Hey Everyone!
After seeing the great projects put together by the people of Snapmaker during their 2020 Makerathon it made me wish that I had the resources at my disposal that the employees of Snapmaker had to build their projects. For example, anodized extruded aluminum, brackets, laser filtering sheet, etc. I was particularly interested by the project completed by Team X, I attached some photos of their project below:
Seeing this project got me thinking, how amazing would it be if the Snapmaker store offered the “Raw Materials” that go into creating Snapmaker products? I believe this would truly open up the modularity aspect of the Snapmaker and draw in many more customers. This would also give builders like me the ability to create things that have the Snapmaker level of finish on them.
For example, I would like to build a heat-set insert rig for adding threads to my 3D printed parts, now how awesome would it be if I could order an anodized extruded aluminum piece straight off their website that matched my Snapmaker for this build…pretty awesome is the answer!
Curious what everyone’s thoughts are on this and I look forward to discussing it more. I think it could have the potential to really set the Snapmaker company apart from the sea of other like-minded companies in the industry.
-ATOM Engineering
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The main thing that strikes me from the pictures from the makerthon is the dichotomy between how enthusiatically these teams are praised for their out of the box thinking, yet on the forum here many modifications are threatened with a voiding of any warranty and blanket refusal of replacement parts until adequate kicking and screaming has occured.
Good luck building anything and modifying any firmware. They’ll happily sell you replacement controllers.
Someone, while attempting to reprogram the processor, accidentally overwrote the bootloader. Instead of providing a replacement binary or bootloader code or anything, they sold a new controller.
There’s definitely potential here, and I’d love to see this ecosystem mature. I’m not a fan of business jargon, but there really does need to be a paradigm shift - an alignment between Snapmaker’s stated goals and how they actually support their users.
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I absolutely agree with the phrase about alignment between Snapmaker’s stated goals and their support for users. A large amount of Snapmakers appeal for me when first looking into it was the “Endless Modularity” pitch they gave in their Kickstarter :
As it stands I don’t feel they have truly lived up to these statements. But like you mentioned I’d love to see this ecosystem mature, and I think if they can pull it off they will definitely set a precedent.
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