<p>I know very little about the history of 3D printing, except that SLA came first (in the 1980's?), and FDM development was probably held back by patents.</p>

<p>By 2016, very low price kit machines were available to hobbyists, in the &lt;€300 price range, as price-reduced clones of designs which had already seen several iterations.</p>

<p>Was this the start of the break-out of cheap FDM machines (as opposed to the >€2000 semi-professional lab budget prototyping class), or were the earlier iterations of these kit machines also suitable/adopted by hobbyists?</p>

<p>I realise that early popularity would grow exponentially, but I'm thinking particularly at what point people could build a printer without needing to compile their own firmware, solder any boards, etc.</p>

[{'answer_id': 6548, 'author': 'Tom van der Zanden', 'author_id': 26, 'author_profile': 'https://3dprinting.stackexchange.com/users/26', 'pm_score': 4, 'selected': True, 'text': '<blockquote>\n<p>By 2016, very low price kit machines were available to hobbyists [..]</p>\n<p>Was this the start of the break-out of cheap FDM machines</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>No, not by any means. The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RepRap_project" rel="noreferrer">RepRap project</a> started in 2005, and by 2008-2010 there were several open-source printer designs out there that were somewhat workable for hobbyists. These designs were still quite expensive, you needed to source all the components yourself and do a very significant amount of troubleshooting.</p>\n<p>However, as early as mid-2009 you could buy a <a href="https://gizmodo.com/5286457/makerbot-cupcake-cnc-delivers-diy-3d-printing-for-just-750/" rel="noreferrer">Makerbot Cupcake CNC</a> for \\$750 as a kit (which might have involved some soldering) or \\$2500 fully assembled (presumably without soldering, but it\'s conceivable it was plug-and-play). Makerbot went on to become quite a successful company, piggybacking off the RepRap project and could be viewed as the &quot;break-out&quot; you ask about.</p>\n<p>I purchased my first printer kit (no soldering or firmware involved) for \\$500 (plus around \\$150 in shipping and taxes) in February 2014; cheap hobbyist machines were commonplace well before that.\xa0</p>\n'}, {'answer_id': 7200, 'author': 'Mark Harrison', 'author_id': 6851, 'author_profile': 'https://3dprinting.stackexchange.com/users/6851', 'pm_score': 1, 'selected': False, 'text': '<p>The Makerbot Replicator was released in 2012 and was the first 3D consumer-level printer that was sold only as a complete unit, not a kit.  They were also well funded and had a famous Maker-Person as a founder.  This seemed to coincide with wide-scale coverage of 3D printing in the media, and a big boom in the DIY side of the movement which is continuing to this day.</p>\n\n<p>The unit was still expensive by many standards (US$2500), but it did solve the bootstrap problem... you could just buy one at a store, instead of having to have a specific knowledge set in order to build one.</p>\n'}]
['https://3dprinting.stackexchange.com/questions/6546', 'https://3dprinting.stackexchange.com', 'https://3dprinting.stackexchange.com/users/4927/']