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> 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

> 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.
- sircastor 5y ago
  My first printer was a Makerbot Cupcake in 2010. It sucked. I had to replace a lot on it to get it to work, and the best thing it ever did was print the parts for my current printer. I have since given it away.
  - ravenstine 5y ago
    If it's any consolation, we had the Makerbot Replicator which I'm pretty sure was the slightly "higher end" version and it probably didn't work any better than the Cupcake. I normally don't like talking crap about things people put effort into, and I'm sure that those early-gen Makerbots were capable of doing good prints given enough tweaking, but boy were they really bad in terms of casual printing. It's not even obvious why that was the case considering that all these Chinese 3D printers aren't that different technologically. My only guess is that those laser-cut frames they had were too flimsy for even the most reasonable print speeds, resulting in jostling that would cause catastrophic failure with anything with more than a few inches of vertical height. The weirdest thing I remember about the Makerbot was that, at the time, it came with nothing to hold the spool. What the actual F? My dad and I built one out of PVC and a roller bearing, if I remember correctly. The decision-making put into those printers was rather odd.
    - sircastor 5y ago
      The late-model Chinese printers you see today (which are overwhelmingly duplicates of the Ender 3) are the beneficiaries of lots of community development over the last ten years - this has the added benefit of making cheap and easy printers for new users to get into. From the Cupcake to now: 1) A constant-speed DC Motor as an extruder is not sufficient for 3D printing, you really need to be able to change how much filament you're moving. 2) A small melt-zone in your hot-end is critical to reducing jamming - This is why the E3D design has been so reliable. Looking through some old pictures, I remember how insane the cupcake hotend was (wrap some Nichrome wire around coupler, and some thermal cement around that, and your thermistor attached to that, and wrap the whole thing with some fiberglass insulation and Kapton tape) 3) Proper mechanical components shouldn't really be substituted - M8 threaded rods are not ACME leadscrews. I remain amazed at what the community (mostly Prusa, honestly) has been able to get out of 8-bit electronics.
ZeroGravitas 5y ago
One of the founding stories of the Free Software Foundation is of a time when just a standard laser printer was a similarly exotic and expensive item: > But before this happened, I had an experience that prepared me, helped me see what to do, helped prepare me to see what to do when this happened, because at certain point, Xerox gave the Artificial Intelligence Lab, where I worked, a laser printer, and this was a really handsome gift, because it was the first time anybody outside Xerox had a laser printer. It was very fast, printed a page a second, very fine in many respects, but it was unreliable, because it was really a high-speed office copier that had been modified into a printer. And, you know, copiers jam, but there's somebody there to fix them. The printer jammed and nobody saw. So it stayed jammed for a long time. > Well, we had an idea for how to deal with this problem. Change it so that whenever the printer gets a jam, the machine that runs the printer can tell our timesharing machine, and tell the users who are waiting for printouts, or something like that, you know, tell them, go fix the printer. Because if they only knew it was jammed, of course, if you're waiting for a printout and you know that the printer is jammed, you don't want to sit and wait forever, you're going to go fix it. > But at that point, we were completely stymied, because the software that ran that printer was not free software. It had come with the printer, and it was just a binary. We couldn't have the source code; Xerox wouldn't let us have the source code. So, despite our skill as programmers -- after all, we had written our own timesharing system -- we were completely helpless to add this feature to the printer software. Interesting to think how cheap and almost disposable printers became and how that might apply to 3D printers.
alias_neo 5y ago
Don't forget no proprietary ink. I too bought an Ender 3 V2, it was about £280 I got it the second it launched in the UK. Print quality is greatz and once you learn its limitations you can upgrade. First upgrade is to replace the bed springs with stronger "yellow springs", look them up on Amazon. They're stronger than the stock ones and you'll need to level the bed less often. Learn to level manually, give it a year even then buy a BL Touch, you'll still need to level manually occasionally. At this point I have upgraded mine to the point it's barely an Ender 3v2. Replaced the extruder/hotend with an E3D Hemera (direct drive) which prints flexibles like a champ, got a Pi official touch screen for OctoDash and a Pi 4B 4GB running OctoPrint (Pi 4B is overkill but I have a bunch of them at home). If you do go for a direct drive the X becomes slow and heavy so next upgrade is a Dual Y-Axis, I went for the dual motor option but it splits the power from the board so torque is appalling, go for the belt type instead. At this point you'll want to be custom building Marlin firmware because the Creality version which comes as stock is lacking. If you don't want to do it yourself there a bunch of community versions you can use if you can deal with their defaults (if you switch to a Hemera or other hotend/direct drive though, you're pretty much going to be custom building forever. There are nice easy to use build tools for VSCode/VSCodium called "AutoBuild Marlin" which sorts out the hard work, you just follow the instructions to tweaks some numhers and hit build. Firmware if installed by sticking it on the microSD and power cycling the printer with it inserted. I also removed the bottom cover over the driver board and printed one with a 92mm fan slot and put an always-on Noctua with a buck converter, quieter and cooler. Final mod I want to make is to cut holes in the metal shroud covering the PSU. The Creality design covers all of the vent holes on it leaving only the tiny, loud fan hole cooling the PSU. Other upgrades include a magnetic bed for easy print removal, a webcam for remote viewing and time lapse / octo lapse (these are beautiful time lapse you see where the print hotend is out of the way) and perhaps a shroud/cupboard if you want to print ABS etc (not recommended with stock hotend or inside your home). Wrote all of this on mobile so apologies for lack of citations/links, this should all be very searchable, happy to answer questions.
- jjeaff 5y ago
  I didn't see any mention on a controller board upgrade. For me, that was one of the biggest upgrades as it made the stock motors whisper quiet.

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.

sircastor 5y ago
My first printer was a Makerbot Cupcake in 2010. It sucked. I had to replace a lot on it to get it to work, and the best thing it ever did was print the parts for my current printer. I have since given it away.
- ravenstine 5y ago
  If it's any consolation, we had the Makerbot Replicator which I'm pretty sure was the slightly "higher end" version and it probably didn't work any better than the Cupcake. I normally don't like talking crap about things people put effort into, and I'm sure that those early-gen Makerbots were capable of doing good prints given enough tweaking, but boy were they really bad in terms of casual printing. It's not even obvious why that was the case considering that all these Chinese 3D printers aren't that different technologically. My only guess is that those laser-cut frames they had were too flimsy for even the most reasonable print speeds, resulting in jostling that would cause catastrophic failure with anything with more than a few inches of vertical height. The weirdest thing I remember about the Makerbot was that, at the time, it came with nothing to hold the spool. What the actual F? My dad and I built one out of PVC and a roller bearing, if I remember correctly. The decision-making put into those printers was rather odd.
  - sircastor 5y ago
    The late-model Chinese printers you see today (which are overwhelmingly duplicates of the Ender 3) are the beneficiaries of lots of community development over the last ten years - this has the added benefit of making cheap and easy printers for new users to get into. From the Cupcake to now: 1) A constant-speed DC Motor as an extruder is not sufficient for 3D printing, you really need to be able to change how much filament you're moving. 2) A small melt-zone in your hot-end is critical to reducing jamming - This is why the E3D design has been so reliable. Looking through some old pictures, I remember how insane the cupcake hotend was (wrap some Nichrome wire around coupler, and some thermal cement around that, and your thermistor attached to that, and wrap the whole thing with some fiberglass insulation and Kapton tape) 3) Proper mechanical components shouldn't really be substituted - M8 threaded rods are not ACME leadscrews. I remain amazed at what the community (mostly Prusa, honestly) has been able to get out of 8-bit electronics.

ZeroGravitas 5y ago

One of the founding stories of the Free Software Foundation is of a time when just a standard laser printer was a similarly exotic and expensive item: > But before this happened, I had an experience that prepared me, helped me see what to do, helped prepare me to see what to do when this happened, because at certain point, Xerox gave the Artificial Intelligence Lab, where I worked, a laser printer, and this was a really handsome gift, because it was the first time anybody outside Xerox had a laser printer. It was very fast, printed a page a second, very fine in many respects, but it was unreliable, because it was really a high-speed office copier that had been modified into a printer. And, you know, copiers jam, but there's somebody there to fix them. The printer jammed and nobody saw. So it stayed jammed for a long time. > Well, we had an idea for how to deal with this problem. Change it so that whenever the printer gets a jam, the machine that runs the printer can tell our timesharing machine, and tell the users who are waiting for printouts, or something like that, you know, tell them, go fix the printer. Because if they only knew it was jammed, of course, if you're waiting for a printout and you know that the printer is jammed, you don't want to sit and wait forever, you're going to go fix it. > But at that point, we were completely stymied, because the software that ran that printer was not free software. It had come with the printer, and it was just a binary. We couldn't have the source code; Xerox wouldn't let us have the source code. So, despite our skill as programmers -- after all, we had written our own timesharing system -- we were completely helpless to add this feature to the printer software. Interesting to think how cheap and almost disposable printers became and how that might apply to 3D printers.

alias_neo 5y ago

Don't forget no proprietary ink. I too bought an Ender 3 V2, it was about £280 I got it the second it launched in the UK. Print quality is greatz and once you learn its limitations you can upgrade. First upgrade is to replace the bed springs with stronger "yellow springs", look them up on Amazon. They're stronger than the stock ones and you'll need to level the bed less often. Learn to level manually, give it a year even then buy a BL Touch, you'll still need to level manually occasionally. At this point I have upgraded mine to the point it's barely an Ender 3v2. Replaced the extruder/hotend with an E3D Hemera (direct drive) which prints flexibles like a champ, got a Pi official touch screen for OctoDash and a Pi 4B 4GB running OctoPrint (Pi 4B is overkill but I have a bunch of them at home). If you do go for a direct drive the X becomes slow and heavy so next upgrade is a Dual Y-Axis, I went for the dual motor option but it splits the power from the board so torque is appalling, go for the belt type instead. At this point you'll want to be custom building Marlin firmware because the Creality version which comes as stock is lacking. If you don't want to do it yourself there a bunch of community versions you can use if you can deal with their defaults (if you switch to a Hemera or other hotend/direct drive though, you're pretty much going to be custom building forever. There are nice easy to use build tools for VSCode/VSCodium called "AutoBuild Marlin" which sorts out the hard work, you just follow the instructions to tweaks some numhers and hit build. Firmware if installed by sticking it on the microSD and power cycling the printer with it inserted. I also removed the bottom cover over the driver board and printed one with a 92mm fan slot and put an always-on Noctua with a buck converter, quieter and cooler. Final mod I want to make is to cut holes in the metal shroud covering the PSU. The Creality design covers all of the vent holes on it leaving only the tiny, loud fan hole cooling the PSU. Other upgrades include a magnetic bed for easy print removal, a webcam for remote viewing and time lapse / octo lapse (these are beautiful time lapse you see where the print hotend is out of the way) and perhaps a shroud/cupboard if you want to print ABS etc (not recommended with stock hotend or inside your home). Wrote all of this on mobile so apologies for lack of citations/links, this should all be very searchable, happy to answer questions.

jjeaff 5y ago
I didn't see any mention on a controller board upgrade. For me, that was one of the biggest upgrades as it made the stock motors whisper quiet.