[HH] electronics hobby industry

[Greg London]

> Any Kickstarter projects for building CNC peripherals?

There are already plenty of existing CNC conversion kits out there

http://blog.makezine.com/projects/cnc-mini-mill-conversion-kit-hardware/

The problem is the mill itself has to a lot beefier to cut material
than a 3D printer would have to be to deposit material.

CNC mills have the expense of a regular mill, plus CNC motors and
control. 3D printers have the expense of a printer frame, plus CNC
motors and control. therefore 3d printers will plateau at a point
cheaper than a similarly capable cnc mill.

The only real challenge I see for 3D printers is material science.
Can they find a material that is cheap and strong compared to metal?
No one has really been looking because the need never existed until now.

Plastics can be brittle or they can be damn strong, so maybe its just
a matter of figuring out some sort of plastic that is printable and
is damn strong when printed.

3D printers are in the daisy-wheel printer level of technology right now.
They're slow, they're clunky, they're low resolution.
The question is whether 3D printers will have improvements similar to paper
printers. And if so, today we have ink jet printers that do 30ppm at
high resolution, in color, that sell for one or two hundred bucks.