3D Print Time Support Estimator

Fused deposition modeling was invented by S. Scott Crump, who filed the founding patent in 1989 and co-founded Stratasys to commercialize it; the patent issued in 1992. For roughly two decades the technology stayed industrial and expensive. The shift toward the desktop began in 2005 with the RepRap project started by Adrian Bowyer at the University of Bath, which set out to build a machine capable of printing most of its own parts and shared the designs openly. It accelerated as the core FDM patents expired around 2009, the same year MakerBot began selling kits derived from that open lineage. Time and material estimation evolved alongside the slicer, the program that converts a mesh into layer-by-layer toolpaths. Early open source slicers including Skeinforge, then Slic3r released by Alessandro Ranellucci in 2011 and Cura released by Ultimaker in the same period, estimated duration from extruded path length divided by nominal feedrate, which is the same volumetric logic this calculator uses. Modern slicers such as PrusaSlicer and Bambu Studio instead simulate the toolpath against the printer's acceleration and jerk limits, and firmware features such as input shaping in Klipper changed real achievable speeds again. That is why a simple volumetric estimate now tends to differ from slicer output by a modest but fairly consistent margin.