It’s such a nice project. But boy do I think it would benefit from mass production. People spend a lot of time printing generic bins and baseplates that would be better spent just printing custom bins.
Time has never really been an issue imo. For the average person your printer sits unused 99% of the time if it takes you half a day to print a baseplate and some bins, who cares. It’s still faster and cheaper than shipping.
> People spend a lot of time printing generic bins and baseplates that would be better spent just printing custom bins
3D printing with a modern printer is set and forget. You send the print file to the printer and you go get it a couple hours later.
Still faster than waiting for a package from Amazon and lower resource usage than driving to the store.
The customization comes everywhere from picking the bin you want to selecting the color filament to match your layout. Gridfinity isn’t my thing but people who are into it are usually customizing something, from the color to the baseplate.
Commercializing doesn't really make sense. So I need to get a small 1x1x3 container to store washers or whatever. With my 3D printer, I'll have that container in under an hour. Even if I bought it with the fastest shipping Amazon has available, assuming it was from a local Warehouse, the earliest I could get it would be half a day away. Having a local store that sells them would be marginally faster, but then I have to go to the store, pick it up and come home. The hour I spend waiting for the printer isn't an hour. I'm I'm completely blocked from doing anything else. It's just an hour in which my printers busy.
The example you bring up is for a single one-off extension. Yeah, for that case it doesn't make a lot of sense.
However, for initial setup of the system (e.g. filling up multiple drawers with baseplates and basic bins, as you will see in many videos online), it would definitely jump start the process a lot, where you'll otherwise spend weeks printing everything. Additionally, if you also go for the fancier baseplates/bins that include the magnets you'll also spend quite a bit of time on assembly and will require external hardware anyways.
I personally didn't think it was a big deal as for me adopting the system incrementally over time worked quite well, but I think there definitely is a niche of people (and possibly businesses) that would like to adopt Gridfinity for its other benefits and appreciate faster initial setup time.
I don't understand the sibling posts that're arguing with you.
Consumer-grade containers would be cheaper than 3d printing if buying a set, it'd get folk up-and-running without fuss, and when they wanted to customize it they could do so with the help of any of their 3d printing fanatic buddies.
So yeah. I agree with @stephenpetryk. Storage solution companies should start marking their bins as Gridfinity-compatible (which is a protected use of copyright regardless of whether "Gridfinity" is copyrighted).
The place to start would be enough basic bins and the grid itself for the Alex drawers from Ikea.
The cool things about gridfinity is not just the custom pieces, but also the exact fit that can be achieved. Since every drawer seems to be a slightly different size, exact fits with basic bins would never quite be achieved without targeting a specific drawer.
Also, I've turned down the fill and structural strength a lot without issues for most things. How strong does a bin for cotton swabs need to be?
The Slant3d guys have a trope about 3d printing primarily being a fulfilment technology, not a manufacturing one. To me it doesn't matter if someone is selling an injection moulded baseplate if I can print one for pennies from filament I already have and it's in my hands in a couple of hours with no delivery charges.
Especially for baseplates, since I have some drawers that are larger than my print area. It'd be awesome to just buy an injection molded 8x7 on Amazon or whatever for $5 instead of fiddling with glue and interlocking puzzle pieces.
It's not clear what tort would be committed under US law by someone who sold injection-molded parts using the Gridfinity STLs. Patent infringement? No patent has issued. Copyright infringement? Copyright generally only covers expressive elements of works such as the sculpture in question, not functional elements like the "Sega" string that was at issue in Sega vs. Accolade. Trademark? Also doesn't protect functional elements.
Basically, it seems like the inventor purports to be licensing the kinds of exclusive rights to their invention that a patent would grant them, but without actually meeting the legal requirements for receiving a patent.
(I don't know of any other jurisdiction that would give them a cause of action either, but law is diverse enough, and many governments are corrupt enough, that I'm sure there's somewhere in the world they could win a lawsuit.)