Comment by whynotmaybe
14 hours ago
You are a "new" type of user for the 3d printing world.
In the last decade, most 3d printer users were hobbyists and liked to know the internals of the machine they were using.
That's why there are so many useless models of random gadgets on thingiverse. People didn't care about the output, more about the process.
With the arrival of bambu and the last Creality, the market has shifted to a plug and print model where more and more buy the printer as a tool to produce and output and they don't care about the internals or gcode.
They must be able to control their printers from their phone.
The people that started in 3d printing when they had to assemble the whole machine by hand are now sad to see their hobby replaced by something too easy, it feels like cheating.
"How come you don't know how to level the bed and measure the offset with a piece of paper? "
Just like senior dev are sad to see vibe coding replace "true development craft".
I built my Prusa from a kit and was interested in the internals, but I was always annoyed I spent more time working on the printer sometimes than learning CAD.
And the Prusa is a real workhorse. I’ve only had a couple problems in almost a decade.
A lot of the hobby is people printing out useless things. But the it doesn’t even work for people who are interested in learning CAD. There’s no surprised everyone is turning to Bambu. So will I when my Prusa breaks or there’s a sale too hard to pass up.
> The people that started in 3d printing when they had to assemble the whole machine by hand are now sad to see their hobby replaced by something too easy, it feels like cheating.
I have a 10 year old kit-built prusa I3 sitting next to me. Its brother is in the basement next to a kossel. It's been years since they have seen action, there is a litany of small bits of work they need.
I unboxed an A1 Mini and it's been like an epiphany. I've been printing almost nonstop. It's so much FUN. I just send from my phone and it just works. Everything has been nearly flawless until last night where half a batch of mini utility knife frames started to spaghetti, probably my fault for not fully cleaning the build plate in a bit.
Beats the hell out of glue stick or blue tape, fussing with slicer params, babysitting the first layers, etc etc. Fuck that, gimme the cheat.
There are plenty of us “old” type of users who made and designed our own printers and parts and spent hours on calibration, who no longer want to unnecessarily waste time doing so.
I might be a software engineering but I’m not going to waste time writing a bootloader for my next PC when it is a solved problem.
Sorry for the old-heads, but just because I'm new doesn't mean I don't appreciate the craft, or the pains endured by many others before me that enabled this painless experience.
But if nobody was fixing the problems everybody was experiencing except Bambu, then frankly, good for Bambu.
Boo to the gate-keepers. Vorons still exist and likely always will for those that want to dork around with printers, but for the rest of us, printers that work empower the field. In the past 5 weeks, I've started to learn and understand how 3D printers work, I've started to do some simple 3D modeling, and I've begun making models with OpenSCAD, which wasn't a thing that I knew existed before. Those parts are currently on Github.
I've organized a billion things. I've modeled a corner for my weird desk's keyboard tray so that it stops cutting my knees when I swivel my chair too quickly. I've delighted my wife by printing some conveniences. I have (admittedly infinitesimally) advanced the availability of 3D models in a way that I simply would not yet have if I were still messing around procuring the Voron parts list. Quality tooling advances the craft as it makes it more accessible.
But the main thing is that it doesn't actually help anybody for 3D printing to be more difficult, nor does wanting Bambu to be bad make them not good. They are good, and they're leaps and bounds better than most of the products in the field.
My first printer was a delta in 2015. I spent more time calibrating it than I did printing, and it was never very good. I then got an Anet A8 in 2017, but it was too flimsy. Cheap, tho!
Around 2021 I spent quite a lot upgrading and dialing in an Ender 3 V2 so it was repeatable, whisper-quiet, and dead reliable.
That's it. This doesn't end with me buying a Bambu. It's still all of those things. I'm very happy with my printing appliance, and also that its only data connection is via microSD sneakernet.
>>You are a "new" type of user for the 3d printing world.
Why can't you be both. I loved my time with my Ender 5 Pro, I had it for 3 years and I will always freely admit that 90% of the fun was with the tinkering to make the machine work correctly. But you know, you get bored of it. I got an H2D just before christmas and it's incredible to have a machine that "just works". I can print things for myself and others and not worry whether it's going to work or not - it just will.
Same as I used to tinker with my cars when I was younger, now I want an appliance car - I want to get in, press start and drive across europe not worrying whether I'll have to fix it on the roadside or not. I would say it's just getting older, but I Don't think it is - I think everyone goes through stages of developing things they enjoy about their hobbies.