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Survey summary: Makers who improve 3D printers

Joris van Tubergen - designer, inventor and 3D printing innovator
Joris van Tubergen – designer, inventor and 3D printing innovator.

Prof. dr. Jeroen de Jong and Max Mulhuijzen surveyed YouMagine community members to learn about the motivations of makers and their reasons to share what they made.

Below is a summary of their findings:

  • An interesting trend is that Makers increasingly develop designs that benefit producer products. At YouMagine, we observe that users upload designs that serve as inspiration for the next generation of Ultimaker printers.
  • We aim to find out: what are the characteristics of Makers improving 3D printers?
  • With a response rate of 33% (N = 122), we find an engaging Maker community in the YouMagine platform.
  • Although 40% of the respondents are also occupied with 3D printing in a business environment, only a few report being driven by commercial motives.
  • Respondents are driven because they want to help others, learn, satisfy a personal need, or out of enjoyment.
  • On average, we find that the respondents spend 10 hours on 3D printing per week and have 7 years of experience working with 5 different printers.
  • Designs that are created to overcome a personal problem show higher scores of online adoption on YouMagine.
  • This is well-reflected by the designs ‘Yet Another Ultimaker 2 Feeder’ and ‘Ultimaker 2 Cable Chain’. These are uploaded by Makers who essentially created these designs to solve their personal problems.
Click to download the complete survey report:Download

YouMagine Survey Results Part 3

How many things do you 3D print per month?

How many things do you 3D print per month?

We’ve conducted a survey among 500 of our Community Members in order to find out how YouMagine is doing and what tools we have to build in order to help 3D printing. Since we like to share and we want to build tools for the future of Distributed Innovation we made some fun graphics for you. We thought that this was a good idea since this is the largest survey that maps the 3D printing community. The first post about the survey results are here the second is here and you are currently reading the final one.

On average our community members 3D print 21 things per month. This is an indication that the 3D printer is becoming a part of people’s lives. Reliability of the printer is especially important if people want to make things often.

How often do you use your 3D printer?

How often do you use your 3D printer?

34% of our community use their 3D printer every single day. For them the 3D printer is an appliance that they continually use. 11% use there 3D printer rarely. For them their 3D printer is not currently a significant part of their lives. 50% of the community uses their printer at least 4 times a week. These usage numbers are encouraging and mean that fore this group the 3D printer is not a toy but rather a tool that they use continually.

What slicing software do you use to 3D print?

What slicing software do you use to 3D print?

If we look at what slicing software people use then we find that some slicers that were popular only a few years ago have virtually fallen completely out of use. 58% of people use Cura and 23% use Slic3r which means that these two open source slicers account for the vast majority of 3D prints. Its also good to know that Ultimaker’s Cura is so popular. Simplify3D is doing quite well having an implied market share of 10%.

What is your favorite thing to 3D Print?

What is your favorite thing to 3D Print?

If we look at what people like to make then the most popular single category is household items with people preferring to make practical things that solve real world problems such as hooks, housings, repairs and enhancements for daily life. We see a lot of very practical things on YouMagine from enhancements for Ikea furniture, solutions for organizing tools, kitchen paper holders, table cloth clips, hooks, organizers for batteries and cradles for electric toothbrushes. Enhancing your daily existence with 3D printers to organize your life may not be what gets the headlines but it is what a lot of people are actually using 3D printers for. The second most popular item is 3D printer enhancements. We see a lot of things on the site from practical spool holders, to a camera mount for the Robo3D, Ultimaker fan mounts, calibration tools for Kossel’s, bearings,, CoreXY brackets, a turntable for your printer,  Printrbot extruders, to complete 3D printers such as MonkeySh#tFight, the iTopie and the Spatial One. Those most interested in 3D printing are very often interested in improving their own printers and sharing the results.

Which is the best filament supplier for 3D printing?

Which is the best filament supplier for 3D printing?

We asked our community what the best 3D printing materials supplier was. Over 33% of the sample has not found one indicating that while people have been trying out vendors they have not yet found a reliable supplier. 30% of people entered a name of a vendor which was unique. The 3D printing materials market is therefore very fragmented with many vendors in many countries selling filament. The most popular choice was ColorFabb followed by Faberdashery and then Amazon. This shows us that the online retailer is already making an impact on the 3D printing market through its 3D printing offerings.

Conclusion

In general we can conclude that 3D printers are, for some, becoming a daily addition to their lives chiefly through the making of fun gadgets and practical household items. People want more reliable, bigger and faster 3D printers and they want the process of designing things and printing them to be easier. People really like PLA as a build material but have not found a reliable vendor for it. Bed adhesion is still among the most pressing problems for 3D printer users. And at YouMagine we really need to improve our search ! We would like to thank those 500 community members who participated in this survey. We hope to use their information and feedback to further improve our site and guide us to building tools for the future.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Results of the YouMagine 3D printing survey part 2

Previously we told you about the results of our community survey amongst 500 members of our 3D Printing community. This is the largest and most in depth desktop 3D printing survey conducted to date. Today we can share you the second part of this survey.

At YouMagine we want to enable collaborative worldwide innovation in 3D printing and build the tools to let people in a distributed way work together to create, remix and share open source technology. We call this Distributed Innovation and want to build the tools for our community to engage in letting more people make better things.

In order to make sure that we are building the right future we want to understand our community and get feedback on what we need to do better. Through this process of letting our community guide our roadmap and development we can also give people an insight into what is happening in 3D printing. We would like to qualify this information to a certain extent however because we would expect our community to skew towards people who have been involved with 3D printing longer & be more open source minded than a random sample of the 3D printing community.

We asked Alexey Butakov to make us some nice illustrations to show off some of the graphs.

What do we need to improve about YouMagine?

What do we need to improve about YouMagine?

Probably the most important thing for our development is the above graphic. We need to improve search and navigation. We’re working hard on this and have adapted our roadmap to the findings. We also received a lot of individual feedback about bugs and issues that need addressing, we found this super helpful also. We’ve identified different types of users whereby we’re generally seeing that one group wants more interaction and collaboration whilst the other seeks quick access to many designs. We’re making lots of quick steps forward on improving our overal design and user experience.

What needs to be improved in order to make 3D printing better for you?

What needs to be improved in order to make 3D printing better for you?

The main thing that needs to be improved is the reliability of the 3D printers. If we drill down into these numbers we can also see that certain issues such as bed adhesion and dialing in new materials is also an issue for people. Reliability not only encompasses machines and in order to improve the overal experience  improvements in software, electronics, materials & machines will have to be coordinated. People also want larger build volumes and faster 3D printers. Cost is not an issue for many.

One thing affecting many is warping and bed adhesion. Here we see that it is still critical to get your first layer right. Rather than be a solved issue for many we can see people looking at many different strategies to make materials adhere to beds. The best strategy is also very material dependent and depends on if you have a heated bed or not. Over the past few years a lot of new types of materials have become available for desktop 3D printers. These have exacerbated this problem especially since the best bed adhesion solution differs per material. Personally I’ve taken to washing down my glass heated build plate with a dishwashing soap with a high alcohol content. This degreases it and makes for excellent adhesion. As a YouMagine team we are leaning towards using only soap but some still use glue or tape.

There is a wide distribution of bed adhesion solutions for 3D printers

There is a wide distribution of bed adhesion solutions for 3D printers

We’re seeing that even though there are a number of products out there to solve the issues. Most people still use glue or blue painter’s tape. Hairspray is also quite a popular solution. There is still scope to as an industry make better beds or come up with better solutions to this issue. Bed adhesion issues and warping are still the leading cause of failed prints. It would make a lot of people really happy if someone solved this issue.

I hope you enjoyed these results, thank you so much to all who participated. The third and final installment of our survey results can be found here.