Comment on California’s New Bill Requires DOJ-Approved 3D Printers That Report on Themselves
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 1 week agoYou can still get an Ender 3 (essentially the end result of RepRap). Every vendor has their own.
That said? If you buy a printer in 2025 (let alone 2026) and it does not have an integrated enclosure, you are opening yourself up to a world of hurt. The price difference isn’t that much anymore and even just having a box to hold the waste heat in solves like 90% of print problems.
Bambu are, above and beyond, the best bang for your buck. They ALSO are ahead of the curve on locking things down to support only their networked slicers. Which… is a huge concern with stuff like this.
Personally? I love the Qidi printers. I have a Q1 something or another and convinced a friend to get a different model. They use a semi-open fork of Klipper so you can theoretically make something work when it is abandoned. Which is good because the various CoreXY printers are no longer all based on the same standard so part kits aren’t (easily) interchangeable. And, of course, you can use Orcaslicer or whatever else you want.
Keep in mind that is all FDM. For Resin (SLA?), the ship has already sailed and people are genuinely happy to run slicers with literal fucking ads in them. Assuming the vendor doesn’t lock them out of even that garbage.
solrize@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
Thanks, yeah, I like the idea of an enclosed printer so that I can print outdoors and not get my living room full of fumes. Is that a reasonable thing to want to do?
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
On a warm and dry day? Maybe?
But if it is cold? Some printers have built in heaters. They aren’t strong enough to handle that. And if it is moist? You ACTUALLY will be someone who needs to dry your filament and good luck.
As for fumes and microplastics? That is the other big advantage of the enclosures (that I tend to try to avoid mentioning because people are fucking stupid). Even with no filter you are going to be getting a lot of benefits from the residues and the like hitting the walls first. And most of the CoreXYs can trivially add an actual filter to the vent… many that you print yourself.
It isn’t the same as a proper exhaust system but… ain’t nobody doing that.
solrize@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
Hmm, ok, so much for that idea. I had hoped it wouldn’t depend much on ambient temperature and humidity. Thanks.
Do you recommend any FOSS CAD software for designing parts? I’ve played with OpenSCAD a bit and maybe that suffices, but I wonder what else there is.
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
Do yourself a favor: Learn on TinkerCAD/Fusion 360 or OnShape. No, they are not open source and both have some REALLY nasty caveats for free users. But both of those are THE most user friendly CAD tools out there and you’ll be able to google anything you need. Learn the fundamentals and the language first.
Once you have that down? FreeCAD is surprisingly not horrible these days and I think I even actually like it. But FreeCAD is still heavily restricted by being “for users, by coders” as it were. So operations that might take one step in every other tool could take three or four because that maps a lot better to the underlying math libraries. And you’ll need to constantly translate between what everyone else calls something and what FreeCAD calls it. www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaTNTUzA5dM is a very good video comparing the two (just watch it at like 1.25x because Deltahedra has a very very very slow speaking cadence…). But they key is that if you know what you are trying to do in the language everyone else speaks, translating that to FreeCAD becomes super easy. Rather than not even knowing how to ask for help in the first place.
OpenSCAD is REALLY nice for building something in a vacuum where you know every dimension you want and have very clean (or nonexistent) interfaces to existing geometry. But, odds are, the vast majority of what you are going to be doing is matching to reference images or even reference parts.