I used to recommend the Bambulab A1 (Mini), because they are amazing, really cheap printers. But Bambulab in the meantime Bambulab is pulling an Apple in a very bad way, so can’t recommend them anymore.
I have a Snapmaker U1, a decidedly not-budget printer, but I can totally recommend that one for anyone who’s seriously into 3D printing. What an awesome machine!
I damaged my stock Snapmaker U1 build plate with a print of 2 layers TPU 85A topped with a solid PETG print.
TPU 85A only comes off the build plate because you can bend and peel it off. The PETG on top of it stopped me from doing that. It was a dumb idea.
To put it differently: Work is a trade. The worker sells time and skill, the employer buys that with money. That is the very basic underlying concept of work.
If the employer doesn’t want to do that deal, why should the worker?
Two things that aren’t mutually exclusive…
I put an E3D Toolchanger that I got for cheap from Aliexpress on mine, with 2x E3D v6 and Trianglelab TBG-Litle direct drive extruders. The TBG-Lite is amazing. It’s got so much grip on the filament, that I didn’t even end up setting up a TPU profile at all, I just used a PLA profile for it.
I ended up switching over to a Snapmaker U1 earlier this year, and the only thing I miss are these TBG-Lites.
You can absorb it via the skin too.
I could have been more explicit. I was talking about commercial FOSH. While there are some companies selling Voron kits, afaik they are all taking the role of the “copycats” and aren’t first-party. AFAIK, Voron is developed completely non-commercially.
I don’t think so. Or to put it differently: there is no fully open-source 3D printer any more.
The only relevant parts of the Snapmaker U1 that actually seem to be proprietary are the hotends/extruders. These are also proprietary for newer Prusa or E3D stuff.
And compared to some of the newer Prusa printers, you don’t have to physically snap off part of the mainboard to flash custom firmware onto the U1. Snapmaker doesn’t even void your warranty for using custom firmware, as long as the firmware doesn’t damage the hardware and you manage to back-flash stock firmware.
I mean, any company can turn from FOSH to proprietary, same as E3D and Prusa, even though both of them were real FOSH champions. The issue is that if you do FOSH, you are essentially developing for your competitors.
E3D spent years of development to come up with great nozzles, Hotends and so on, and they have to factor that into their product prices. So when it comes to the customers buying parts, they have the choice between an €70 one from E3D or an €6 one from Aliexpress. Or anything in between, often quality products from name-brand seller for a fraction of the price of a real E3D one.
In the end, E3D ends up unable to compete in the market they created. That’s unsustainable.
In general, open source works well for stuff that isn’t the main product. Angular works well as open source because Google doesn’t have a way to sell it. Google monetizes their web apps built with Angular, so they have an incentive to maintain and improve Angular, but they can’t monetize it directly, so open sourcing it helps get more eyes on the code, so that others can find bugs and vulnerabilities from them.
Open source works good as a marketing device for non-essential parts. People do buy e.g. open printers because that means they won’t get vendor lock-in and people can create custom firmware to fix issues, add improvements and support the product after the company stopped first-party support.
But it’s sadly unsustainable if you are just handing the plans to the competition, asking them to please undercut and replace you.
And yes, as a FOSH and FOSS developer myself, this hurts. But so far there hasn’t been an actual solution for the issue.
I can second the Snapmaker U1. Amazing machine, rock solid, works every time. I run it in LAN mode with custom firmware. If I need to remote in, I use a VPN on my local pi. No direct internet access/cloud stuff needed for the U1.
It’s seriously difficult right now. A while ago I would have clearly recommended Bambu, especially the A1/A1 mini. Super cheap, perfect prints every time. But their current behaviour makes them unrecommendable.
If you are going for a higher budget printer, I can recommend the Snapmaker U1. That’s a beautiful device. I got myself that one, and it’s purely amazing. Custom firmware is available, which fixes some problems in the stock firmware. Perfect 4-color prints every time with very low waste.
The filament changer is even quite useful for single-filament prints, because you can just keep multiple filaments loaded and don’t have to manually swap filaments.
I can second the U1. I got it after my modded Ender 5 that I fitted with a two-head toolchanger.
It’s night and day. The U1 isn’t quite as fast in real life as the marketing material says, but it’s still much faster than the Ender 5. It prints perfectly every time. Since I had it I had a single print failure, and that was because I didn’t clean the bed propperly and the print detatched from the fingerprinty bed. Other than that, every single print worked flawlessly.
The toolchanger also saves so much waste compared to a filament changer.
I know it’s beyond your stated budget, but I wouldn’t want anything else (except maybe a Prusa XL, but that thing is ridiculously expensive).
Btw, the U1 is rather open sourcy, and there’s a custom firmware that improves a lot of issues with the OG firmware.
I know this isn’t strictly an answer to your question, but maybe something to consider:
I have a hot-air soldering station with different nozzle sizes, one of which is very small. It can be precisely controlled up to 480°C, and it’s awesome to weld PLA or PETG together. I stopped using glue alltogether.
That is really harsh… Good way to harm one’s own economy unless there are equivalent local products for absolutely everything.
Of course, but the download is still labelled as “driver”, and it’s the only (official) way to get the full functionality of the mouse.
96%? Uff, that’s harsh. Where do you live?
Mouse drivers are ridiculous. Over 1 GB for just a freaking mouse driver.
Yeah… the industry moved far away and left them behind.
It’s pretty ridiculous to think that a Snapmaker U1 is cheaper than a Prusa MK4S. And for just €50 more than the MK4S you get a full enclosure for the U1.
I thought the point of a nozzle changer was to save money compared to a full hotend+extruder changer, because you don’t have to double up as many parts.
But that INDX system is so expensive, it doesn’t make sense.
Seriously, amazing piece of kit and pretty open and hackable at that.
Way fun to use.
Only downside: the reverse bowden tubes make printing with PLA annoying because it keeps breaking in the tubes if you leave it in there for a few days without printing.
The upside: it prints PETG just as well as PLA, so I just stopped using PLA alltogether.