3DPrinting

My resin printer was powered off with resin in the vat for about 7 months. Last night I turned it on, gave it a job, and I woke up to a successful print.

My inkjet printer was powered off for 2 weeks. Last night I turned it on, gave it a job, and was instantly disappointed with a streaky, blotchy output. Running a clean cycle just made the output worse.

Why are 2D printers so terrible despite decades of development? What are some 2D printers this community has had good interactions with/would recommend?

Hi 3D-Printer Community,

I am a total newby in regards to 3D Printers but want to start this Hobby. Do you have any tips and suggestions for me about good printers? Anything you wish you knew before starting Out?

Videos:

• Short - just driving through the duct
• Long - more pictures and voiceover

I threw together this robot in a couple of days to inspect my HVAC duct and pull a cable (side note: I’m aware it’s generally advised against to run a cable through a duct, but I live in LA and we don’t have heating in our HVAC system so I don’t see it as a problem)

It's a pretty bare-bones platform, designed to be as simple as possible for a quick design + build using parts I had on-hand.

The vehicle is powered by small geared 28BYJ-48 Stepper motors driven by ULN2003 drivers, controlled with an ESP32 Cam development board. It’s a decent board for the application as it has wifi, a camera and a bright forward facing LED. The board does not have the necessary 8 GPIO pins to drive the ULN chips, so I used a 8 bit shift register.

I originally intended it to be powered by an 18650 battery but I had problems using a boost converter to get the required current to drive the electronics at 5v. the board is pretty power hungry, and coupled with the steppers and high power LED, it wouldn't even boot. I resorted to using 2 lithium polymer batteries in series to achieve 7.2v with no boost converter, which worked well enough. Even then, use of the LED kept causing brown-outs and reboots so I resorted to lowering it to 1/4 duty cycle which fixed the problem.

I used Micropython and the Picoweb framework to serve a REST API for rover control and a web page to provide a UI:

The rover was designed in FreeCAD and printed on my Voron 0 using PLA. The tires were printed in NinjaFlex TPU which is a very flexible rubber like plastic, in order to provide more traction.

The rover suffered from the aforementioned brown-outs due to the LED power requirements and also struggled to turn in certain locations in the ducts due to traction limitations and as side effect of being 2WD, but ultimately succeeded at what I needed.

How long do you have filament sitting "in the open"? I mostly print with a single filament roll at a time, and just leave it on the printer. A 1kg roll lasts me several weeks. For long time storage I keep it in an air tight box with disiccant pouches.

But how long can I let it sit before I should start storing it with disiccant and/or drying the filament before use?

I have enjoyed my Ender 3v2 but my extruder and hot end are acting up and I am ready for a more reliable printer. I like the simplicity of Bambu but it seems to come at the cost of customization. Prusa seems to be more open and extendable, but at the cost of increased complexity. What would you recommend?

This is the second time this has happened. It looks like it added part of the model on to the side. Is it my slicer? I'm using a Creality Halot Mage, and Chitubox 1.9.5 because that is the only slicer I've gotten to work on Fedora that supports my printer that I've found. I'm completely new to all things 3d printing. This is my first printer and that is my sixth print in the picture.

Hey all, I just finished a run of Popandsicle's excellent vase mode ornaments and I noticed these weird bulges happening all over the prints. The last run in a different color was flawless so I'm not sure where to start. I couldn't find much on the issue with a bit of googling so I thought I'd check with you folks and see if you all had any insight.

I've calibrated my esteps and adjusted the resolution to be a bit easier on my printer (modified CR-10v2), and unfortunately my mainboard isn't capable of linear advance.

Filament is overture royal gold, layer width is 0.6, height is 0.2.

I appreciate the help!

Hi everyone!

I'm curious to know which slicer you guys use.

I've been using the Creality slicer, but it seems like it pretty consistently crashes, and I've tried Cura but the print seemed stringy despite using the same settings.

How are Orca or Prusa?

Wanted to share this since this was a long Project. Since Autodesk started changing Fusions functionality, from limiting active projects, to changing their terms of service. Since I need a CAD tool for my 3D Printable designs, I started migrating to a new cross platform CAD tool. That happened to be FreeCAD.

Learning FreeCAD wasn't easy, but was well worth my time. And after slowly pecking at it for 11 months, I was able to re-build every design I made (that I cared about).

I've made my 3D Printable designs available on my GitHub if you are interested: https://github.com/the16bitgamer/16BitVirtualStudiosDesigns

https://thangs.com/designer/RetroMaker/3d-model/Reindeer%20Wood%20Cut%20Kit-972886

I'm trying to find out what purpose this type of design serves and how they are designed but have hit a wall with knowing what to even look for.

This piece of the voron stealthburner is the only example I can think of off the top of my head but I have seen them before in some sort of fan duct or funnel thing.

Look upon my maker space, and despair.

Anyway, here's what a 15 minute Benchy looks like.

Things I like:

• This thing can print stupidly fast. I don't know, maybe this high speed CoreXY shit is what all the cool kids are already doing these days, but this is new to me.
• Runs ordinary Klipper g-code, and while the firmware is quite customized it's still at least open source.
• Huge build area.
• Basically unbox and go.
• Look and feel, interior lighting, etc. is significantly improved over my 1st gen X-Plus.
• Has an optical bed leveling sensor built in.
• Has an actual chamber heater element with a PID, doesn't just rely on the residual heat from the build plate.
• The top lid authoritatively keeps out dust when the machine is not in use, or when running it enclosed with the chamber heated. The last gen machine had a big ass hole in the lid all the time, which let in grit and fuzz. (My machine is parked in my basement, as you can see, which is not a super clean area.)

Things I don't like:

• The build plate is textured on one side... And textured the same on the other side. That's stupid. Qidi sells a replacement plate that's smooth on one side like the ones that used to come with their old models, but you have to buy it separately and it's like $48. It's also out of stock everywhere.
• Doesn't come with an internal camera. Again, Qidi sells one separately. But it's an added expense.
• Didn't come with the nice little tackle box case for the included tools and spare parts like my old Qidi, either. Teh fook? I guess I'll have to print one.
• It's fucking enormous. I had an opportunity to see a Bambu X1 Carbon in person today, and the Bambu is way smaller in external dimensions, even moreso than the difference in build area would lead to believe. It wastes a ton of space inside.
• It's also heavy as hell.
• It comes with a dry box, but it's not an inbuilt dryer. It does have a spot to stick desiccant, though.
• The rear filament spool loading location is moronic. You need like 12" behind the machine to be able to swap spools. I will be running this from an external dryer placed on the table next to it instead.
• The build plate base has an incredible amount of thermal mass, and does not actually reach the temperature of your setpoint at the surface until some minutes after the PID says it did. You should start preheating a few minutes before beginning your print.

Quirks and annoyances aside, this machine looks like it's shaping up to be able to knock out parts about four times faster than my old one. So that's nice.

If I had to do it again I may have gotten the X-Plus 3 rather than the Max (my old machine was also a Plus) since I'm not really sure I'll use the extra build volume too often. But damn it, I like knowing I can print a part a whole foot across in a single shot.

It makes the dinkum drawing table I have it sitting on wiggle quite a bit when it's doing high speed moves. You probably want a very solid foundation to put a machine like this on, and I will probably have to devise a different table situation soon.

I'm getting into 3D printing, and due to the nature of my living constraints, I find myself with a large 12 ft x 20 ft non-climate controlled but clean shed from which to print. I bought one of these small microenvironment enclosures for my ender 3 pro, but temperatures here in the winter can reach the teens, and summers over 100 Fahrenheit. I guess my question is how much temperature can those micro enclosures account for when it's extremely cold on the outside?

I'm thinking about buying a small 3D printer for the odd project once in a while.

Problem is, I will not use it very often and I don't have much desk space for it to sit around.

Ideally (and I know this is utopia), I would like a device that I can pull out of a closet, fasten four screws, plug it in and be ready to go.

Is there something even remotely like that available? Every review I've seen just seems to assume that printers are basically static.

Right now looking into bang for the buck workhorses with a small footprint/build volume. A description that fit the Prusa mini+ perfectly in the past, but it feels like Prusa is a dinosaur that hasn’t moved with the times.

So who is still buying the Prusa mini+ and why?

Personally: While Prusa has outstanding support, good data protection, and does good things but there is now the Bambu Lab A1 mini.

Prusa mini is at the moment 500€ plus 20€ for a filament sensor (sic., it’s nearly 2024 and that’s an paid upgrade on half a grand printer) and another 7€ for WiFi.

Bambu Lab on the other hand is 320€.

Looking at the specifications, the A1 looks like a clear winner: For maintenance, there are three tasks: 1. cleaning and lubricating the mechanics (both are the same in this respect); 2. cleaning the build surface (both are the same); 3. maintaining the hotend and here Bambu Lab is clearly the better system as you can replace the nozzle in just a few seconds compared to Prusa’s E3D v6 hotend, which requires hot tightening.

The operation is not that different. Both support network, web interface, and automatic bed leveling probed at the nozzle. Bambu Lab has a camera built in, but this requires the printer to be connected to the BambuLab cloud, which may not be possible as the model data is shared with/uploaded to China. I would say this is still a strong point for Prusa as privacy is not an issue with their printers which means they can be easily deployed.

Performance should be close with input shaping enabled, but the A1 mini has the higher flow rate hotend, which means BambuLab is once again the winner (still no highflow at only 28 mm^3/s but twice the flow of a Prusa V6).

The build volume is identical and the footprint is also almost identical, so again no point where Prusa beats BambuLab.

Value? I have already mentioned it. 1.6 Bambulab for the price of 1 Prusa is a clear answer. If Prusa still had the 400€ original launch price and a filament runout sensor included, maybe the answer would be Prusa due to privacy/easier integration. The 200€/printer price difference is so significant that I don’t see who is still buying multiple Prusa mini+.

Btw. is there another printer on the market that just works paired with a small footprint and excellent value?

So this is for a more popular team which I've been told isn't doing so well this year. And when I said "what's new", I was told " you know where you can go".

For those who asked last time this is all printed in parts and assembled together in one print like so

Files are again available on Printables and Thingiverse though this model is bigger. I shrank it down in the x and y in my slicer by 50% for these prints

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6364966

https://www.printables.com/model/675731-montreal-canadiens-keychain-ornament

Since I got back into 3D printing I really want to fix up my prints now with sanding and coloring. Would airbrushing or traditional painting (paint brush) be better?

Recently I've been having feelings about moving away from Fusion 360. The combination of cloud app / filesystem and their demonstrated willingness to remove features and add arbitrary limitations (eg. 10 editable model limit) makes me feel uneasy about using it. To be clear I'm grateful that AutoDesk provide a free license at all, and it's an incredible piece of software, but I have a sense of vulnerability while using and honing my skills in it. If you've ever rented a house you'll know the feeling - you quite don't feel like it's really your home, if the landlord wants to make renovate or redecorate you don't have any choice and you could be evicted at any moment.

So I tried FreeCAD. At first, I have to say that it felt a little like stepping out of a spaceship (Fusion) and banging rocks together like a caveman. It's not that you can't do (most) of the same things as an enterprise CAD package, but the killer feature of Fusion is the level of intuitiveness and "it just works" that makes FreeCAD seem like trying to write Latin.

After a week of on-and-off learning I was not sure I wanted to continue. Even after getting comfortable with the basics, frustration levels would spike to 11 sometimes. The main issue I kept running into was that altering a previous feature would break everything that came after, requiring a varying amount of work to fix. The FreeCAD wiki suggests ways to mitigate this but many of them are un-intuitive and/or inconvenient. After some googling this seems to be caused by a pretty difficult to solve issue called the "Topological Naming Problem" (where FreeCAD can't keep track of surfaces / edges / vertexes in a stable fashion when features are changed). Then I came across this blog post that pointed out a fix has actually been developed earlier this year. A developer by the name of RealThunder has created a fork of FreeCAD called "Link Branch" which can track topology in a (more) stable fashion.

I tried this branch and was blown away by how much more usable it is. Not only can it handle changes to past features almost perfectly, but I can create multiple bodies from a single sketch (not possible before) and there are other UI tweaks that make creating features easier such as the ability to preview fillets and chamfers at the same time as selecting their edges. I'm not totally sure which of these features are unique to Link branch vs which might be pre-release in the main branch, but certainly the topology naming fix is unique to Link.

So if you have tried FreeCAD in the past and been frustrated, or if Fusion's past free license changes or price increases are making you uneasy, give the Link Branch a try! Downloads are available in the releases page.

Hey guys. I was wondering if anyone had and ideas / knew of an existing stl for a paper folder or folding document organizer. I couldn't find anything on thangs or printables that would keep the paper from bending over time.

Anyone have any thoughts or ideas? I would be using this to store print outs and related documents from a pen and paper rpg.

I wanted to print a temperature tower, but the custom Gcode entered in prusa slicer doesn't seem to actually change the temperature of the nozzle? It just uses the temperature that's configured on "other layers" under the filament tab.

I'm attempting gaaZolee's temperature tower, using the custom Gcode supplied with it, in the "before layer change" part of custom Gcode in prusa slicer.

I grabbed a beepy a little while back (if interested BE ADVISED: they've since gone dark and left a bunch of people holding out for one, I got really lucky and ordered super early) so I could work on some python stuff on the go. I didn't like having all the parts exposed, and the cases available seemed too flimsy for my liking.

I fired up blender and designed a unibody case for it. Printed it out on my Ender 3 and its been pretty great. I use it with some software I'm writing to turn a raspberry pi into a portable sensor data acquisition and visualization platform called a Picorder (Pi + Tricorder).

It took a couple revisions to get here, mostly to get the feel in the hand right. I wanted some bulbousness to make it easier to hold.

It's designed so the PCB slides into it and is affixed by two screws, and then a top cap is secured with four more screws to protect the top.

I've been printing a couple years now and enclosures are still my favourite item to design and print. So satisfying to hold something in your hand that was once just a 3D model and is now a fully real object. I wanted to add some content here as I've enjoyed looking at the other posts!

I wish you all easy first layers and good prints!

I made this by downloading an SVG of the teams logo from Wikipedia, the importing and making the profiles in FreeCAD. After some finagling of dimension so the thinnest wall wasn't 1 thick, it printed beautifully the first time. Hoping to make more but of more popular teams.

If you know of the Belleville Senators, then have at it, I've uploaded the files to Printables and thingiverse

https://www.printables.com/model/673303-belleville-senators-ornament

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6360512

EDITED Spelling error in title

I just assembled my new Anycubic Kobra 2, performed an auto level and tried to print the 30min benchy file they include on the micro SD card that it ships with. No other modifications of adjustments made. It printed in pretty much exactly the 30min the advertised.

It's think it did OK, but with obvious issues. Since I'm new to the hobby I don't know exactly what to expect and how to identify print quality issues.

My benchy looks like this: