7 ms·

I'm glad that prusa has stayed true to his open hardware pledge all these years, while continuing to push the reprap ideals. Everybody is complaining about the

by j-pb 7y ago

I'm glad that prusa has stayed true to his open hardware pledge all these years, while continuing to push the reprap ideals. Everybody is complaining about the price, but c'mon this thing is designed printed and assembled in Prague, the EU. It creates local jobs for people with fair wages, social security and good quality of life, we should strive to have more of our stuff produced in the west. Happy to see him design another printer, I really love my MK3.

mk3 7y ago
The price is going to slay all Chinese crap makers. I always wanted mk3 but never had a big enough reason to buy, now I can justify it. It's the printer I will buy :)
- m0xte 7y ago
  It’s not. I bought an Creality Ender 3 recently for a lot less than that (152 GBP next day in UK) and the thing is perfect. It is also entirely open source. https://github.com/Creality3DPrinting/Ender-3 https://github.com/Creality3DPrinting/Ender-3 Quality is pretty top notch. It worked out of the box flawlessly and with no futzing.
  - crankylinuxuser 7y ago
    Yeah, except for the things you can't see. 1. They use crappy MOSFETs that are known to fail closed. This means you can get a runaway heat on your hotend. A 40w cartridge can melt the alu heatspreader 2. The beds are anemic for heating. Not enough power 3. Crappy steppers 4. No features for jam detection, autoleveling, skipped step protection, filament runout 5. "Chinese" quality: good luck in getting any sort of tech support. Once they have your money, you're fucked. I'm fighting right now with Pine64 over defective eMMC modules that ignore the first read, causing initrd to fail to boot. Of course, they were chatty on Twitter prior to purchase, but have ignored every way of contact AFTER purchase. But pretty much every Chinese company is like this.
    - m0xte 7y ago
      Note: former EE. I’ve taken it and the provided power supply to bits before I even fired it up. 1. They’re IRLR3103PBF operated within their SOA. They’re fine. Most MOSFETs fail short due to the construction of the MOSFET. I’ve actually got a few scars on my arms from the buggers exploding on me misusing them on purpose as RF PA’s as a ham. I’ve seen them blow up in various bits of expensive US made kit too (tektronix 22xx in particular grr) 2. I’ve had absolutely no problems at all with mine and adhesion. 3. A decent stepper costs as much as a Prusa i3. All the steppers at this price are crap. But they work pretty damn well. 4. These are luxuries really. If it jams the Bowden tube pops out and you clean it up and off you go. I levelled it in 3 mins myself. Skipped step I’m not sure if the scenario. Filament run out doesn’t happen if you pay attention to the Cura filament length and don’t try to wing using up the ass end of a roll. 5. I’m not paying for support. I’ll fix it myself. I’m quite handy with a screwdriver, a compiler and a soldering iron. The thing is just an AVR running open source firmware. Nothing complex. The main thing is I can get functional chunks of spare parts for this next day via eBay. As for comparing Chinese support to US support, I’ve had better luck out of the worst Chinese company than Microsoft and Apple.
      - jrockway 7y ago
        I think he is referring to a step motor controller as a "stepper". People love the fact that Prusa uses Trinamic drivers instead of no-name drivers. I personally don't understand why step motor control is something that needs to be outsourced. Just stick an H-bridge between the microcontroller and the motor and improve the control algorithm with every release.
        m0xte 7y ago
        The “no name” drivers are a bit more complicated than an H bridge: https://www.pololu.com/file/0J450/a4988_DMOS_microstepping_driver_with_translator.pdf https://www.pololu.com/file/0J450/a4988_DMOS_microstepping_d... The typical H bridge has many failure modes and disadvantages which are handled by the controller ICs. Not to mention a lot less CPU overhead for the AVR running the show.
hevi_jos 7y ago
Prusa cares about quality. Chinese mostly about price. For example, Prusa filaments are perfectly rewind, so the possibility of the filament making a knot and stopping the print like has happened to me with other filaments in 14h printing sessions does not exist. Or chinese aluminium printing beds, with 0.3-0.4 mms differences along the printer, that even with a touch probe you can't print big things over. Those beds are so cheap, and you could print small pieces with them, but anything serious in size like 18x18 cms will fail. Prusa warrantees it. Quality control is the great advantage that Prusa has over the Chinese(that love lying). He knows it, and sends you a report of the QA of your specific machine.
- dual_basis 7y ago
  Maybe, but quality is hard to measure. I just bought a Creality Ender 3 Pro for $180 and the print quality looks as good as anything I've seen from a Prusa or even the Ultimaker at my university. It's got a larger build volume than this mini as well. It doesn't have some of the comfort features, such as auto bed leveling or wifi, but if you really want these you can add them in and still be under the price of this mini, not to mention that the cantilevered design of the mini is almost certainly less stiff than the i3 style on the Ender 3.
  - omnimus 7y ago
    Is this Creality Ender 3 Pro marketing team?
    - dang 7y ago
      The site guidelines ask you not to post like this—would you mind reviewing them? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      - omnimus 7y ago
        Its the parent who is clearly marketing different product in multiple comments around the thread. I was just annoyed that i had to read thrid comment about how great differend product is
crankylinuxuser 7y ago
> I'm glad that prusa has stayed true to his open hardware pledge all these years, while continuing to push the reprap ideals. He truly believes it. Not only that, but his left arm has the Open Source Hardware logo tattooed with honeycomb infill :) I've been there and saw his progress from the beginning. I was at the first MRRF, and he flew in from Prague. Back then, I had my Prusa i2 printer, designed by him to use 8mm threaded rod with a simple 3d prints to make your own printer. Things have indeed changed since those old days!
jrockway 7y ago
The price seems fine to me. This is going to print a lot of useful parts for people and comes with great software for both your computer and the printer that you can hack and modify. If this is anything like my i3, then it's going to have high quality parts (Noctua fans!) and come in kit form to let you assemble it yourself so you know where everything is if something breaks and you need to repair it. I am surprised that they switched to a more powerful microcontroller. While it is something Reddit endlessly complains about (despite having no software engineering experience), a lot of engineering is invested into their existing 8-bit platform which works perfectly fine. You don't need 32-bit pointers to read a string like "G1 X42" and pulse an I/O pin a couple times ;)
- j-pb 7y ago
  My guess is that driving that big color display and more importantly ethernet/ip stack would be a huge PITA on an 8bitter.
  - jrockway 7y ago
    Yeah, I posted a few comments here without actually watching their marketing video, and didn't realize it had those two things. Upgrading to get those features seems like a good idea, to compete with the cheaper models. I don't think I would have engineered a new board and control stack just to get a web interface and a screen. Their last model (the i3 MK3S) has headers to accept a Pi Zero, and that seems like a good approach modulo the bugs, which would be worth fixing. (Apparently the bugs are, the Pi Zero isn't fast enough to emit gcode to the UART and record a video stream from a camera at the same time. I kind of doubt it, but that's what I'm told. The other problem is that the i3 has one power switch, so it can't keep the RPi on when the printer is powered off. This means a lot of people are corrupting their SD card, which is probably why they complain about the setup randomly breaking.) I just want a USB serial port that accepts gcode. I have plenty of computers with much better screens (and SSL stacks) around for doing something more powerful ;)
    - dfasdfasd 7y ago
      > I just want a USB serial port that accepts gcode. I have plenty of computers with much better screens (and SSL stacks) around for doing something more powerful ;) That's fair, but then you've added an extra processor which adds a lot of cost. I don't want to tie up a full computer and the associated space just to run my printer. Many people don't have a spare computer they can dedicate to printing either.
drudru11 7y ago
Price seems totally reasonable to me. Whenever I research the cheaper printers, I read about all the upgrades people have to implement. This ends up costing more time and $$.
- Arcanum-XIII 7y ago
  Can’t agree more. I bought a Creality Ender 3, and added since: a new bed plate, a leveling sensor, a raspberry pi to control it For the future, I know I’ll replace the fans, and probably the main board That’s without adding my time: updating the firmware (overheating protection seems cool), calibrating and configuration of the various bit (like the probe position relative to the hot end), finding the correct slicer and config for it. Now it works fine. Still, it cost me way more than the list price to get to this point. A prusa mini would have been a better investment !
techslave 7y ago
people in Prague deserve jobs more than people elsewhere? Neither Prague nor China have a connection for me so I’ll take the cheapest, please. I don’t really feel that way but your argument just isn’t sound.
- jjeaff 7y ago
  You aren't just providing jobs, you are also providing tax revenues. So I guess if you don't see any issue giving money to the Chinese government, then choose the cheapest.
  - AYBABTME 7y ago
    Should chinese entrepreneurs and workers be penalized for being born and being stuck under the wrong regime?
ekr 7y ago
> It creates local jobs for people with fair wages, social security and good quality of life, we should strive to have more of our stuff produced in the west. I don't really agree with that argument from a humanitarian perspective. That would simply further increase the vast economic inequality between the west and the rest. Even with lower wages, people in China are better off with more jobs than fewer. People in the Czech Republic for instance have more safety nets, more alternatives and opportunities.
- ddingus 7y ago
  Let China put it's people to work. They have lots to do. Making products locally maintains a higher standard of living and can limit dependencies on others. Not doing that takes a nations to largely service economy status and when that matures the standard of living declines, infrastructure development slows or stops, tax revenue goes down, and demand for new products gets tepid. In short terms, the boost from cheap stuff is nice. As wages flatten, that cheap stuff becomes not so cheap and improving income more difficult.
StavrosK 7y ago
The price is great for what it does. I've had a Wanhao for years and love it, but all the features of the new Prusa aren't to be laughed at. I would love automatic bed leveling, because leveling is annoying enough that I would pay to have it done. All the rest is great too, mainly built-in wifi (though I'd probably run Octoprint anyway). All in all, I consider this a solid contender.
AYBABTME 7y ago
> we should strive to have more of our stuff produced in the west Why exactly is it preferable to favor "the west" over other places? These types of statements read a lot like "us vs them" to me. What makes "the west" an intrinsically morally better source for products?
- akavel 7y ago
  As j-pb mentioned in the immediately preceding sentences: "the west" comes with the assumption that people working on the product have reasonably good living and working conditions, protected by law that is most probably not too cheated on through corruption. Whereas for goods produced in "the east", the usual assumption seems to be that it's the opposite, that the workers are most probably being taken advantage of.
solomontribe 7y ago
Why so many people need 3d printer? Then people are suggesting to buy them from already rich/prosperous nations? Well, let me bite this - you guys don't need 3d printer to scratch your itch. Try to do with less resources which results in less energy/resources consumed. Meanwhile, people in developing countries barely have woodworking or other power tools.

by j-pb 7y ago

mk3 7y ago

The price is going to slay all Chinese crap makers. I always wanted mk3 but never had a big enough reason to buy, now I can justify it. It's the printer I will buy :)

m0xte 7y ago
It’s not. I bought an Creality Ender 3 recently for a lot less than that (152 GBP next day in UK) and the thing is perfect. It is also entirely open source. https://github.com/Creality3DPrinting/Ender-3 https://github.com/Creality3DPrinting/Ender-3 Quality is pretty top notch. It worked out of the box flawlessly and with no futzing.
- crankylinuxuser 7y ago
  Yeah, except for the things you can't see. 1. They use crappy MOSFETs that are known to fail closed. This means you can get a runaway heat on your hotend. A 40w cartridge can melt the alu heatspreader 2. The beds are anemic for heating. Not enough power 3. Crappy steppers 4. No features for jam detection, autoleveling, skipped step protection, filament runout 5. "Chinese" quality: good luck in getting any sort of tech support. Once they have your money, you're fucked. I'm fighting right now with Pine64 over defective eMMC modules that ignore the first read, causing initrd to fail to boot. Of course, they were chatty on Twitter prior to purchase, but have ignored every way of contact AFTER purchase. But pretty much every Chinese company is like this.
  - m0xte 7y ago
    Note: former EE. I’ve taken it and the provided power supply to bits before I even fired it up. 1. They’re IRLR3103PBF operated within their SOA. They’re fine. Most MOSFETs fail short due to the construction of the MOSFET. I’ve actually got a few scars on my arms from the buggers exploding on me misusing them on purpose as RF PA’s as a ham. I’ve seen them blow up in various bits of expensive US made kit too (tektronix 22xx in particular grr) 2. I’ve had absolutely no problems at all with mine and adhesion. 3. A decent stepper costs as much as a Prusa i3. All the steppers at this price are crap. But they work pretty damn well. 4. These are luxuries really. If it jams the Bowden tube pops out and you clean it up and off you go. I levelled it in 3 mins myself. Skipped step I’m not sure if the scenario. Filament run out doesn’t happen if you pay attention to the Cura filament length and don’t try to wing using up the ass end of a roll. 5. I’m not paying for support. I’ll fix it myself. I’m quite handy with a screwdriver, a compiler and a soldering iron. The thing is just an AVR running open source firmware. Nothing complex. The main thing is I can get functional chunks of spare parts for this next day via eBay. As for comparing Chinese support to US support, I’ve had better luck out of the worst Chinese company than Microsoft and Apple.
    - jrockway 7y ago
      I think he is referring to a step motor controller as a "stepper". People love the fact that Prusa uses Trinamic drivers instead of no-name drivers. I personally don't understand why step motor control is something that needs to be outsourced. Just stick an H-bridge between the microcontroller and the motor and improve the control algorithm with every release.
      - m0xte 7y ago
        The “no name” drivers are a bit more complicated than an H bridge: https://www.pololu.com/file/0J450/a4988_DMOS_microstepping_driver_with_translator.pdf https://www.pololu.com/file/0J450/a4988_DMOS_microstepping_d... The typical H bridge has many failure modes and disadvantages which are handled by the controller ICs. Not to mention a lot less CPU overhead for the AVR running the show.

hevi_jos 7y ago

Prusa cares about quality. Chinese mostly about price. For example, Prusa filaments are perfectly rewind, so the possibility of the filament making a knot and stopping the print like has happened to me with other filaments in 14h printing sessions does not exist. Or chinese aluminium printing beds, with 0.3-0.4 mms differences along the printer, that even with a touch probe you can't print big things over. Those beds are so cheap, and you could print small pieces with them, but anything serious in size like 18x18 cms will fail. Prusa warrantees it. Quality control is the great advantage that Prusa has over the Chinese(that love lying). He knows it, and sends you a report of the QA of your specific machine.

dual_basis 7y ago
Maybe, but quality is hard to measure. I just bought a Creality Ender 3 Pro for $180 and the print quality looks as good as anything I've seen from a Prusa or even the Ultimaker at my university. It's got a larger build volume than this mini as well. It doesn't have some of the comfort features, such as auto bed leveling or wifi, but if you really want these you can add them in and still be under the price of this mini, not to mention that the cantilevered design of the mini is almost certainly less stiff than the i3 style on the Ender 3.
- omnimus 7y ago
  Is this Creality Ender 3 Pro marketing team?
  - dang 7y ago
    The site guidelines ask you not to post like this—would you mind reviewing them? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - omnimus 7y ago
      Its the parent who is clearly marketing different product in multiple comments around the thread. I was just annoyed that i had to read thrid comment about how great differend product is

crankylinuxuser 7y ago

> I'm glad that prusa has stayed true to his open hardware pledge all these years, while continuing to push the reprap ideals. He truly believes it. Not only that, but his left arm has the Open Source Hardware logo tattooed with honeycomb infill :) I've been there and saw his progress from the beginning. I was at the first MRRF, and he flew in from Prague. Back then, I had my Prusa i2 printer, designed by him to use 8mm threaded rod with a simple 3d prints to make your own printer. Things have indeed changed since those old days!

jrockway 7y ago

The price seems fine to me. This is going to print a lot of useful parts for people and comes with great software for both your computer and the printer that you can hack and modify. If this is anything like my i3, then it's going to have high quality parts (Noctua fans!) and come in kit form to let you assemble it yourself so you know where everything is if something breaks and you need to repair it. I am surprised that they switched to a more powerful microcontroller. While it is something Reddit endlessly complains about (despite having no software engineering experience), a lot of engineering is invested into their existing 8-bit platform which works perfectly fine. You don't need 32-bit pointers to read a string like "G1 X42" and pulse an I/O pin a couple times ;)

j-pb 7y ago
My guess is that driving that big color display and more importantly ethernet/ip stack would be a huge PITA on an 8bitter.
- jrockway 7y ago
  Yeah, I posted a few comments here without actually watching their marketing video, and didn't realize it had those two things. Upgrading to get those features seems like a good idea, to compete with the cheaper models. I don't think I would have engineered a new board and control stack just to get a web interface and a screen. Their last model (the i3 MK3S) has headers to accept a Pi Zero, and that seems like a good approach modulo the bugs, which would be worth fixing. (Apparently the bugs are, the Pi Zero isn't fast enough to emit gcode to the UART and record a video stream from a camera at the same time. I kind of doubt it, but that's what I'm told. The other problem is that the i3 has one power switch, so it can't keep the RPi on when the printer is powered off. This means a lot of people are corrupting their SD card, which is probably why they complain about the setup randomly breaking.) I just want a USB serial port that accepts gcode. I have plenty of computers with much better screens (and SSL stacks) around for doing something more powerful ;)
  - dfasdfasd 7y ago
    > I just want a USB serial port that accepts gcode. I have plenty of computers with much better screens (and SSL stacks) around for doing something more powerful ;) That's fair, but then you've added an extra processor which adds a lot of cost. I don't want to tie up a full computer and the associated space just to run my printer. Many people don't have a spare computer they can dedicate to printing either.

drudru11 7y ago

Price seems totally reasonable to me. Whenever I research the cheaper printers, I read about all the upgrades people have to implement. This ends up costing more time and $$.

Arcanum-XIII 7y ago
Can’t agree more. I bought a Creality Ender 3, and added since: a new bed plate, a leveling sensor, a raspberry pi to control it For the future, I know I’ll replace the fans, and probably the main board That’s without adding my time: updating the firmware (overheating protection seems cool), calibrating and configuration of the various bit (like the probe position relative to the hot end), finding the correct slicer and config for it. Now it works fine. Still, it cost me way more than the list price to get to this point. A prusa mini would have been a better investment !

techslave 7y ago

people in Prague deserve jobs more than people elsewhere? Neither Prague nor China have a connection for me so I’ll take the cheapest, please. I don’t really feel that way but your argument just isn’t sound.

jjeaff 7y ago
You aren't just providing jobs, you are also providing tax revenues. So I guess if you don't see any issue giving money to the Chinese government, then choose the cheapest.
- AYBABTME 7y ago
  Should chinese entrepreneurs and workers be penalized for being born and being stuck under the wrong regime?

ekr 7y ago

> It creates local jobs for people with fair wages, social security and good quality of life, we should strive to have more of our stuff produced in the west. I don't really agree with that argument from a humanitarian perspective. That would simply further increase the vast economic inequality between the west and the rest. Even with lower wages, people in China are better off with more jobs than fewer. People in the Czech Republic for instance have more safety nets, more alternatives and opportunities.

ddingus 7y ago
Let China put it's people to work. They have lots to do. Making products locally maintains a higher standard of living and can limit dependencies on others. Not doing that takes a nations to largely service economy status and when that matures the standard of living declines, infrastructure development slows or stops, tax revenue goes down, and demand for new products gets tepid. In short terms, the boost from cheap stuff is nice. As wages flatten, that cheap stuff becomes not so cheap and improving income more difficult.

StavrosK 7y ago

The price is great for what it does. I've had a Wanhao for years and love it, but all the features of the new Prusa aren't to be laughed at. I would love automatic bed leveling, because leveling is annoying enough that I would pay to have it done. All the rest is great too, mainly built-in wifi (though I'd probably run Octoprint anyway). All in all, I consider this a solid contender.

AYBABTME 7y ago

> we should strive to have more of our stuff produced in the west Why exactly is it preferable to favor "the west" over other places? These types of statements read a lot like "us vs them" to me. What makes "the west" an intrinsically morally better source for products?

akavel 7y ago
As j-pb mentioned in the immediately preceding sentences: "the west" comes with the assumption that people working on the product have reasonably good living and working conditions, protected by law that is most probably not too cheated on through corruption. Whereas for goods produced in "the east", the usual assumption seems to be that it's the opposite, that the workers are most probably being taken advantage of.

solomontribe 7y ago

Why so many people need 3d printer? Then people are suggesting to buy them from already rich/prosperous nations? Well, let me bite this - you guys don't need 3d printer to scratch your itch. Try to do with less resources which results in less energy/resources consumed. Meanwhile, people in developing countries barely have woodworking or other power tools.