No New Print Designs - Peachy Printer's Explanation

I just saw this posted by the guys behind Peachy Printer

Quote:

---

To those who are concerned that we have not yet shown a more detailed print - perhaps if we give a bit more detail into our current situation it will help you understand why it's not just as simple as hitting play on an audio file.
As you're all aware, we launched this project in development stage. We were not planning to continue development until after the campaign as we would not have access to the funds from the campaign to pay our engineers to do so. We also did not anticipate such a strong desire to see a better print from our backers. Thankfully, the engineers are excited enough about the project that they've agreed to start working on it in their spare time before we are able to pay them. None of these people are able to focus on the project full time yet, so please bear with us. This all came into place in the last 10 days. We have not been working on doing a better print for 3 weeks.
Furthermore, all of our R&D happens out of Techworks in Saskatoon. All of our working prototypes have been left with the engineers there. We live in Yorkton, the two communities are 3.5 hours apart. As you can imagine we have many things to do in both places, so we are not able to simply set up a camera and hit print.
We assure you it is at the top of our priority list and we are doing our best to show you what you want to see. Rylan is leaving to Saskatoon today to focus on this, and I will be heading up soon after to film and edit our print demonstration video.
We are sorry if you feel unsatisfied by our updates or communication. We're doing our best, and shooting for even better.
Thank you all very much for your patience up to this point, and going forwards!
NG.

---

What do you guys think about this?

I would not worry about it.

Writing custom Software is a tricky business. Some of my friends are software engineers I know any of them would never just drop everything in there lives to focus on one project for 2 weeks without getting paid. Remember they have lives also. But once money begins to flow and they consolidate locations I bet you will see things work better.

When you are making 3D Python scripts in Blender it is far more difficult than just writing a web page. with something like this you are dealing with 4th - 5th dimensional processing technology not just 2D or 3D.

Software just doesn't go "Poof" it magically works in 20 seconds it has to be written by hand line by line with trial and error and in this case could be hundreds of thousands of lines long. and a software engineer will want to get paid to work on something that complex.

the software and hardware may be open source but somebody has to get paid to start the project out it will not poof out of thin air and just work before it becomes open source.

I think the Peachy Printer team also are not anticipating all the other people beyond the 4000 people funding the project that are watching the project and what people are expecting out of the project combined the amount of world attention within a span of 10 days is asking allot from 5 people to rearrange there entire life around one project if they are not getting money from it.


Another open source 3D printer that originally started on Kickstarter called Makibox which is the cheapest extrusion 3D printer which costs $200 USD also raised a half million dollars and it took almost a year before it was able to print everything because it was built from the ground up completely different than normal extrusion printers.

https://store.makibox.com/#/product-detail?type=1&&option=31

Now it is one of the most popular $200 class extrusion printers and a year and a half later they are just now going into mass production after kickstarter campaign.


Peachy printer is like 10% hardware 80% software 10% resin lol.

there entire machine setup relies on almost nothing but software.
So I say give it some time.

I'm also funding the Makibox; I was in the first twenty original people funding it way back in February 2012.

Needless to say, I've learnt that all this stuff takes time. The Makibox hardware is almost ready to go, but the software still looks like it'll take some time - and this is more than eighteen months since the project was started! Luckily the Makibox can also work with alternative 3D printer software, since it's a standard cartesian FDM design.

The Peachy is going to be much more complex to write software for. It'll be starting from scratch (no other open-source software to use as a base or reference). The software has to talk to hardware devices (soundcard) and do signal processing on the microphone input, rather than just sending out a bunch of data through a serial port. It has to deal with horrible 3D trig instead of simple X-Y-Z coordinates. It has to deal with variable-sized printing containers. With the current alpha-stage hardware, it's likely that each hardware set will behave differently, so the software has to deal with that.

In short, it looks like a huge amount of work.

Add to that the fact that it's currently at best a side project; it'll be lucky to get an hour per night from each engineer until they actually get paid to do it full-time. Add to that the logistical issues (two teams several hours apart). It becomes clear that making any progress right now is pretty amazing.