hyoenmadan wrote:I don't think that 3D printing for electronic designs procedure will be ready for the next 60 or 70 years, at least for common civil people.
Well, 3D printing is '80s technology, and typical FDM printers are working just like modified CNC machines which are '60s technology, I don't know why home 3d printers started to be popular in this decade, maybe because of microcontrollers like atmega or arduino boards becoming cheaper, but anyway I believe that such technology will be popular only among enthusiasts, and there isn't much that could be done to improve speed or quality of FDM printing. Of course alternative methods of 3d printing, which are more accurate do exist, but they will probably remain only in medical and high-budget prototyping use. There are some processes which use something like photosensitive resin which is stacked in layers, but you already can create electric circuits using screen printing, litography or photoresist. Maybe you could create a double-sided PCB for mainboard in home, but i don't think
Well, I also think that human race didn't invent so much new processes used for fabricating products in the last years.
In fact, we rely only on some basic processes, which are adapted or improved to fit particular needs, and actually a lot of things can be made using them.
For example:
We use processes which are based directly on classical photography, litography or other classical printing techniques: offset printing (newspapers), photolitography used to make CPUs and integrated circuits, resin-based 3d printing, ...
Most processes can be classified as additive:
Moulding: currently the only way to mass-produce plastic cases
Metal casting
FDM 3d printing...
and substractive processes:
Milling,
machining,
cutting...
We also know how to join two objects together:
Welding: lots of different techniques but it always ends up in joining two pieces of metal
Soldering
Glueing... 😜
and so on... but these techniques already existed for many years
Yeah, it is obvious that the technology in general has improved over the years, but I mean that we didn't invent any processes that for example accumulate cosmic energy and dark matter in order to make something out of nothing, we didn't invent teleporting, or fusion power with satisfying efficiency and similar stuff 😁
I'm not skeptical about technology, but I mean that our smartphones are just tiny computers, and the drones are tiny helicopters. And the airplanes are still burning fuel and are totally not ecological.