Quick Summary
Additional Context
Over the time Hackaday has been in existence, the art of 3D printing has evolved from a relatively crude hit-and-miss affair to something approaching what we all imagined back then. You can’t yet walk up to a Star Trek replicator and ask for a part, but a modern state of the art consumer or prosumer grade printer will deliver consistent high-resolution parts, and in a surprisingly short time. [The Next Layer] asks whether consumer FDM printers have now reached the point at which they’re about as good as they’re going to get, and whether other technologies hold the future.
It’s a fair point to make that the resolution of a consumer FDM printer may be close to its mechanical limit. Techniques such as input shaping and the adoption of better CoreXY mechanisms mean that prints which once migh