I don’t have any experience with resin printers yet but have been poking around at FDM for the better part of a decade. In that price range (for FDM), I’d likely suggest a Creality K1C. It is not going to likely match the BambuLab printers but it’s a great departure from previous by Creality, requiring little to no tinkering to make it work. If you can spare around $1k, and don’t care about proprietary stuff, BambuLab X1 series is about the most turnkey that I know of. But, again, the Creality is (surprisingly) right there too with the K1C.

Note: It is probably possible to get similar results with mods to a K1 or K1Max - the nozzle brush seems to be critical to the K1C’s reliability.

Yeah. That’s absolutely fair. I would honestly recommend BambuLab for about anyone looking for a turnkey solution (supposing that they have the funds). For me, it’s a primarily philosophical/personal thing.

I will say though that this new gen of printers is pretty incredible and getting to the point of nearly practical for non-3d printer enthusiasts. Even the K1C is remarkably functional out of the box. It didn’t need any mods to print accurately and reliability. The nozzle brush relocation mod, spool relocation mod, and full-fledged Klipper are not necessary - I just prefer textured PEI (no glue stick needed), easy spool changes, and the Mainsail UI (and customizability).

Something that I’ll also give BambuLab, beyond their slick AMS, is their inspiration of more work on forks of PrusaSlicer. I switched to OrcaSlicer with the new printer, after being on Cura forever and the use experience is absolutely incredible.

Not for now, thanks to some YouTubers getting them to reverse course slightly on some of their printers (to be fair, Creality took similar pressure). However, I have less trust in BambuLab at this time. That said, I’m not about to even try to claim that they’re bad printers. Plenty of data out there to say otherwise and their AMS is pretty slick.

I got a K1C a few months back and am buying but delighted with it. I came from a gen 1 Ender 3 with a warped bed. The only complaints that I’ve had are that the spool relocation included should include relocation of the runout sensor and the nozzle cleaner should not be part of the build plate (fixable with an easy mod).

Closed source firmware on a 3d printer is just a non-starter for me. Even if the printer were 10x or 100x better, I’m not dropping that kind of dough on something that will leave me screwed if the manufacturer decides to enshitify or goes bankrupt.

We’re quickly heading into a world where you can open up your phone and just say stuff. It talks back and it knows you. And it just works. Super exciting and as a user, quite looking forward to it.

I’m pretty sure that I’m not interested in that at all.

3. Fuck the wiki read the code and other peoples configs. The wiki and the docs have largely been misleading and the nixpkgs code is usually super easy to read, the source is also linked to on search.nixos.org

This is what caused my bad initial experience and has left a bad taste in my mouth for the whole thing. I’m not a fan of the syntax and DSL but, could get over that with good docs. I DO find the concept interesting but until the docs are useful, it’s a non-starter for me.

I’ve taken to just using HTTPS only. No redirect. Just an error.

I would be surprised if someone hasn’t been scraping it for years.

I’ve been in the tech industry for about 12 years and learned my first programming language about 30 years ago. The choice of language really will depend on the sort of things that you want to do. That said, if choosing one of the three listed, I’d say Go with no reservation. It is a much better language for beginners than the other two as it is widely used, not esoteric, and has a C-like syntax.

I would probably recommend either Python or JavaScript as a better first language though, biased heavily towards Python because JavaScript’s type system is awful (it still gets a lot done on the Internet though). Python is a great interpreted language that is very human readable. Yes, some hate that it uses whitespace for party of its syntax but there are very few footguns (don’t mix tabs and spaces for indents and just don’t use tabs, that’s about all that isn’t covered in a hello_world).

It’s set for release in H2 of this year. This should be an actual desktop-class processor, performance-wise. Mini-ITX form factor too! The RISC-V processors are going through generations blazingly fast. Probably partly because we hobbyists get to do some QA.

I would caution though that this is still likely in the territory of “dev board”. Probably not going to be mainstream-ready and will have plenty of quirks. But, it’s a really big step forward.

I’m still on an Ender 3 non-pro (1.5?) with an SKR miniE and a hotend that I need to try to clean. No need on the big prints, personally. I’ve yet to come across anything that couldn’t be divided into multiple parts, if needed but I’ve rarely needed.

I’m intending to use an Oasis for a NAS and virtualization host. If it plays nice, maybe put together a cluster.

I’ve been using some much smaller CH32V305 based keyboard controllers for a while, recently built a fightstick aroubd the platform. Now if only I fidn’t suck at joystick games, having grown up on gamepads.

Right there with you. I didn’t have a console as a kid so, I’m pretty bad at fighting games. Have been holding back a bit in the MCUs as well but, mainly due to time constraints and waiting for my new hobby dev system to arrive. But, have a good number of plans for MCUs and other things - hopefully the SG2380 gets a bare chip release, like the SG2000/2002 because I want to try making a motherboard/SOM to move towards a fully FOSHW computer (pretty sure that the SG2380 isn’t going to be OSHW initially but, being fully-compliant should be a good place to start).

Depending on when I can justify the purchase, that one does indeed look like a good contender. Will have to look into it more. Thank you!

Currently, waiting for the Milk-V Oasis. Looking forward to a fully-compliant implementation in the SG2380. Should make for better mainline support.

Metal is stronger than plastic,

True but, with pressure, water can cut metal. I’ll be heat softening it with my PCB toaster oven to see if I can recover it. If it’s just a leak, and no electrical damage, as you mention, it’s probably ok.

Probably, I’ll still get a new hotend, even if there’s no breakage because I think that the PTFE feed tube is a bit of a weak link.

My worry is stripped threads and, in even if not, I think it’s probably about time to let the poor thing retire (until I repurpose it into a filament extruder). It’s served me far better than I expected.

I’d probably recommend just finding an equivalent micro switch. They are generally pretty cheap.

If you have the 3d model, you already have the drawings. Quite literally. Just need to print off some views with measurements, if you want it on paper, otherwise, use the CAD model and get measurements as needed.

At that point, it’s just down to having the tools, skills, and material. Someone with good skills, tools, and material could make the equivalent parts faster and of better quality than a bed-slinger. Someone without the skills… well, they’ll probably have time to build the skills in the process.

Now, when it comes to materials, I think that there’s definite risk there. Wood often exhibits worse shear strength along its grain than well-tuned printers do along layers (a good example of this weakness can be seen in the rear totes of old Stanley-Bailey bench planes - it is a minority of them that have not sheared where the handle meets the mounting section). So, that has to be taken into account in laying out the part in the raw material.

I’m going to go a slightly different direction and suggest something that has physical feedback like Adafruit’s CircuitPlayground. It can be setup to use MakeCode, CircuitPython, or Arduino and there’s a lot of good resources, both for purchase, and free: https://www.adafruit.com/category/965

If someone hands a loaded gun to someone who they believe intends to commit murder, do you believe that they are not a part of the murder committed?