Didn’t mean to put you off if it’s something you are interested in, just be aware with what you are dealing with going into it.

Small desktop CNCs are relatively affordable, but only cut in 2 dimensions. Laser cutters fill a similar niche, are a bit more limited in the types of materials they can cut and how thick the material can be, are a bit more forgiving than a CNC (no risk of breaking milling bits if you screw up), but have safety issues to be aware of. I’m not aware of any hobby-grade muli-axis CNC machines, but there might be ones out there

For minis and other things where you want lots of small details you want a resin/SLA printer.

• Keep in mind that as well as the printer itself, you also need equipment to wash and cure the resin after it comes out of the printer
• Resin is extremely toxic, accumulates in the body (ie, lots of small exposures over time is just as bad as one big exposure), and you can develop immune sensitivities to it where your body freaks out with even small amounts leading blisters, burns and breathing difficulties. Do not screw around with resin. Use proper PPE. Dispose of waste resin properly

I’ve got a Elegoo Neptune 3 Pro and found it really easy to setup and get good results printing without having to spend a lot of time fiddling - I guess it depends on your definition of “budget”, cos although it’s cheaper that the equivalent Prusa, there are definitely cheaper options around

WFH until the printer is moved. Even if the fumes weren’t toxic (they are) you shouldn’t be expected to work in an environment like that

Soooooo… link?

Nah, shipping it via ballistic rocket. Anywhere in the world in 60 minutes, but the reentry heating is hell on the solder

Whatever you go with, keep in mind that for the most part the difference between a cheap ffm 3d printer and a mid-tier 3d printer isn’t print quality, it’s reliability. If you are happy spending as much time getting the printer to actually consistently print properly as you do actually printing stuff, then go ahead.

Cheap 3d printers are a hobby, expensive 3d printers are a tool

Yeah, I had fun trying to work out why DHCP was totally broken - turns out the Zyxel router would respond to any ARP request it saw, for any MAC anywhere. There was a setting you could enable to make it work properly, but it went in the bin shortly after when I found out the VPN component would let in anyone who asked politely, and that there were ways to get at the admin panel from the WAN even when you had turned that off

Switch != Router, and I wouldn’t use a Zyxel anything even if you paid me - their approach to security is to just not bother, and their hardware is made out of whatever scraps they can find on the factory floor

Not to mention that AA/AAA cells don’t use lithium so are slightly less environmentally disastrous

I’ve seen people do things with the Tesla integration where they turn the car heaters on X minutes before it’s time to leave for work on a work day if the outside temperature is less than Y

What do you think public domain means? Cos I don’t think it means what you think it means

Practically it doesn’t make any real difference - unless your network is ancient/massively overloaded/completely screwed or your client device is low power enough to struggle with TLS the whole connection setup process is only going to take ~100ms at most

Theoretically, MQTT would be faster than HTTP; with MQTT the clients all maintain a persistent connection to the server, so sending a message is just a case of sending another packet on the existing connection, where as HTTP in the worst case would require a DNS lookup, TCP connection setup and TLS handshake before the button press could be reported.

The downside of a persistent connection is you have to maintain a persistent connection - not an issue if you are hardwired, but for things in batteries it probably isn’t practical

Not money as such, but being able to talk about printing made it easier to hang out with one of the production engineering teams at work - their Friday drinks are pretty fun, and the manager has a pretty liberal understanding of what “business expense” means

I mostly just followed the official docs, and yeah, stuff will have changed dramatically in the last few years (I’m also better at running a lab than I was at the time, oh well).

Never used VMWare, but ran OpenStack in my lab ~6 years ago. It’s an awesome bit of tech, but the thing to keep in mind is it very much isn’t a “product” like VMWare. It’s a big pile of python code and config files that mostly kinda sorta work out of the box, but is really aimed at large operators who have full time on staff developers to write custom bits to glue stuff together to make it work with their particular setup

I’ve not been paying attention to the Neptune 4 reviews, but my 3 Pro is awesome and Elegoo have really great customer support

Yes, with https://www.printables.com/model/272073-dachshund-low-poly (printed at 50% scale)