an artist developing one off unique designs, having someone steal your work and post it for free on Thingiverse would be devastating. Also if your work centers on pop culture, in which the time to sell is only as long as the item is popular, then theft is very likely and devastating.

But if your work is more utilitarian the likely hood of theft is smaller

Also, if you are smart about what items you make available for streaming you can minimize the damage done if someone steals your work. For example, we sell many scale model V8 engine kits and there are some parts that are very large and not very visible on an assembled model and some parts that are small and very visible. What I would like to do is make the large, low visibility, items available for streaming at a very low markup and then pick up the profit from the selling of the small, highly visible, items that are still printed and shipped by Shapeways. Thus reducing the overall price to our customers but still keeping the profit margin the same for us.

If the large items that are made available for streaming are stolen then it really would not cut into our profits a lot because you would still have to come to our shop on Shapeways to purchase all the other items that make the engine. We have thought about giving away the files to the large items but we are not ready to turn loose of these files until we see how the streaming technology shakes out.

I really think we need to learn to embrace the new technologies and figure out how to leverage them as best we can. The music industry has done it with streaming and print streaming can do it too.

TDR Innovations

The streaming is not possible and will never be an option at Shapeways.

As you can see Shapeways is a professional 3D printing service , that means top of the line 3D industrial printers are used!

99% of the real designers in here will never stream NOTHING to any MACHINE and the last 1% already share some models to be downloaded for free.

So......do you sit on the board of directors for Shapeways........or are you just stating your own opinion?

Each company has her own policy and politics. Pinshape is for streaming not Shapeways. Shapeways is not a file-sharing site and will never be , the download section is near abandoned for years , and is just only a option for designers that want to share some models.

I'm not part of any board , just an a community member.

Each company has her marketing brand , you can't have everything , and it is not needed. Shapeways will never be a file-sharing / streaming site , it is not made for that , all site is build to be a marketplace for REAL 3D PRINTED PRODUCTS ON DEMAND on INDUSTRIAL GRADE 3D PRINTERS.

Is simple like that!

Some how I will bet the board of directors at Shapeways does not think in such "black and white" terms as you do........it they do they will become obsolete in the years to come. All companies that want to survive, thrive, and grow will always be looking for new areas to expand into. Streaming, or some other technology, may be one of those areas.

Your mind seems to made up and you don't seem to want to hold a conversation on this subject, so please do not consider the following to be directed toward you.

I like to think of streaming as a way of getting the large items we sell into the hands of our customers in a cost effective manner and then we can sell all kinds of small items, printed by Shapeways, to them that will allow them to customize their creation in a manner they desire. It would sort of be like streaming a customer the model of a Christmas tree that they could print at home cheap but then sell them all the special ornaments to hang on it through the traditional Shapeways system. This is a business model that I think would work very well for our customers, us, and Shapeways. We could reduce the expense to the customer, expand our customer base, and still make the ornaments pay off in the end.

I will admit that our product line is different than a lot of others out there on Shapeways, but there are also a lot of drone designers, model train designers, and model house designers out there that may like to market there products in a similar manner. It would be really nice if Shapeways could be a one stop market place for this, rather than streaming Christmas trees from one company (Pinshape) and printing the ornaments at another company (Shapeways).

I am really interested in an open minded exchange of ideas here......not just opinions for or against. Are there any other areas where something like this would work? How could something like streaming be leveraged to elevate the industry as a whole?

TDR Innovations

Hey tdr.innovations, numarul7 this is a great discussion to have and lets keep it pleasant. Everyone has a right to share their opinion and streaming is an interesting business choice. Its true that this is all just opinion and I can say that at Shapeways, our goal is to provide high quality prints to everyone. We do acknowledge there is a growing number of folks out there who have printers at home and those machines are getting better, but they currently aren't our target audiance.

But again, we're just having a discussion right now. tdr.innovations is suggesting that we look into streaming and has very valid points. There are other ways that we could connect designers to people's machines at home as well and your ideas on this are valuable to know what we should look at in the future.

Sell the STL of the big part and point to the shop for the detail parts?

People have been selling blueprints for airplanes and other things for decades. Also you can find a big market of PDFs for board games.

Definitely an option but just don't want to let that genie out of the bottle prematurely until the streaming technology develops more or flops completely.

I have a few of my designs available for streaming at a Shapeways competitor site. They sell from time to time as a stream. I did have a number of items up on Pinshape but they sent me a message telling me that they were going to delete all of my uploaded items to do some kind of upgrading of the site and I sent them a message telling them to delete my account because that's not the way to do business. I spent a lot of hours uploading and documenting my submissions and they wanted me to do it all over again! HAHA!

I too think Shapeways should get into streaming. It's like free money so why not get into it? I know it's like the wild west when it comes to streaming, but it's going to continue to grow and it's worth investing in I feel.

As for the security of it, I don't care who has my data because if they try to sell it I am going to stop them. By the way, 3D printing gcode to 3D model conversion already exists. If something ends up on Thinyverse I'm going to have it taken down.

If Shapeways does something like this it would depend on whether it would mesh with their business model or makes any profits. They'd need to weigh the costs of implementation and support versus demand and financial benefits. If it were offered at the present time I doubt I would option in at all. And I don't even have any mega "valuable" models that would cause a great financial loss. It seems like too much of a potential problem and risk for most folks here to participate with current technology. That's not to say that in 20 years streaming might be the big thing. But in 20 years the design aspect could very well be so automated and capable that you don't have much of a need to stream or purchase other people's designs either.

I could see the support side of the business could be pretty burdensome. What with variations in machine operators experience and different capabilities of 3D printers, it could be a support nightmare. It could be over come some by allowing 2 or 3 attempts at printing a streamed file.

On the other hand though there may not be a large upfront cost. You really have to keep that $500,000.00 printer working day and night to pay for its self, not to mention the regular servicing I am sure they require.

We designers may also have additional work, tweaking our designs to make them printable on an FDM machine. I have found that designs that minimize material on a Shapeways print, do not work the greatest on my home prints. Thin walled designs are best for Shapeways and thick block like designs are best for the home printer.

The upfront cost for shapeways would probably include both additional infrastructure to provide reliable mass streaming capabilites for the gcode and additional support staff to handle all the complaints from newbies who got some rickety makerbot clone at a sale or as a christmas gift and want to print some highly detailed SW model with it next morning. I rather suspect they find their current business challenging enough...