Find people who care about what they’re working on and they’ll go well beyond the extra mile. As an extra motivator, make it clear the company won’t be around if they don’t succeed. I’m sure these employees have shares, but tha only really matters if the company succeeds (extra motivation!). Unfortunately, there have been a ton of green/green-adjacent automotive “startups” that have struggled to gain a foothold. See also:
(I’m sure many others)
Is the print stopping or does the printer keep going like all is well?
If the printer is continuing like everything is normal, you can surmise that the issue is either the heater, the extruder, or the filament path.
What does your temp graph look like during the print? Oscillations = potential wiring issue, especially if they’re not present for the whole print.
Have you caught the printer doing this? Is the extruder clicking? If yes, something is preventing the filament from moving through the extruder. You’re either developing a clog or something is preventing the filament from feeding (binding, etc).
If the extruder isn’t clicking, and the print continues for a bit, does the extruder slowly chew through the filament? If yes, you probably need more tension on the feed screw. I would still suggest looking for souces of binding.
Tons of incremental updates.
Based on the printer in the picture I think you have one of the answers, lol.
The other answer is slicers, but if you’re using Bambu’s you’ve also seen that change now.
I agree that building a Voron is a project. I had a Pursa I3 clone (knockoff) that I used to print most of my parts on. If you don’t already have a 3D printer you can use the Print it Forward program to get printed parts shipped to you. Parts aside, your first build will take an easy 20-40 hours. This isn’t because the build is hard, it’s just that the build is long - especially if you want to have your wiring just-so. On the upside, you’ll have a very good knowledge of how your printer operates at a physical and firmware+Klipper config level once your done.
Be wary of better. From a quality of life perspective I would absolutely put my 2.4 ahead of a Prusa. For example, I can mechanically level my bed via automation. That said, expectations often outstrip reality. Beware of what you’re getting into.
I think you got a lot of good replies, but at a glance no one said “Prusa good!” so here’s that reply. Prusa printers are workhorses. They run their own machines in a print farm printing parts for the printers they sell and iterate/bring tweaks into production.
If you look at posts from a year or more ago they’ll frequently appear as trustworthy/hassle free options. They’ve somewhat fallen out of favor from a price to performance ratio, but if you want a hassle free printer so you can just worry about printing they’re still a good option.
Jumping in here, a lot of what you said checks Voron boxes. Fast, CoreXY, can print a range of material, completely open source. I really like my 2.4. You can self source the whole BOM from wherever you want. There are a few BOM in a box options, including some put together by US companies (West 3D) but with whatever you buy a decent quantity of the BOM is going to originate overseas.
There’s a very large community around the printer, along with tons of mods. The only thing it doesn’t do out of the box is multi-material, but there are mods for that.
Qualcomm’s stuff is within single-digit percentage points of the current-gen AMD and Intel chips both in power usage, performance, and battery life
Back in June, the new Snapdragon X processors were a lot more efficient than their x86 based counterparts. I can personally attest to much lower levels of heat generation.
The problem is that the current tradeoff is that huge amounts of the software you’ve been using just does not work, and a huge portion of it might NEVER work, because nobody is going to invest time in making it behave.
I agree with the sentiment, but IMO this is a PC and Windows problem. I would also extend this beyond pure comparability. I say this for a few reasons
All that said, I’ve had zero issues with emulation so far. I never personally used a M1 max when they launched, but from reports of that era the current Windows experience is at least as good as that.
I own a Lenovo Yoga slim 7x Gen 9, which is powered by a Snapdragon X. It certainly checks the “good enough” box. I use it primarily for photo culling/editing (I’m a holdout dedicated camera user). It is more than fit for purpose there, stays cool, is slim, and although I know the fan has come on a few times I wouldn’t have known if it wasn’t on my lap. When I bought mine, it was also one of the better deals - you could upgrade to 32 GB of memory and a SSD for under $125 in total. The SSD also isn’t soldered, but the memory is. The 3k OLED display is amazing, but if you want the ultimate battery sipper it’s probably not the best choice. I still get tons of runtime per charge, but am somewhat sad that I lose about 5% charge per day thanks to the laptop not really being off while asleep.
The biggest downside is linxu support is very hit and miss depending on the laptop in question, which means you’re tied to windows 11. I don’t have the time to tinker with it, so I haven’t looked much further into it than this.
It’s not just the surface devices anymore. In June this year, a fresh wave of ARM powered laptops from a verity of different OEs launched. There are offerings from Dell, HP, Lenovo, Samsung, Asus, etc.
It goes beyond this to the things people print. There’s a lot of… low shelf life dudads turned out by a subset of our community. For example, a coworker printed each of the ten of us a 4" tall Groot as a holiday present pre-covid. I bet most of those wound up in the bin. I totally get the hobby of collecting trinkets, but often wonder about the end state - it will all eventually need a new home or will end up in a landfil.
Plastic recycling is a fine idea, but in many cases the material winds up getting shipped overseas and burned. It’s also the least preferred option of reduce, reuse, recycle. It is cool that some filament companies are now accepting scraps, but that’s not very common (yet?). I also wonder how they deal with contamination. Sorting the different plastic types is difficult today from my understanding. That and low resale value is why plastics recycling is struggling.
All that said, I am a massive believer in functional prints. You can breathe new life into existing things and the things you create can be here for a long time.
You got a few good replies, but I just want to briefly mention build volume. Nearly everything I print is functional. Splitting prints into sections isn’t the biggest deal, but being able to print things in one shot is nice. Consider the size of things you’ll be printing and ask if you think you’ll be happy.
I’ve never heard of PCTG before. A quick Google search and I’ll probably be ordering a spool.
Oh, sorry - it was the post title.
I’ve had similar experiences. PLA is very stiff, which also makes it brittle. I have quite a few functional PETG that have been going strong for years. Now that I can print ASA too, some of my newer functional prints are transitioning materials.
When you smooth you do give up some dimensional accuracy.
These days, I more or less exclusively print ASA and PETG. I would call the ASA tougher than PETG, but PETG’s ability to stick to itself when printing makes me prefer it for thin parts. In my experience, PETG also allows for more elastic (temporary/recoverable) deformation before the part undergoes plastic (permanent) deformation.
I still view it differently than being locked out of using actual OEM features of the car
Totally agree!
I do find this unsurprising though based on the metric fuckton of spam you get from SiriusXM after buying any new or used car from a legit dealer.
I’ve always wondered how much this costs relative to the number of takers they pull in.
The song in the meme is Ohio is for lovers by Hawthorne Heights.
And I can’t make it on my own (And I can’t make it on my own) Because my heart is in Ohio So cut my wrists and black my eyes (Cut my wrists and black my eyes) So I can fall asleep tonight, or die
Deep, I know.
Not to say that Dashboard Confessional doesn’t have similar lyrics, lol.
Teslas unlimited Internet package is also super cheap at $100/year the last time I checked. Competitors are multiple times more expensive.
SiriusXM does revenue share with auto companies.) Old article, but I’m too lazy to dig through a financial report or find something newer.
This was a good read. Anyone who’se purchased any of his anthologies will be familiar with some of the content, but the appeal to live a fulfilling life and how hard that can be as you get older was refreshing.