3DPrintopia, the last year in Maryland (headed to Philly next year). I think a natural progression would be the theme of this year. Last year I saw Bambu's everywhere, and now I saw Vorons and homebrew printers and very obscure things if you are not part of the community (ie: Positron).
This is good and bad for the community. The maker community is growing, but their growth will also push out developments of companies with large market caps and investments. This is because the hobbyist who loves printing eventually gets the engineering tinkerer bug. So now Bambu, Creality (my company) and others are potentially headed towards starter printer and farm printer (business not tinker).
This may sound good for the overall plan and the maker community, but here is the problem: I saw a lot of the moonshot projects from last year, and many of them were working worse than last year which is kind of hard to believe. The printers producing parts last year were down this year.
Saw a lot of parts for sale, a lot of cool custom stuff and awesome painting and fabrication. A lot of filament for sale and that went well for those companies. I worked some at the Creality booth (very limited) we were showing off scanning primarily and I think that is a neat avenue for makers to grow and the world to benefit.
The participants shrank considerably; I talked to one of the larger 3D Printer resellers in the country and they said the ROI isn't there. We need 3D Printopia to grow, We need the maker community to grow, and we need the bigger brands like Bambu and Creality and Prusa to continue their success. That is tough to do all of it concurrently, so the userbase needs to Grow. Maybe Philly is a step in the right direction, because this year was a slight step backwards.
The most interesting thing was the rise of the 3D Printed Museum"" I call them that as they are personal collections. Look at the Makerbot Thing-o-matic pictures, I remember all of that and have talked about a museum before as I have some knowledge in the industrial space worth sharing with the world.
