I'll start with the experience of the participant. If you were there and remember a small table in the corner of the DIY section with crutches - that was us.
Honestly, I did not expect the topic of 3D printing to attract so many visitors “from the outside”. There were a huge number of people. By the middle of the day, all the plastic samples from the manufacturers, the numbers in the wardrobe and even the sandwiches from the neighboring eatery, where you could take coffee, were swept away.
I expected that we would be lazy all day chewing cookies and talking “about 3D-printed life” with those who would be there. There it was. The faces and questions of visitors succeeded each other with a breathtaking speed. It seems like three seconds ago she showed a surprised palm-tree to a fruit stand, and already the question flies in my direction, why is it suddenly a VAZ relay, not a MOSFET, standing on a heated table?
It is clear that we did not see the whole audience from our corner. In the area of ​​our “table”, two types of characters lingered. First of all, those who were interested in DIY as such. We brought the printer self-assembly, as they say, from what turned up by the arm. Complexity and detail are beyond his power. Although he copes with the household level perfectly (by “household” I mean kitchen and tourist applications, children's toys, wall mounts and other commonplace). Of course, our neighbors for DIY-schiki were more interesting - everything was cleaner, more precisely and more automatically there. But on our side is not a very large budget and minimal time spent on servicing the printer itself. Oddly enough, it seemed interesting to someone other than me.
The second large group of visitors are parents with school-age children. It was funny even to meet some friends from completely different parties who came to collect probes, to solve some of their private technical issues with a purchased printer, etc. Someone asked the abstract: what do you print? What can be printed at all? Is it possible to print a conditional elephant? And someone came with specifics ...
Although there were a lot of people, somehow I still found time to walk around and take a look at the equipment and prints that others put up. I finally looked live at the photopolymer printer. It’s a pity, it didn’t reach the master classes.
At first glance, it seemed that the air smelled comicon. What to do - cosplay stood out most clearly among the applications available to the average man. But if every time you do not get distracted by costumes and lighting effects, you could notice a lot of interesting things. Dice, vehicles, underwater robots, miniature boats and other detailed figures, amazing things, “painted” with 3D pens.
All this is wonderful, but ... Looking closely at the exhibits from my belfry, it seemed to me that there weren’t as many ordinary household exhibits as they were at a non-profit festival. Manufacturers of printers and threads tried to show trickier models - they also need to demonstrate the capabilities of their product. 3D-modelers and adherents of some of their hobbies, where the printer is just a tool (such as aircraft modeling), also went quite far into complexity. While the viewer’s question hung in the air: “How will the print come in handy for me personally? Is it worth buying or assembling a printer? ” It is clear that the average user does not imagine how much is behind the presented complex models. He himself cannot print such mega-pieces and is disappointed in the technology as a whole. Feels like the majority came to the festival.
For some reason, the festival participants were embarrassed to show banal things. Everything is clear here - any conditional connectors for two IKEA "designers" or accessories for a kitchen drawer look less presentable than an alien's growth figure. However, after inspecting other people's stands, there was a feeling that marketing sharks had not yet come to this industry. There is no one to ask the question: “What does the end customer need?” He feels that at the end of the festival he does not need a cool gear made of carbon fiber - he needs to fix it at home, for example, a robot vacuum cleaner. But for some reason they showed only big beautiful gears. “An engineer in the soul” will fully guess how to apply one of the presented plastics to solve his problems. But for the real mass it is complicated. So the festival really worked to a certain extent to popularize, but this is only the first step.
There were a number of useful and replicated ideas. Some are open source implementations with Thingiverse. For example, Rec showed a bridge lamp. I had been thinking about printing this for a long time, just until recently the dimensions of the workplace did not allow ... At the festival, I received confirmation that the project was viable.
As at any exhibition, some of the stands were devoted to selling (photos, models, printers), but still it did not slip into a banal fair. Unlike commercial events, participants were open to conversations with everyone, even if “I just watch” at the end of the day. And all the exhibits could be twisted in the hands - this is not a museum for you.
In fact, my festival personally left a rather positive impression. In general, I like to watch some particular market segments. And then, having come to a niche about the commercial side of which I know almost nothing, in a day I got a kind of concentrated idea that today there is 3D printing in a separate St. Petersburg. It is curious how this impression correlates with what will be in Moscow at the end of November. They decided to scale the “warm tube” festival in St. Petersburg - they promise more manufacturers of plastic and printers (they seemed to call everyone at all). Yes, and those who use the printer to solve their private problems will be more. Only 5 vehicles are expected.
By the way, we are also going there - with a printer, a bunch of household examples and a tent model (except perhaps with a button accordion). Come and tell me why and how to housewife on maternity leave to assemble your printer.
