Nice article. I had one nitpick to make and also wanted to share an experience i had commercially with 3d printing.

FFF (Fused filament fabrication) is the more popular term nowadays to describe FDM technology as it is devoid of copyrights.

I just wanted to mention an interesting experience i had with FDM. i used to consult with a mechanical engineering company and they were making pill presses for a customer who used to sell homeopathic medicines. the pill press used to churn out compressed tablets that would then be wrapped in butter paper.

The pill press had several moving components like punch dies, punch levers, crank shaft, positioning wheel, drift pins and so on. It suffices to say that the customer interaction was an expensive affair because they had to make a fully operating machine to match their specs, let them test it, make modifications and then actually insert it into production. this whole process would take months with severe cost implications.

One of the engineers did some research and found this company called stratasys. They decided to create a hand operated prototype and stratasys built it for them using thermoplastic in 2 days. the engineers the assembled the prototype together and were able to cut the entire design-verify-post production cycle to just a week. the accuracy of thermo plastic was within 2.5% of the actual production components which were made of steel.

FFF (or FDM if you prefer) is a great prototype maker