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FYI a 3D printer is super affordable nowadays. Heres a quick guide for home usage: FDM printers: They use a spool of plastic as filament which is heated and la

by sydd 5y ago

FYI a 3D printer is super affordable nowadays. Heres a quick guide for home usage: FDM printers: They use a spool of plastic as filament which is heated and layed down layer by layer in a small string, are the cheapest, safest, have a large print volume. On the downside they often break down (e.g. the filament gets jammed) and have a coarse resolution (the smallest details are around 0.1mm). Most popular ones are the Ender series from Creality and Prusa printes. Prices are from $150, filament is from $17/kg. SLA printers: They use a liquid (called resin) the hardens (cures) under UV light, they print a whole layer at once. They are capable of printing super fine details, are less prone to breakdown (they just have 1 motor vs 4 or more in FDM). On the downside the resin they use is a very toxic material, you need to vent its air outside and always use protective gear. Also the print needs to be washed and cured after printing and they have a smaller build volume (iPad mini/iPad screen size) than FDM. You can get one from $250. Check out r/PrintedMinis on Reddit to see what they are capable of. I suggest getting a FDM printer as the first one unless you really need the fine details, e.g. for printing miniature figures.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
huhtenberg 5y ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/PrintedMinis/ https://www.reddit.com/r/PrintedMinis/ Woah. That's way better that I would've expected.
- cthalupa 5y ago
  DLP resin printers are making it down to consumer pricing, and the LCD based printers are now getting 8k screens - after priming and painting, you'll have a hard time distinguishing from a miniature printed with these from one cast.
FractalParadigm 5y ago
> FYI a 3D printer is super affordable nowadays This seriously cannot be understated enough. When I was in my final year of high school (2012) my shop teacher was the first person in the entire school board to get a 3D printer, one of the cheapest machines on the market (I can't remember the brand, or the name, only the number at the bottom of the invoice - $11,374.38). He got the machine in February and tasked me to help him set it up. After months of dicking around with it, levelling the bed, using different slicers, trying all kinds of different models, nothing would print properly past the first ~5 layers. Dealing with tech support gave us files that printed absolutely beautifully, but no help getting our stuff to print.[0] After this experience I threw 3D printing to the back of my mind and didn't think about it again until last year... When I bought an Ender 3 V2 around November. $250 at my door, an hour to put it together, another hour of tuning everything in, and I can count on one hand the number of non-user-error-related failed prints. With software packages like Octoprint and hardware mods like the BLTouch, I will argue that my 3D printer is significantly more reliable than any inkjet or laser print I've encountered. [0]: That shop teacher retired the same year I graduated, so the printer got moved to the media/broadcasting room. As far as I've heard, that printer was put into permanent storage around 2015 because nobody else could get it working properly.
- jcims 5y ago
  >When I bought an Ender 3 V2 around November This is 100% my recommendation for a first time 3D printer. I bought a wanhou i3 about 4 years ago and it was endless frustration. The Ender 2 V2 has been a completely different experience. I have probably 200 hrs of prints through it and just a handful of relatively minor issues. I did have trouble with Octoprint however. I stopped tinkering pretty quickly but IIRC there is some limitation to how the communication protocol works with the board and it caused me to miss steps here and there and generally resulted in poor prints. If that has been resolved would love to hear about it.
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    I switched my printers over to Klipper and have been overjoyed with the change. It’s a different style of firmware where all the gcode interpretation and motion calculations are done on the more powerful raspberry pi* and only the motion control pulse generation is done on the printer’s board. You get very precise step control as a result and with no start-stop blobbing within a layer. If you don’t want to go that far, look into max resolution settings in your slicer** to reduce tiny moves which might be overrunning the printer’s ability to process. Note that this is still useful with Klipper as well. * I’m using zero-w Pi, which is still way more powerful than a printer board. ** https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Hvw3DrVAeTA https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Hvw3DrVAeTA
    - jcims 5y ago
      Nice! thank you!
- ravenstine 5y ago
  My dad got one of the original Makerbot printers back ~2009. It was expensive, I'm pretty sure in the thousands. And it sucked. Sometimes you could get it to print right, but most of the time it screwed everything up to the point where it wasn't useful for anything. Every print was a roll of the dice. Last year I got an Ender 3 on Amazon for a fraction of the price (~$150) we spent on the Makerbot. I assembled it, plugged it in, set it to print the test file of the cat, and it just worked. The print was perfect, printed faster than the old Makerbot did, and had better resolution.

by sydd 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

huhtenberg 5y ago

https://www.reddit.com/r/PrintedMinis/ https://www.reddit.com/r/PrintedMinis/ Woah. That's way better that I would've expected.

cthalupa 5y ago
DLP resin printers are making it down to consumer pricing, and the LCD based printers are now getting 8k screens - after priming and painting, you'll have a hard time distinguishing from a miniature printed with these from one cast.

FractalParadigm 5y ago

> FYI a 3D printer is super affordable nowadays This seriously cannot be understated enough. When I was in my final year of high school (2012) my shop teacher was the first person in the entire school board to get a 3D printer, one of the cheapest machines on the market (I can't remember the brand, or the name, only the number at the bottom of the invoice - $11,374.38). He got the machine in February and tasked me to help him set it up. After months of dicking around with it, levelling the bed, using different slicers, trying all kinds of different models, nothing would print properly past the first ~5 layers. Dealing with tech support gave us files that printed absolutely beautifully, but no help getting our stuff to print.[0] After this experience I threw 3D printing to the back of my mind and didn't think about it again until last year... When I bought an Ender 3 V2 around November. $250 at my door, an hour to put it together, another hour of tuning everything in, and I can count on one hand the number of non-user-error-related failed prints. With software packages like Octoprint and hardware mods like the BLTouch, I will argue that my 3D printer is significantly more reliable than any inkjet or laser print I've encountered. [0]: That shop teacher retired the same year I graduated, so the printer got moved to the media/broadcasting room. As far as I've heard, that printer was put into permanent storage around 2015 because nobody else could get it working properly.

jcims 5y ago
>When I bought an Ender 3 V2 around November This is 100% my recommendation for a first time 3D printer. I bought a wanhou i3 about 4 years ago and it was endless frustration. The Ender 2 V2 has been a completely different experience. I have probably 200 hrs of prints through it and just a handful of relatively minor issues. I did have trouble with Octoprint however. I stopped tinkering pretty quickly but IIRC there is some limitation to how the communication protocol works with the board and it caused me to miss steps here and there and generally resulted in poor prints. If that has been resolved would love to hear about it.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  I switched my printers over to Klipper and have been overjoyed with the change. It’s a different style of firmware where all the gcode interpretation and motion calculations are done on the more powerful raspberry pi* and only the motion control pulse generation is done on the printer’s board. You get very precise step control as a result and with no start-stop blobbing within a layer. If you don’t want to go that far, look into max resolution settings in your slicer** to reduce tiny moves which might be overrunning the printer’s ability to process. Note that this is still useful with Klipper as well. * I’m using zero-w Pi, which is still way more powerful than a printer board. ** https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Hvw3DrVAeTA https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Hvw3DrVAeTA
  - jcims 5y ago
    Nice! thank you!
ravenstine 5y ago
My dad got one of the original Makerbot printers back ~2009. It was expensive, I'm pretty sure in the thousands. And it sucked. Sometimes you could get it to print right, but most of the time it screwed everything up to the point where it wasn't useful for anything. Every print was a roll of the dice. Last year I got an Ender 3 on Amazon for a fraction of the price (~$150) we spent on the Makerbot. I assembled it, plugged it in, set it to print the test file of the cat, and it just worked. The print was perfect, printed faster than the old Makerbot did, and had better resolution.