Prusa i3: XZ head and Y bed, laser cut XZ frame.Prusa Mendel: XZ head and Y bed, threaded rods based.RepRap Mendel & Huxley: XZ head and Y bed, threaded rods based.

RepRap Darwin: XY head and Z bed, threaded rods based.RepRap Darwin by Adrian Bowyer (2007) RepRap Mendel by Adrian Bowyer (2009) RepRap Huxley by Adrian Bowyer (2010) Prusa Mendel by Josef Prusa (2010) Prusa i3 by Josef Prusa (2012) See also RepRap Principle and Blog Archive. This third iteration became quasi standard for low cost 3D printers for the next years and his Prusa Research company surged. Eventually the Prusa Mendel as developed by Josef Prusa and reduced overall complexity and his next iteration was most significant: Prusa i3 (2012). Hobbyists started to adapt the design and push it further, since all plans were Open Source aka Open Source Hardware, it was easy to improve and iterate the designs. Once the patents expired (~2009), and that’s truly a lesson against patents, a surge of innovation occured and the prices for 3D printers fell from 100K+ USD range below 3K USD for the same functionality and print quality.Īdrian Bowyer, a british academic, coined the term of RepRap (2005), the replicating rapid prototyping and designing 3D printers which can print parts for itself: self-replication. Scott Crump, US Patent #5,121,329 Scott Crump, US Patent #5,121,329 Scott Crump’s first Stratasys 3D Printer (1991) Most approaches secured with patents by companies like Stratasys, like the famous US #5,121,329: Apparatus and Method for Creating Three-Dimensional Objects (applied 1989, granted 1992) and others were thereby inaccessible for innovation outside of the patent holders and due the high pricing also inaccessible for users – a period of stagnation happened. Selective Laser Sintering (SLS) by Carl Deckard (1988).Fused Deposition Modelling (FDM) by Scott Crump (1988), who later founded Stratasys, and.

Stereolithography (SLA) by Hideo Kodama (1980),.

Back in 1980’s the concepts of 3D printing were invented and implemented with

Stratasys timeline 3d printers