Noctua releases official 3D CAD models for its cooling fans

I have split feelings on Big Ass Fans.

I got three of their house fans from Costco a few years ago. Great fans - low power draw, good looks, includes a nice light, good noise profile, etc.

The fans didn't include wall panels, which I wanted rather than only remotes. No problem, I figured I'll order 3 of them from their site. However, there's an obvious bug in the shipping calculator, where the cost to ship three little wall boxes came out to $40+$40+$40 = $120. (And where the shipping page called this a "flat rate".) If I wanted to order 50 wall boxes, the shipping would be $2,000! The shipping cost was completely incongruent with other items in their shop - e.g. I could order 100 branded mugs for a flat shipping charge of $40. (And this is on top of the wall controllers that where already $123 each for some pretty simple electronics.)

I had probably a dozen support interactions over a couple weeks over both phone and email trying to get Big Ass Fans to fix their broken website and/or just put the wall controllers in a $30 flat-rate shipping box for me before we finally settled on a $55 shipping charge where I still felt like I was getting ripped off.

It’s not just a donkey, it’s a donkeys ass.

Always glad to see them mentioned! I drive by their factory all the time.

we have a really large version, in our factory for 20+ years - its a game changer for the folks who do the real work around here.

I think the joke blew right past you.

haha true, though I don't think that's what GP meant

> The whole point of a patent is encouraging progress through disclosure of knowledge.

Well, in terms of its design, the patent system was designed to reward what we now call theft of IP, by granting someone exclusive use of a technology that they would bring in from another country. Greenfield invention was an afterthought and some of the problems we face stem from that disconnect.

You correct, you are allowed to "break" patent law in Germany, if the use is private and non-commercial. This does not encompass schools and science though.

The legalese about not making a patented item for personal use is basically a technicality. From what I recall I think it might be limited more to process than physical devices, too.

No individuals gets prosecuted for it. The companies would spend more on lawyers than they could possibly collect.

  The whole point of a patent is encouraging progress through disclosure of knowledge.

Is it, though? It seems like the purpose of a patent is pretty direct: make money for people(/corporations...) who invent things.

I guess you could argue that inventors would hide their designs without patents, but that's not how any industry I'm familiar with works; if they thought that obscurity was an option, they'd stick with it and just label it a trade secret!

> At least in Germany, you are legally allowed to make patented things for yourself or science to some capacity.

Yeah, it has always amazed me that Ruf could market their own versions of the 911 without there being a design patent legal problem.

Uh no you can definitely make a replica of a patented device at home in the US. You can not sell it. I don’t think you could distribute the files of a reverse engineered Noctua fan online either.

I believe the tolerances to the fan housing (which reduces turbulence and thus noise), and the the material stiffness needed for that small tolerance, are the alleged reason there are few copycats. Supposedly getting plastic that rigid is hard. I've tried to find hard numbers and validate that claim, but I wasn't able to. Would probably have to measure an actual noctua fan blade to know. On the other hand, metal printing is attainable now..

It better have been, considering what they charge and how long they take to come out with new ones.

> I'm a Noctua fan!

:)

You're better off for having done the measurements.

Broadly, it is just good training since you're normally _not_ going to have CAD drawings. If you do this enough, it becomes second nature, and with a 3D printer it's fast to make test prints which you can use to check your measurements against.

More specifically, it avoids having to wonder if you'd be breaching some law by using those CAD drawings to make a "derivative work". While there's nothing illegal about using precise tools to measure an existing product and create a CAD model. It's (apparently) a silly grey area to take measurements from a CAD representation of a product to make your own CAD model. It can be argued that you're just taking factual information from a reference and using it to produce your own design. But whenever you find yourself saying to yourself that something "can be argued" then you really need to take pause to consider if you want to find that out for yourself or avoid the problem entirely.

This is the same absurd nonsense that Prusa's "Open" Community License imposes. If I buy a Prusa 3D printer and I just carefully measure it (I don't find this that hard, and I am at best an amateur, consider what an experienced CAD designer could achieve with the right tools), I can create a 3D model of the printer and, as long as I've omitted any separable purely aesthetic elements, I own all rights to that 3D model.

Moreover, as long as there are no patents on the product, I can manufacture and sell it.

The hard part of cloning a product like a 3D printer or silent fan is not in getting the exact CAD model, it's in the choice and sourcing of materials, making the right tooling, finding places to make all the parts, etc.

There are also some secrets on how certain things are manufactured. But those either don't appear in the CAD model or can be easily omitted.

If manufacturers want to hand out CAD models of their products, they should do so under some highly permissive license, with only enough detail to actually aid in producing mods. The alternative where the license is restrictive, is that you're just giving out poisoned apples that solely restrict the freedoms of anyone who decides to take them.