We had a wind and rain storm here this last week and our power was out for a full 24 hours. We live in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains so this is a fairly common occurrence.
Normally, I have had to make trips to the gas station to keep our generator fueled. The first truly useful thing that I designed and printed was a flange that enabled us to mount a special adapter to use natural gas to fuel our generator. Mostly because we are able to more precisely control the gas to air mixture... a "therm" of natural gas actually produces as much electricity for us s a gallon of gas, but costs only a dollar.
So this not only is far more convenient and less dangerous than handling and pouring 5 gallon containers of gasoline into our generator... we also save a significant amount of money.
Our 3D printer is a derivative of an open source design so we can print using many different types of filament and have many more options available to us than most of the name brand 3d printers. This is addressed in this article. The security concerns expressed are almost completely bogus. The article seems to have been written by someone who has little or no experience actually using a 3D Printer; but other than that it has one of the best explanations of the current state of consumer level 3d printers that I have read recently.
Currently there are no real security concerns with objects that are downloaded. They are mostly merely 3D objects. You have to open them in software that converts them to "gcode" that the printer understands. At present I have never heard of a file that has been intentionally designed to fail as mentioned in the article. On the sites that I go to many people leave reviews on the projects and files.
The problem with most articles on 3D Printers is that they are over-hyped and claim that they have been advancing quickly. This article mentions the plateau in development of consumer 3D Printers that has taken place for the past couple of years. I hope that new advances do start to accelerate... 3D Printing is still much more difficult to master than it needs to be to appeal to people who are not technically proficient hobbyists.
Many 3D Printers which are actually amazing machines get negative reviews from people who have unrealistic expectations. This also results in a high return rate which makes it difficult for manufacturers to make a profit.
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PFL
PEOPLE: Just to to www.CodeIsfreeSpeech.com and download for FREE all 10 3D-printer gun blueprints! I did, and I have no such printer! It took about one minute to get them all. Support our First Amendment against Judicial and Fakebook censorship!