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.
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 ;)
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.
> 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.
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 :)
> 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.
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 $$.
> 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?
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).
The mini is neat, but I'm more excited about the CoreXY based XL.
I love my MK3, which I've upgraded to the MMU MK3S, but have had a bunch of projects where a larger printing area would be desirable (I print a lot of board game organizers, to reduce shelf space usage, speed up set up/tear down, improve playing ability during the game, etc., so usually this means 3-6 distinct sets of prints on the MK3S).
I have a good bit of experience on the Voron 2, and was thinking I was going to build a 2.1 - the CoreXY design also has the benefit of being able to print faster without quality loss, as well as being very amenable to designs that have built in enclosures, which is a godsend for printing ABS (and building exhausts to get the fumes out of the house), but with how great my experience with my current Prusa has been, I'm going to wait and see how it shapes up. It'd also save a ton of work, as the Voron is an entirely DIY design.
I guess switching to a bowden extruder let them cut a ton of costs. Can't wait to see how it prints compared to the mk3.
The real test will be comparing it to the Ender 3, which seems to be the form factor/market the mini is trying to go after. Even if the mini is 150 bucks more than the Ender 3, if it prints even slightly as reliably as the MK3 then the Ender 3 may be done for.
With low cost printers like the Ender 3/Maker Select/etc, after the first 50-200 hours of printing, you can end up spending more time on printer maintenance than printing. There's also small problems that can happen that for non-technical users would be the end of their adventure into 3D printing. That is easily the greatest pain point at the Ender 3's price point.
Switching to the Bowden extruder may have been more about reducing print head mass because of the cantilevered design.
I'd avoid printers like the Ender for fire risk as much as the hidden cost of maintenance and upgrades. The Prusa Mini will be a much better entry option than the cheap Chinese knockoffs.
I think the market for this one will be difficult, just because you can get a 3D printer (read: Ender) for basically half the price...
...with this being said, though - I'm happy to see a "entry-level" Prusa. One thing that lags the cheap printers are security measurements. I guess no one is keen on burning down their house, just because this giant hotglue on rails went rogue.
On their website, they state that they are:
- monitoring FAN RPM
- Have self diagnostic
- Have a high quality PSU
- and, even more important, use thermistors.
Taking all this into account, this might justify the price bump, if you aren't able to add all this to, let's say, your Ender or any other printer by yourself.
The Ender is a great printer if you're cool with it catching fire. In several of the 3d printing groups I'm in, the most common question is "what's the best printer around $300" I can get. The most common answer is something like "try not to scrimp and get the Prusa instead." That's a fairly tone deaf answer to someone truly budget constrained, though if the price is double their budget. But for an extra fifty bucks--that's a no brainer.
Print jobs can easily go 24 hours and fires are fairly catastrophic. I think Prusa just hit the ball out of the park with this pricepoint and approach assuming they are using their usual reliable, vetted components. I have never seen a report of a fire with a Prusa.
I'm legitimately regretting my Ender 3 purchase after seeing this printer. It should decimate the Ender 3 if there's a real future to FDM...
My Ender 3 Pro cost 230$ and came with a magnetic bed.
Added about 30$ for Automatic Bed Leveling.
Adding a 32-bit board would cost at least what? 50$? (
The stock Ender 3 board has so little memory I had to remove LCD support to get Unified Bed Leveling working)
Max quoted hotend temp is 280 °C so unless Prusa is condoning heating up PTFE to life threatening temperatures it has an all-metal hotend, so another 30$ for a middle of the road one?
Adding steppers... I think we've hit what the Prusa costs, except you hacked together this kit so now it's on you to support it, and also the prices I listed are not for high quality parts.
Then there's just the fact, Prusa will make a 3d printer that just works, and if it doesn't just work, they'll make it right. Good luck if that 50$ Aliexpress-sourced 32 bit board conks out, and have fun tearing it down and returning it to stock if Creality wants to help you out.
This printer represents careful design and good support, I'm going to try and get rid of my Ender 3 immediately and get one of these.
I wanted a Prusa originally but didn't feel like sinking the money into a proper printer when I didn't know I was going to use it. Instead I ended up with something I'm not using because it never works correctly and has actively damned my enthusiasm for FDM...
This is pretty awesome. I "upgraded" my Makerbot Replicator 2x to a Prusa MK3S and the difference was pretty amazing. Now to see if I can upgrade the controller to the Buddy.
Why does everyone need a 3d printer? Maybe this statement would sound as ludicrous looking back as asking why does everyone need a PC in the 1980s. However, I still don't understand why would a regular person need a 3d printer? Mass marketed goods are always cheaper due to economies of scale. And would you really want to put in the effort to make your own chair, etc?
I make a lot of stuff from scratch and a 3D printer is an excellent way to quickly test if something is going to work or not in practice. Also: musical instrument parts, prototype machinery, replacement bits for old gear that you can't buy anymore. It's the sort of thing that you use more and more the longer you have it because you see applications that you never dreamed off before getting it.
You won't be using it make your own chair (or at least, you probably shouldn't) and you won't be mass marketing anything 3D printed nor will you compete in the marketplace with anything that can be injection molded or stamped.
But for a quick one-off part if beats whittling out of a piece of wood by quite a distance.
On another note: soldering irons and hammers are also not for everybody, some people will never get the hang of fabrication. But once you are in the group that likes to make stuff 3D printers are just one more option in the tool arsenal.
I’m using mine to produce enclosures, replacement parts and new mechanical parts for my other interests. As well as printing things for the kids who have an endless stream of ideas. It turned into an unexpected family activity. Finishing and painting stuff is fun too.
Genuinely if you are a creative person it’s an excellent tool to extend your abilities.
I print a lot of stuff around the house with a toddler. I printed guards to prevent him from turning on the oven, a insert for the piano that prevents him from pressing the auto play demo, a shim to get a drawer to close more smoothly, a shampoo caddy that hooks around our shower stall, a storage system for small hardware, a set of clips for the computer cords to keep them organized, a doohickey to strip leaves off of herbs, geez there must be more I’m forgetting.
Everyone does not need a printer. A creative professional like an architect, engineer, electrician, decorator, wood worker, they absolutely need it.
Mass marketed are always cheaper and most of the time better. True.
So why creative professionals need it? Because not everything they need its mass marketted. In fact, one of the best uses is joining two mass marketted things together to create a system.
3d printing is fantastic for joining the gaps that exist between what exist in the market and exactly what you need.
Imagine you are an engineer creating a flight simulator hardware machine, or a driving simulator with VR. You probably will buy the chair, but then you will have to adapt it some way to your structure of soldered beams.
You can spend like 600 euros mechanizing and soldering little metal pieces and wait something like a month for those that make it to make it. Or you could print them and spend like 25 euros and have it ready at the end of the day, look at the problems in the design, iterate.
I don't think everybody _needs_ one but they're extremely handy to have, especially when you want something very particular, like a missing part of a cheap tool, a new handle for a particular broom, a doorstop that works with your weird door, plastic feet that fit your specific furniture or a desk organizer that's the specific size needed for your desk.
And even if mass a produced version of these things would be cheaper/better, often you just won't be able to find it.
This will sound frivolous and ridiculous, but I have a toddler with constantly changing tastes and it's a nice way to be able to engage with and encourage their interests. For example, cars have been a huge deal lately, and being able to 1) print a bunch of logos for room decorations and 2) put the logos in areas that the kiddo finds onerous to encourage them to go there (e.g. How many cars can you name while we get changed for preschool) has been a life saver.
Plus it's nice to be the hero around the house when I can solve random maintenance problems with a quick search on Thingiverse or a couple of hours of designing and printing. Not sure it has literally paid for itself since I got one, but it has definitely be more useful than I expected and I would say it has been borderline indispensable for my household.
"Everyone" doesn't. If you don't make things, don't buy tools.
Metaphorically, you're comparing buying a radio to buying a piano. If you just want to listen to music, buying a piano is a very inefficient step to your goal.
I'm a sculptor who specializes in math and physics visualizations, I have two Prusa printers and they are invaluable tools for me. I 3D print a lot of sculpture parts and things like sculpture bases that would be difficult and time consuming to make on a milling machine (grids of tapered square holes, etc), in addition to lots and lots of tooling like jigs for setting the back stop on my model railroad chopper to precise lengths.
I love my two printers. They enable me to achieve the kind of computer precision my artwork requires in a way I don't know I'd be able to achieve otherwise, at least not in such a short amount of time.
Not everyone needs a printer - but an easy to use, reliable and relatively affordable printer is more suitable for "everyone", not just people that enjoy "fiddling with my 3D printer" as a side-hobby or can/want to afford expensive ones. I interpret the article as meaning it that way.
E.g. a 3D printer can be great for all kinds of creative hobbies.
Even as a person with zero 3D modeling skills, I like making a printer because it lets me make little knick-knacks of things that aren't popular enough to warrant actual toys but someone bothered to model and put up on Thingiverse.
I bought a 3d printer when I got a hiring bonus for referring a friend. I had played around with one before but a nice turn key one was the real trigger I needed. I bought it without really knowing what all I'd do with it.
I make all sorts of things:
I work for twitch (built bits product initially), so I print a few hundred bits to give out at twitch con for my coworkers, it's a fun thing for them (I expense the plastic).
I needed to replace a bunch of boards on my deck and the dimensions of dimensional lumber have changed. So I could either pay $400 + cost of lumber to get boards cut correctly, or I could pay $175 for the lumber and print abs Shims to make the lumber the correct thickness. Shims at market price were around $75. I was able to iterate on a design and print the 80 shims I needed for about $3 worth of ABS plastic.
I also really enjoy solving problems with the printer in a pretty clean way compared to getting out in the shop. I can, in between matches of dota or pubg, iterate a design and hit print. A match or 3 later I've got a part, or a sub part (mating surfaces) done.
They're also amazing for coming up with templates for making parts out of more time consuming materials like well anything. I can cad a design up in seconds to minutes and hit print. That will get me a part that I can see if it fits. Even wood takes as long as the cad step. And you can iterate a ton.
Another good use case is enclosures and mounts for arduino and ESP32 projects. Lots of little lego parts of eletroics that need to be wired together. Getting them into a reasonable form factor usually requires hot glue and tape to make a shitty ball that's hard to work with, or leaving it on a breadboard which isn't a great form factor, or making a printed enclosure which can hit most of your needs. These can take longer, like 10 hours of iteration but that's amazingly faster than most other methods.
My friend makes furniture. I bought him a printer and he prototypes pieces on the printer. Makes full mockups of living room parts to give to potential customers.
My son does dnd, we print figurines all the time, they're fun weekend projects. He made and painted an infinity gauntlet over the summer which looks pretty sweet.
Have I gotten the $2k out of the printer in absolute value and replacement over mass produced products? No. Maybe about $700 worth of savings there. If you add the DND figures maybe $1000.
If you add the cost of learning, hobbies, time with family, and offsetting iteration and time spent with turn key manufactureres working on a prototype, yes, prolly at least $10k of value (that I wouldn't have spent otherwise).
At the end of the day, for not much space, it makes a lot of physical projects feasible mostly relying on just the computer for the design space.
I use mine for designing and building robot parts. I can design, print, and test like 5 different component designs per day. The difference this makes in quality of construction is insane. Even if I had a full tool tool shop I wouldn't be able to iterate like this. It's truly incredible.
No everyone needs a 3d printer for sure. A big part of what stopped the idea that 3d printing would be this magical revolution is that designing plastic parts is actually fairly hard.
I don't use my 3d printer to 'fix' things around the house that often because it's frequently cheaper to work around it or buy a replacement. The times a high-value item breaks in a way I can fix with a printed part are rare enough it certainly doesn't justify owning one.
That said, if you really like designing mechanical things or working on electronics projects or similar, a 3d printer is a total blast. I'm currently using mine to make molds for real ceramic parts.
Really curious to see what the print quality ends up being like on these.
Design wise they're very similar to something like a cetus, or many other Chinese printers with similar mechanics with a major difference: Smooth rods and bearings instead of linear rails.
In my own designs I've pivoted away from rods in favor of rails and seen much greater quality, accuracy, repeatability, and speed, even with cheap knock off rails from China, and most of the industry is moving that way as well.
What's curious is you can get a machine similar to the mini, using linear rails, and more metal or injection moulded parts over 3D printed parts, for just a little bit more than the mini.
Prusa has quite a good reputation though, so I'm skeptical they would release an inferior machine at a the same price point, so like I said, really curious to see how well these works.
What I love about Prusa is that they eat their own dog food. They use their printers in a farm producing parts for their products. This makes reliability and repeatability first class citizens.
He mentions in the blog post that the motivation for this was wanting smaller & cheaper machines for the farm, as two small machines can print faster than one big one for the same cost.
I'll still wait for reviews, but this looks like a great little machine and I suspect that quality will be reasonable for the above reasons.
One issue will be corrosion on the rails over time though. This affected an original Ultimaker I had sitting around as I let too much dust gather on it.
The vast majority of housefires caused by 3D printers are caused by the budget printers coming out of China. It's a real issue, and it's cost people their homes and their possessions. The Anet A8 in particular has been very bad about this. The Creality CR-10 had some issues as well. The Ender 3 that several people have referred to in here has some additional protections, especially with the newest firmware, but I would be hesitant with the track record and huge lag time on putting thermal runway protection into their devices.
I don't think anyone is saying that China is incapable of creating high quality products - they very obviously are. But being capable of doing something doesn't mean that that is the product strategy being employed, or that if it is being employed, that it's the only or most popular one.
I would absolutely trust a 3D printer manufactured in China from a company that used quality component and put thought into safety from the start. I've put my money where my mouth is, and own a Milkshake3D (granted, it is an SLA printer and not FDM.) But I wouldn't purchase one of the budget FDM printers manufactured in China at this point in time. If Creality's printers look to hold up well with the new protections, I might reconsider them in the future.
I made a comment referencing Chinese companies on this page...
It has nothing to do with racism, there's an obvious strategy most of them shared in the 3d printer space, and that was slap their name on a random 3d printer using the cheapest possible materials to get to a feature list
Search and see how many no-name printers are using exactly the same displays and various bits from the "named" Chinese sourced 3d printers.
There are definitely companies in China being more selective than average now. Creality printers started off looking just like no name copies with slight changes, but they've been starting to innovate a bit more of late.
But it's not at all shocking, or racist, that people would group a market that operates in a certain way.
It's no more racist than saying SV tech companies vs Eastern European tech companies, we know they have differing cultures
"Yes, China may be a brutal, authoritarian, oppressive regime currently trying to censor discussion of their occupation of Hong Kong - but at least they provide cheap manual labor due to lax labor laws, a disregard for the environment, and the general poverty of their people."
These threads are always a strange and uncomfortable bridge between valid criticism (many products made in China are cheap and break easily, the Chinese government uncomfortably authoritarian) and actual racism ("the Chinese" only make cheap shit, Chinese don't care about freedom).
I never really understood why they stayed with building a giant 3d printer farm to build all those 3d printer parts, except for it being "cool". Especially in .cz, I think think they could have gotten all those parts injection moulded for a lower cost. At a higher precision.
Having just built a MK3S and not having done much printing before, it was nice to see just what kind of things you could build. The level of detail, how to design the parts that need to be somewhat strong etc.
Another point is that it allows you to print spare parts for your own or a friends printer if something breaks, or print upgraded parts if they tweak the design.
1. It looks like you are going to fight "ringing" with lack of rigidity.
2. Its a bowden extruder... which I suppose is a necessity due to the lack of structure. Still I would rather have direct drive on every machine.
3. It's very expensive. You can buy an Ender for $200 or less on sale... or around $230 normal price. Upgrade the board to a 32bit Bigtreetech for $60 with Trinamic drivers... plug and play.
4. Most people find they want a bigger printer... not smaller.
This is my initial reaction. I am always looking for innovation in this space and most of it is happening in the "industrial" realm. For example, I wish they would make an SLS machine or a "beginner" industrial machine.
The companies like Creality are just dominating everything.
We need prosumer/industrial machines that have features you can't get with $750 dollar machine.
Re: points 1 and 2, I think they're connected. The lack of rigidity is mitigated by the Bowden making the hotend so damn light it probably won't be as big of a deal as you might think. Also tweaking some jerk and acceleration settings will almost always fix ghosting and ringing caused by a "less stiff" frame with minimal hit to the print time. (And I'm assuming they'll do most of the legwork to have a great printing profile out of the box)
>You can buy an Ender for $200 or less on sale...
This is exactly why I love the idea of this printer so much more! You could get an ender for $200 (plus $60 to $100 to improve the worst parts and make it less likely to catch fire). But you're still manually leveling, you're still fighting with scraping prints off the bed, you're still missing stuff like filament run-out detection, automatic firmware updates, spring steel PEI print surface, crash detection, power panic, stealth mode, and a lot of other safety features.
And at the end of the day, an ender 3 is gonna cost $260 to $300 and require the user to know what to replace fix on day 1 for a safe printer, while this is $350. And outside of commercial manufacturing, most users don't ever max out their print area with most printers (at least from what I've seen spending a lot of time on 3d printing forums).
I'm super excited for this, because $800 to $1000 is just to much for the average person to spend on an easy to use printer like the MK3S. This is only slightly more expensive than other "starter" printers, and has most of the niceties, safety features, and support.
But,I will say that my creality has been a bucket of pain, to the point where I almost exclusively use my prusa these days. So perhaps that's reason to hope this is more than just a crappy bargain basement printer warmed over.
One of the ways Prusa gets the quality they have is that they run a massive print-farm of their own printers to print the parts so they get to see all the issues up close. Printing the parts also makes them upgradeable and home-fixable for end-users.
Yes, but in general everyone that buys an FDM printer for things like that is unhappy. Your parts will look 3D printed. If you care about fine detail, you really want an SLA printer.
(The fact that this printer is small doesn't make it any better at small parts. It just takes up less space and can't print bigger parts.)
I got into 3d printing about 6 months ago and am thrilled every time I print something. But 100% of the things I design and print are practical and solve some sort of problem. My parts look 3D printed, but I don't care, because they're performing a useful task. Many people on the Internet are not interested in that, they just want to produce injection-mold quality parts from 3D models at home. If that's your use case, don't buy this. The SLA printers are much much better at that.
This is pretty exciting, I'm glad that they doubled down the path of making high quality hardware and remain open source and a net positive player in the space.
Did your printer stop working when they stopped writing software for it? Does it no longer do what it did when you took it out of the box?
(Serious question. I don't have a 3D printer, but I've been thinking about it. If they're reliant on constant firmware fixes, then I will probably wait another year.)
I've literally never firmware updated my Prusa and it works totally fine. This is a bit of a bizarre nitpick. Hell, you can build your own firmware if you really care that much.
Prusa is running a pretty good business. 100% of their hardware and software is open; you can print your own Prusa i3, build your own controller board from schematics, modify all their software on both the firmware and slicing side, etc. I don't think it's bad to give them a shoutout on HN, they're doing good work and you can benefit from their work without giving them a dime.
(After struggling with a cheap Chinese 3D printer and learning to hate 3D printing... I switched to a Prusa i3 MK3S and am loving it. The software doesn't annoy me. The prints stick to the bed every single time without fail. And I got to assemble the whole thing myself, so I know how every component works and how to fix it in the event that something breaks. And if something breaks, I don't have to order a replacement part, I can just go to the makerspace, print it out, and be back online!)
j-pb|6 years ago
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.
jrockway|6 years ago
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 ;)
hevi_jos|6 years ago
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.
crankylinuxuser|6 years ago
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!
mk3|6 years ago
ekr|6 years ago
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.
drudru11|6 years ago
AYBABTME|6 years ago
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?
StavrosK|6 years ago
All in all, I consider this a solid contender.
techslave|6 years ago
I don’t really feel that way but your argument just isn’t sound.
solomontribe|6 years ago
[deleted]
cthalupa|6 years ago
I love my MK3, which I've upgraded to the MMU MK3S, but have had a bunch of projects where a larger printing area would be desirable (I print a lot of board game organizers, to reduce shelf space usage, speed up set up/tear down, improve playing ability during the game, etc., so usually this means 3-6 distinct sets of prints on the MK3S).
I have a good bit of experience on the Voron 2, and was thinking I was going to build a 2.1 - the CoreXY design also has the benefit of being able to print faster without quality loss, as well as being very amenable to designs that have built in enclosures, which is a godsend for printing ABS (and building exhausts to get the fumes out of the house), but with how great my experience with my current Prusa has been, I'm going to wait and see how it shapes up. It'd also save a ton of work, as the Voron is an entirely DIY design.
e12e|6 years ago
Interesing use-case-do you have some photos? (and possibly design files, although I currently don't have access to a printer)
rullopat|6 years ago
bsamuels|6 years ago
The real test will be comparing it to the Ender 3, which seems to be the form factor/market the mini is trying to go after. Even if the mini is 150 bucks more than the Ender 3, if it prints even slightly as reliably as the MK3 then the Ender 3 may be done for.
With low cost printers like the Ender 3/Maker Select/etc, after the first 50-200 hours of printing, you can end up spending more time on printer maintenance than printing. There's also small problems that can happen that for non-technical users would be the end of their adventure into 3D printing. That is easily the greatest pain point at the Ender 3's price point.
WillPostForFood|6 years ago
I'd avoid printers like the Ender for fire risk as much as the hidden cost of maintenance and upgrades. The Prusa Mini will be a much better entry option than the cheap Chinese knockoffs.
shrubble|6 years ago
MrGilbert|6 years ago
...with this being said, though - I'm happy to see a "entry-level" Prusa. One thing that lags the cheap printers are security measurements. I guess no one is keen on burning down their house, just because this giant hotglue on rails went rogue.
On their website, they state that they are:
- monitoring FAN RPM
- Have self diagnostic
- Have a high quality PSU
- and, even more important, use thermistors.
Taking all this into account, this might justify the price bump, if you aren't able to add all this to, let's say, your Ender or any other printer by yourself.
ericb|6 years ago
Print jobs can easily go 24 hours and fires are fairly catastrophic. I think Prusa just hit the ball out of the park with this pricepoint and approach assuming they are using their usual reliable, vetted components. I have never seen a report of a fire with a Prusa.
BoorishBears|6 years ago
My Ender 3 Pro cost 230$ and came with a magnetic bed.
Added about 30$ for Automatic Bed Leveling.
Adding a 32-bit board would cost at least what? 50$? ( The stock Ender 3 board has so little memory I had to remove LCD support to get Unified Bed Leveling working)
Max quoted hotend temp is 280 °C so unless Prusa is condoning heating up PTFE to life threatening temperatures it has an all-metal hotend, so another 30$ for a middle of the road one?
Adding steppers... I think we've hit what the Prusa costs, except you hacked together this kit so now it's on you to support it, and also the prices I listed are not for high quality parts.
Then there's just the fact, Prusa will make a 3d printer that just works, and if it doesn't just work, they'll make it right. Good luck if that 50$ Aliexpress-sourced 32 bit board conks out, and have fun tearing it down and returning it to stock if Creality wants to help you out.
This printer represents careful design and good support, I'm going to try and get rid of my Ender 3 immediately and get one of these.
I wanted a Prusa originally but didn't feel like sinking the money into a proper printer when I didn't know I was going to use it. Instead I ended up with something I'm not using because it never works correctly and has actively damned my enthusiasm for FDM...
ChuckMcM|6 years ago
alphagrep12345|6 years ago
jacquesm|6 years ago
You won't be using it make your own chair (or at least, you probably shouldn't) and you won't be mass marketing anything 3D printed nor will you compete in the marketplace with anything that can be injection molded or stamped.
But for a quick one-off part if beats whittling out of a piece of wood by quite a distance.
On another note: soldering irons and hammers are also not for everybody, some people will never get the hang of fabrication. But once you are in the group that likes to make stuff 3D printers are just one more option in the tool arsenal.
m0xte|6 years ago
Genuinely if you are a creative person it’s an excellent tool to extend your abilities.
dwoozle|6 years ago
hevi_jos|6 years ago
Mass marketed are always cheaper and most of the time better. True.
So why creative professionals need it? Because not everything they need its mass marketted. In fact, one of the best uses is joining two mass marketted things together to create a system.
3d printing is fantastic for joining the gaps that exist between what exist in the market and exactly what you need.
Imagine you are an engineer creating a flight simulator hardware machine, or a driving simulator with VR. You probably will buy the chair, but then you will have to adapt it some way to your structure of soldered beams.
You can spend like 600 euros mechanizing and soldering little metal pieces and wait something like a month for those that make it to make it. Or you could print them and spend like 25 euros and have it ready at the end of the day, look at the problems in the design, iterate.
Youden|6 years ago
And even if mass a produced version of these things would be cheaper/better, often you just won't be able to find it.
skybrian|6 years ago
tumes|6 years ago
Plus it's nice to be the hero around the house when I can solve random maintenance problems with a quick search on Thingiverse or a couple of hours of designing and printing. Not sure it has literally paid for itself since I got one, but it has definitely be more useful than I expected and I would say it has been borderline indispensable for my household.
_jal|6 years ago
"Everyone" doesn't. If you don't make things, don't buy tools.
Metaphorically, you're comparing buying a radio to buying a piano. If you just want to listen to music, buying a piano is a very inefficient step to your goal.
eigenstuff|6 years ago
I love my two printers. They enable me to achieve the kind of computer precision my artwork requires in a way I don't know I'd be able to achieve otherwise, at least not in such a short amount of time.
detaro|6 years ago
E.g. a 3D printer can be great for all kinds of creative hobbies.
eyeball|6 years ago
Causality1|6 years ago
grogenaut|6 years ago
I make all sorts of things:
I work for twitch (built bits product initially), so I print a few hundred bits to give out at twitch con for my coworkers, it's a fun thing for them (I expense the plastic).
I needed to replace a bunch of boards on my deck and the dimensions of dimensional lumber have changed. So I could either pay $400 + cost of lumber to get boards cut correctly, or I could pay $175 for the lumber and print abs Shims to make the lumber the correct thickness. Shims at market price were around $75. I was able to iterate on a design and print the 80 shims I needed for about $3 worth of ABS plastic.
I also really enjoy solving problems with the printer in a pretty clean way compared to getting out in the shop. I can, in between matches of dota or pubg, iterate a design and hit print. A match or 3 later I've got a part, or a sub part (mating surfaces) done.
They're also amazing for coming up with templates for making parts out of more time consuming materials like well anything. I can cad a design up in seconds to minutes and hit print. That will get me a part that I can see if it fits. Even wood takes as long as the cad step. And you can iterate a ton.
Another good use case is enclosures and mounts for arduino and ESP32 projects. Lots of little lego parts of eletroics that need to be wired together. Getting them into a reasonable form factor usually requires hot glue and tape to make a shitty ball that's hard to work with, or leaving it on a breadboard which isn't a great form factor, or making a printed enclosure which can hit most of your needs. These can take longer, like 10 hours of iteration but that's amazingly faster than most other methods.
My friend makes furniture. I bought him a printer and he prototypes pieces on the printer. Makes full mockups of living room parts to give to potential customers.
My son does dnd, we print figurines all the time, they're fun weekend projects. He made and painted an infinity gauntlet over the summer which looks pretty sweet.
Have I gotten the $2k out of the printer in absolute value and replacement over mass produced products? No. Maybe about $700 worth of savings there. If you add the DND figures maybe $1000.
If you add the cost of learning, hobbies, time with family, and offsetting iteration and time spent with turn key manufactureres working on a prototype, yes, prolly at least $10k of value (that I wouldn't have spent otherwise).
At the end of the day, for not much space, it makes a lot of physical projects feasible mostly relying on just the computer for the design space.
thrax|6 years ago
dfasdfasd|6 years ago
I don't use my 3d printer to 'fix' things around the house that often because it's frequently cheaper to work around it or buy a replacement. The times a high-value item breaks in a way I can fix with a printed part are rare enough it certainly doesn't justify owning one.
That said, if you really like designing mechanical things or working on electronics projects or similar, a 3d printer is a total blast. I'm currently using mine to make molds for real ceramic parts.
neonate|6 years ago
mwill|6 years ago
Design wise they're very similar to something like a cetus, or many other Chinese printers with similar mechanics with a major difference: Smooth rods and bearings instead of linear rails.
In my own designs I've pivoted away from rods in favor of rails and seen much greater quality, accuracy, repeatability, and speed, even with cheap knock off rails from China, and most of the industry is moving that way as well.
What's curious is you can get a machine similar to the mini, using linear rails, and more metal or injection moulded parts over 3D printed parts, for just a little bit more than the mini.
Prusa has quite a good reputation though, so I'm skeptical they would release an inferior machine at a the same price point, so like I said, really curious to see how well these works.
dhon_|6 years ago
He mentions in the blog post that the motivation for this was wanting smaller & cheaper machines for the farm, as two small machines can print faster than one big one for the same cost.
I'll still wait for reviews, but this looks like a great little machine and I suspect that quality will be reasonable for the above reasons.
One issue will be corrosion on the rails over time though. This affected an original Ultimaker I had sitting around as I let too much dust gather on it.
sitkack|6 years ago
cthalupa|6 years ago
I don't think anyone is saying that China is incapable of creating high quality products - they very obviously are. But being capable of doing something doesn't mean that that is the product strategy being employed, or that if it is being employed, that it's the only or most popular one.
I would absolutely trust a 3D printer manufactured in China from a company that used quality component and put thought into safety from the start. I've put my money where my mouth is, and own a Milkshake3D (granted, it is an SLA printer and not FDM.) But I wouldn't purchase one of the budget FDM printers manufactured in China at this point in time. If Creality's printers look to hold up well with the new protections, I might reconsider them in the future.
BoorishBears|6 years ago
It has nothing to do with racism, there's an obvious strategy most of them shared in the 3d printer space, and that was slap their name on a random 3d printer using the cheapest possible materials to get to a feature list
Search and see how many no-name printers are using exactly the same displays and various bits from the "named" Chinese sourced 3d printers.
https://www.aliexpress.com/wholesale?catId=0&initiative_id=S...
There are definitely companies in China being more selective than average now. Creality printers started off looking just like no name copies with slight changes, but they've been starting to innovate a bit more of late.
But it's not at all shocking, or racist, that people would group a market that operates in a certain way.
It's no more racist than saying SV tech companies vs Eastern European tech companies, we know they have differing cultures
ALittleLight|6 years ago
Apple products could be built anywhere.
taneq|6 years ago
dfasdfasd|6 years ago
tpmx|6 years ago
jrockway|6 years ago
It is also nice to know that I can print replacement parts and that my replacement is pretty much identical to the original.
magicalhippo|6 years ago
Another point is that it allows you to print spare parts for your own or a friends printer if something breaks, or print upgraded parts if they tweak the design.
mch82|6 years ago
monkmartinez|6 years ago
1. It looks like you are going to fight "ringing" with lack of rigidity.
2. Its a bowden extruder... which I suppose is a necessity due to the lack of structure. Still I would rather have direct drive on every machine.
3. It's very expensive. You can buy an Ender for $200 or less on sale... or around $230 normal price. Upgrade the board to a 32bit Bigtreetech for $60 with Trinamic drivers... plug and play.
4. Most people find they want a bigger printer... not smaller.
This is my initial reaction. I am always looking for innovation in this space and most of it is happening in the "industrial" realm. For example, I wish they would make an SLS machine or a "beginner" industrial machine.
The companies like Creality are just dominating everything.
We need prosumer/industrial machines that have features you can't get with $750 dollar machine.
Klathmon|6 years ago
>You can buy an Ender for $200 or less on sale...
This is exactly why I love the idea of this printer so much more! You could get an ender for $200 (plus $60 to $100 to improve the worst parts and make it less likely to catch fire). But you're still manually leveling, you're still fighting with scraping prints off the bed, you're still missing stuff like filament run-out detection, automatic firmware updates, spring steel PEI print surface, crash detection, power panic, stealth mode, and a lot of other safety features.
And at the end of the day, an ender 3 is gonna cost $260 to $300 and require the user to know what to replace fix on day 1 for a safe printer, while this is $350. And outside of commercial manufacturing, most users don't ever max out their print area with most printers (at least from what I've seen spending a lot of time on 3d printing forums).
I'm super excited for this, because $800 to $1000 is just to much for the average person to spend on an easy to use printer like the MK3S. This is only slightly more expensive than other "starter" printers, and has most of the niceties, safety features, and support.
debatem1|6 years ago
But,I will say that my creality has been a bucket of pain, to the point where I almost exclusively use my prusa these days. So perhaps that's reason to hope this is more than just a crappy bargain basement printer warmed over.
hevi_jos|6 years ago
I am part of a Spanish 3D printer group called "clone wars", and dozens of people there have bought Enders because they are dirty cheap.
It really takes a master degree in engineering to solve most of them, because they want to print professionally expending 300euros.
That connects with the point 4, yes people want everything, expending nothing. But that they could get it is a completely different thing.
As the print bed goes bigger, the mechanical deflections increase with the square of it.
The price of things like milled precision beds or original linear rails, increments non linearly for a tolerance when the size of the bed increases.
tigrezno|6 years ago
My next printer will be smaller, let's see how they'll price the kit version.
ex3ndr|6 years ago
jasiek|6 years ago
sannee|6 years ago
ericb|6 years ago
johnchristopher|6 years ago
jrockway|6 years ago
(The fact that this printer is small doesn't make it any better at small parts. It just takes up less space and can't print bigger parts.)
I got into 3d printing about 6 months ago and am thrilled every time I print something. But 100% of the things I design and print are practical and solve some sort of problem. My parts look 3D printed, but I don't care, because they're performing a useful task. Many people on the Internet are not interested in that, they just want to produce injection-mold quality parts from 3D models at home. If that's your use case, don't buy this. The SLA printers are much much better at that.
AYBABTME|6 years ago
unknown|6 years ago
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olafure|6 years ago
reaperducer|6 years ago
(Serious question. I don't have a 3D printer, but I've been thinking about it. If they're reliant on constant firmware fixes, then I will probably wait another year.)
dfasdfasd|6 years ago
sannee|6 years ago
BubRoss|6 years ago
jrockway|6 years ago
(After struggling with a cheap Chinese 3D printer and learning to hate 3D printing... I switched to a Prusa i3 MK3S and am loving it. The software doesn't annoy me. The prints stick to the bed every single time without fail. And I got to assemble the whole thing myself, so I know how every component works and how to fix it in the event that something breaks. And if something breaks, I don't have to order a replacement part, I can just go to the makerspace, print it out, and be back online!)
jeffk_teh_haxor|6 years ago