Prusa MINI: Smart and compact 3D printer
blog.prusaprinters.org
blog.prusaprinters.org
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.
https://github.com/Creality3DPrinting/Ender-3
Quality is pretty top notch. It worked out of the box flawlessly and with no futzing.
1. They use crappy MOSFETs that are known to fail closed. This means you can get a runaway heat on your hotend. A 40w cartridge can melt the alu heatspreader
2. The beds are anemic for heating. Not enough power
3. Crappy steppers
4. No features for jam detection, autoleveling, skipped step protection, filament runout
5. "Chinese" quality: good luck in getting any sort of tech support. Once they have your money, you're fucked.
I'm fighting right now with Pine64 over defective eMMC modules that ignore the first read, causing initrd to fail to boot. Of course, they were chatty on Twitter prior to purchase, but have ignored every way of contact AFTER purchase. But pretty much every Chinese company is like this.
1. They’re IRLR3103PBF operated within their SOA. They’re fine. Most MOSFETs fail short due to the construction of the MOSFET. I’ve actually got a few scars on my arms from the buggers exploding on me misusing them on purpose as RF PA’s as a ham. I’ve seen them blow up in various bits of expensive US made kit too (tektronix 22xx in particular grr)
2. I’ve had absolutely no problems at all with mine and adhesion.
3. A decent stepper costs as much as a Prusa i3. All the steppers at this price are crap. But they work pretty damn well.
4. These are luxuries really. If it jams the Bowden tube pops out and you clean it up and off you go. I levelled it in 3 mins myself. Skipped step I’m not sure if the scenario. Filament run out doesn’t happen if you pay attention to the Cura filament length and don’t try to wing using up the ass end of a roll.
5. I’m not paying for support. I’ll fix it myself. I’m quite handy with a screwdriver, a compiler and a soldering iron. The thing is just an AVR running open source firmware. Nothing complex.
The main thing is I can get functional chunks of spare parts for this next day via eBay.
As for comparing Chinese support to US support, I’ve had better luck out of the worst Chinese company than Microsoft and Apple.
I personally don't understand why step motor control is something that needs to be outsourced. Just stick an H-bridge between the microcontroller and the motor and improve the control algorithm with every release.
The typical H bridge has many failure modes and disadvantages which are handled by the controller ICs. Not to mention a lot less CPU overhead for the AVR running the show.
I am waiting for a 3D printer that uses servo motors, though. So many failed prints come from not knowing where the extruder is. But you can just measure exactly where it is, rather than guessing based on how much current the motor used.
I use Leadshine ones normally. They're big but also very reasonably priced and work very well.
I had the experience of getting and assembling a Prusa MK3 kit for myself, and getting access to a cheap Chinese printer at roughly the same time.
The Prusa cost more than twice as much and I've already made upgrades. Worked correctly right after assembly. I've already gone through several kilos of successful prints. And the frills just make it so much nicer to use: spring steel bed, auto mesh leveling, the Prusa fork of Slic3r just keeps getting better and better.
The Chinese printer required you to attach the gantry to the bed. But after weeks of tweaking. It still doesn't work correctly. It's completed prints. But none of them have been of decent quality. Now, some of the Chinese printers appear to be good. But do yourself a favour and research the specific models if you want to buy one.
Otherwise, if you really care about designing and prototyping, spend the extra cash and spend more time making things. There are a few brands out there. I reckon Prusa has the best kits if you swing that way.
It's just too finicky. Too many odd issues with jams, adhesion. I left it sitting for a while and for some reason when I came back to use it I had to play with the belt adjustment. The magnetic bed doesn't align properly so you need to intentionally line it up in a way that doesn't cleanly overlap the metal base.
And I'll admit recently there's a trend of Chinese companies in the space actually working on conscious iterative design based on feedback, especially Creality... but it's still obvious they're just reacting to whatever pops up, instead of trying to get ahead of what people want (which Prusa excels at)
Creality tried tried to fix the fan issue everyone complained about (fan exposed to dust and filament refuse) in the Ender 3... by mounting the board upside down with the fan mounted on the bottom millimeters away from your work surface. Which made any modifications that needed access to the board a massive headache (I actually didn't bother putting back half the screws, since to access them you need to put the entire machine on it's side... )
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Long story short, when I want to print something, I want to know, this thing will be ready to go. The hard part should be designing it, if I can't rely on the printer to just work™ when the motivation is there, I just don't bother.
And this is someone who likes to tinker, it's just when I want to tinker on X, I don't want tinkering on Y to get in the way.
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.
You will eventually need to do maintenance on it, you'll eventually have a clog or a broke part or need to do some slightly technical stuff to fix an eventual problem, but most adults capable of building Ikea furniture should be able to follow instructions and do it.
I'm assuming this will be closer to 85% "plug and play". Things like the "one click print", color screen, WiFi and automatic firmware updates are the biggest nice to haves.
But I don't think they've gotten to the point where you'll have reliability similar to a normal "2d" paper printer, so at some point you'll need to take some stuff apart to unclog it. But that's about the extent of the technical needs I'd expect from this printer.
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!
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 ;)
I don't think I would have engineered a new board and control stack just to get a web interface and a screen. Their last model (the i3 MK3S) has headers to accept a Pi Zero, and that seems like a good approach modulo the bugs, which would be worth fixing. (Apparently the bugs are, the Pi Zero isn't fast enough to emit gcode to the UART and record a video stream from a camera at the same time. I kind of doubt it, but that's what I'm told. The other problem is that the i3 has one power switch, so it can't keep the RPi on when the printer is powered off. This means a lot of people are corrupting their SD card, which is probably why they complain about the setup randomly breaking.)
I just want a USB serial port that accepts gcode. I have plenty of computers with much better screens (and SSL stacks) around for doing something more powerful ;)
That's fair, but then you've added an extra processor which adds a lot of cost. I don't want to tie up a full computer and the associated space just to run my printer. Many people don't have a spare computer they can dedicate to printing either.
Write file, insert, pick job, walk away, done.
For very long prints, SD is my goto. No failures.
From what I've heard, this is not reliable in the current implementations. If the computer goes to sleep, is under high load, or crashes this can result in a failed print. Of course you could build in more and more safeguards for this sort of thing (buffer the gcode, have some "emergency stop" movement which moves the head up and away from the print and decreases the temp of the hot end if there is a break in the stream of instructions) but this is a lot of additional effort when you could just as easily push all the gcode onto an SD card on the printer.
While I agree Reddit's obsession with weird technical details is annoying, this is a pretty arrogant position. I've written motion control code for both 8-bit and 32-bit designs, and the difference is bigger than "read a string and pulse an IO a few times". The Atmega has been outdated for the past 10 years, the only reason it picked up in 3D printing was because of the accessibility through Arduino and similar---not for any good, technical reason. They're going to need to switch at some point, may as well be now.
Sure, you don't _need_ a 32 bit processor, but a modern Cortex-M0 or M4 is much more powerful than an Atmega328 for the same cost or less. My Prusa Mk3 takes a non-negligible amount of time to sort files on the SD card, and the screen could really show more information. There is also much more advanced motion planning they could do with a little more power available.
> Why did we decide to switch to a 32-bit board? Surprisingly, raw performance is not the main reason. We can now write cleaner and more abstract (reusable) code without assembler hacks like on the 8-bit board. Adding new features becomes much less of a hassle and we don’t have to count every single byte in the flash memory. Unit tests and JTAG debugging sped up the development and we also got the chance to include ethernet and optional Wi-Fi connections.
If you read through the firmware you'll find 1000000x #define's for different features that I'm sure they're eager to get rid of.
I get why you would start from scratch with an M4. I don't get why you would maintain two different codebases commercially, though.
(As for the motion control aspect, at the feedrates of 3D printers, I don't think you get anything from a faster processor. Motion control is not what's limiting print speed or accuracy.)
I mean sure, it's not going to be a perfectly smooth transition, but I think you're underestimating how bad it was on the Atmega. There is _no_ code space left on those chips, which makes adding features nearly impossible. They'll probably just maintain the old version for as long as they can, while switching new products over to the new one.
The codebase is also probably simpler than you realize. These microcontrollers don't have the code space for programs of any significant size. Porting the peripheral interfaces over to the new controller is not that hard.
> (As for the motion control aspect, at the feedrates of 3D printers, I don't think you get anything from a faster processor. Motion control is not what's limiting print speed or accuracy.)
This is actually a real problem. It's not the basic motion control, but doing things like intelligent look-ahead or vibration compensation.
I think the technology is further ahead than you realize. It's not an Atmega running your microwave we're talking about. Those chips _are_ seriously limited, in material ways, even if you haven't run into it yourself.
iirc they have well over 200 employees at this point.
But for 3D printing isn't the printer simply reading the instructions in the gcode? It's not doing any motion planning at all, that is all decided by the slicer.
The slicer will generate a command that says go from point (x1, y1, z1) to point (x2, y2, z2) with speed f, but it doesn't say anything about acceleration, or how to transition into the next move. A very simplistic controller will use a trapezoidal ramp profile where it will ramp up to the programmed feed rate at a fixed acceleration, then stay at the programmed feed, then ramp down in time to reach the end point. However, if the move was a very short line or arc as part of a large surface, the machine doesn't need to reach 0 speed before starting the next move. A smarter controller will 'look ahead' to predict the next few move and plan the motion of the machine to eliminate jerkiness or stopping.
The slicer may tell the machine what acceleration to use, but that's really just setting a parameter in the machine controller, and isn't settable per-move.
This isn't as critical for 3D printers as it is for big, heavy milling machines. Nevertheless, you can do clever things like trying to compensate for vibration, or speeding up or slowing down the extruder motor based on the pressure of the plastic in the nozzle.
This isn't to say Prusa is switching just to do better motion planning, it sounds like that isn't a primary goal, but I'm trying to illustrate there is a lot more room for intelligence than 'just wiggling some IO'.
I can see some benefit to motion planning on the device if, for example, decisions are being made based on real-time data. For example, if there is a pressure sensor for the nozzle then the board could use this this realtime data to adjust it's motion.
If there's no realtime data being input then everything is simply a deterministic function of the gcode, and all of these aspects related to acceleration and jerk can be precomputed on your powerful multi-core desktop and "rolled into" the gcode.
Regardless, I was just pointing out one place where a bit of extra power could help with printing. However, that's not really the point. It's not that the core _needs_ to be 32 bit, it's that most modern microcontrollers are 32 bit. The Atmega is more expensive, has less memory, no JTAG, no DMA, poor debugging support, and mediocre peripherals. The extra power to run more advanced motion control is just a bonus when you switch to a modern Cortex-M.
The real usefulness of power is the possibly to add other features not directly related to printing like built-in ethernet/wifi, or a larger screen (it drives me nuts that I can't see longer file names on my Prusa screen).
In the release they say that it will come in 3 pieces that you put together, not a full from-scratch kit
For the future, I know I’ll replace the fans, and probably the main board
That’s without adding my time: updating the firmware (overheating protection seems cool), calibrating and configuration of the various bit (like the probe position relative to the hot end), finding the correct slicer and config for it.
Now it works fine.
Still, it cost me way more than the list price to get to this point. A prusa mini would have been a better investment !
I don’t really feel that way but your argument just isn’t sound.
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.
Making products locally maintains a higher standard of living and can limit dependencies on others.
Not doing that takes a nations to largely service economy status and when that matures the standard of living declines, infrastructure development slows or stops, tax revenue goes down, and demand for new products gets tepid.
In short terms, the boost from cheap stuff is nice. As wages flatten, that cheap stuff becomes not so cheap and improving income more difficult.
All in all, I consider this a solid contender.
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?
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.
Interesing use-case-do you have some photos? (and possibly design files, although I currently don't have access to a printer)
https://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/186909/3d-prints-board-ga...
I've used some fairly generic ones where existing solutions don't exist, but there are some parametric generators on thingiverse that I've started experimenting with.
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.
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.
See Toms video: https://youtu.be/sPvTB3irCxQ
...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.
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.
Tbf, that really depends on the market share. In the interwebs, I've read a total of 3 - 5 reports of printers catching fire. Now, if 20% of the 3D printers are Prusas, then the rest are chinese ones, which come all with the same bad components. There is not much surprise here, at least for me.
Despite from that, the groups I know usually go like "Yeah, get a CoreXY printer instead. Moving the printbed constantly in XY direction isn't a good idea."
https://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=33012
I own the model before this as well as Prusa Mk3. They are both wonderful. Now that Prusa Mini is out, it will probably be the printer of recommendation due to it being open source over the MP Mini.
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...
E.g. a 3D printer can be great for all kinds of creative hobbies.
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.
Haha, brilliant. Could have done with one of those...
Plus I cannot express the collective relief my spouse and I felt when I was able to repair a poorly designed part on the malfunctioning coffee maker in an hour's time. We're solving the real problems here.
And even if mass a produced version of these things would be cheaper/better, often you just won't be able to find 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.
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.
You need to explain to the artisan what you need done. This person has to understand you. This take time and money.
The effort I make explaining what I need to an artisan is completely lost if I change the artisan.
With a 3D printer, you create a design that is a product in itself. It can be repeated ad infinitum. The work I do today improving the design is work I will not have to do tomorrow.
I routinely send designs to people living 2000 miles away. They print it and can play with it the same day.
Genuinely if you are a creative person it’s an excellent tool to extend your abilities.
"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 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.
Any pointers on your process here? How do you cure/fire your ceramics?
It's a pretty straightforward, the same technique that's used industrially for most common ceramic production. I 3D print mold positives that then get cast in plaster. That plaster is used as part of a 'slipcasting' process:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slipcasting
> How do you cure/fire your ceramics?
I'm using standard high-fire (cone 10) ceramic slips that I mix from raw powder. They are fired to ~1300 C in a small electric kiln (although it's a particularly well insulated one so it can go all the way to cone 10 without too much trouble).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Apple products could be built anywhere.
Apple products could be built anywhere, but only because Apple have absolutely vast economies of scale. Most consumer electronics products couldn't be built anywhere else at a viable price, not because of labour costs but because of infrastructure. China has the supply chains and the expertise to build anything from a handful of PCBs to a couple of million units. There's just nowhere else on earth where you can set up several assembly lines in a few weeks or get a prototype built and tested in a few hours.
They are now. They were not when outsourcing began.
And that amazing "supply chain" relies on the fact that the West consumes large amounts of expensive consumer goods continuously. Consequently, the parts flow continuously and are consumed without need for inventory. If manufacturers start moving out of China, the parts flow will stop, inventory will back up, and the supply chain will dry up and blow away post haste as everybody heads for the door to avoid being the one holding the bag.
Many things in manufacturing rely on flywheel inertia to keep going. When the flywheel hiccups, the stuff upstream crashes to a halt.
I suspect it's the other way around. The supply chains, manufacturing expertise, automation, and skilled labour that are now China's main advantages were created through decades of investment that began with a search for cheap labour, and gradually crept up the value chain.
30 years ago in 1989, you would have said that you outsource manufacturing to Japan because they're "damned good at it". Only the very cheapest products would have been outsourced to China at that time. The skilled labour and supply chains weren't there.
30 years before that, in 1959, you would have looked to the US for a force that was "damned good at manufacturing". Only the cheapest products would have been outsourced to Japan.
Basically you start setting up factories making cheap stuff. Then as you gain skill and expertise, your quality gets better faster than your prices go up. The expensive countries see how much they can save by outsourcing more and more of their supply chain to you, and in the process their domestic supply chain dwindles and their skilled labour retires or gets laid off.
Eventually, you're the only choice for anything, until someone cheaper shows up to undercut you on the cheaper stuff...
Of course China started at the bottom of the value chain and moved up. The point I'm making is that China is no longer just a mass of undifferentiated cheap labour and low legal standards - it's a serious industrial power with a lot of unique strengths. A lot of low-skill, low-cost manufacturing has already left China in search of cheaper labour, but China is likely to remain a powerhouse in many industries for the foreseeable future. They're heavily investing in automation and are well-equipped to remain competitive despite rising labour costs.
And Japan still makes a lot of top-notch stuff, and even the USA does too, although neither are the obvious go-to places to get something made, which they used to be.
The same thing may well happen with China; their integrated domestic supply chain and expertise are huge advantages, but the same used to be the case in the USA and that didn't stop companies from looking elsewhere.
At the same time, Chinese companies have noticed that they don't have to be anybody's contract manufacturers; they can design products faster and better than engineers in the USA who have never visited a production floor in their lives. And so it goes...
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
From what I can see, the issue seems to be lack of trust between companies. If you never know whether you're going to get what you paid for, then the only way to distinguish between suppliers is price and it becomes a race to the bottom.
This lines up with the fact that most high end Chinese companies seem to be vertically integrated monoliths, which own the entire supply chain and so can control quality.
Your criticism isn't totally invalid (if unreadable), but not everything is reducible to class. Stop reading weird blogs about how socialist China is and get outside and do some real activism. Sitting around hoping Xie is going to magically do socialism by 2035 isn't praxis.
Go outside.
how about you? why are you spending your weekend telling anonymous tankies to go outside?
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.
It is also nice to know that I can print replacement parts and that my replacement is pretty much identical to the original.
Managing a printer farm sounds like a lot work, but they did do that work and can reap the benefit that prototyping and manufacturing are the exact same process. It's like saying "why does Google have all these servers when they could just buy them from AWS?" Well, they got good at building datacenters before you could just rent a datacenter from Amazon. If you're good at something, keep it up!
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.
a) injection moulded the parts
b) provided all of the parts as 3d models for for spares
though. There's something else all you guys are being weird about.
Is it the IKEA effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect) in action?
I was interested in upgrading my 3d printer to a prusa model.. but... the having the parts being built to subpar-precision using a FDM printer in a Czech 3d printer cluster didn't seem super exciting in itself...
None of the parts need to have tighter tolerances or higher precision for the Prusa printers to work well.
The fact of the matter is, print quality on basically any FDM printer out there can be dialed in and be really damn close. Even on the cheaper ones. The differences are more on print speed, bed leveling, crash/out of filament/etc. detection, recovery after power loss, etc. And none of those are affected by whether or not the plastic was injection molded or 3D printed.
In exchange, they gain a lot of dogfooding on their designs, including through physical and software upgrades, etc. They get to do a lot of testing on how well things like their powder coated sheets hold up to extended workhorse levels of printing.
And yes, some of it is a bit of marketing - Our printers are so good, we print them on themselves! - and the adhering to the whole RepRap movement, but there are a lot of benefits that they clearly believe outweigh the downsides.
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.
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.
My next printer will be smaller, let's see how they'll price the kit version.
>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.
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.
(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.
(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.)
Many people will never even update their firmware from what was in the box, and in fact, some require you to tear them down and wire up a ISP device to flash new firmware, since there's no bootloader (and even if you do all that, there's barely enough memory to hold a firmware with all it's features enabled)
Having firmware upgrades without tearing down the machine is literally a differentiator at the price point this is launching at...
(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!)