I have been mostly happy with my flashforge AD5X starting as a newbie. Its got a good range of material capabilities, but 95% of the time I’m printing PLA anyway. PLA is the most common filament by far.

I will say I have had two hot ends (the part the filiment comes out of) get covered in enough filament they broke during a misprint ($40 repair each).

I don’t really have experience with other makes/models but that is my loose endorsement of the AD5X. My only real complaint is how expensive the nozzles are compared to other brands.

I think we can both agree tautology works because it works, and that’s good enough for me.

Well, them and the bandits, I’d imagine.

I spun it up it up in may to fool around. Today I opened a brand new air purifier and imeaditley disassembled it to flash ESPHome firmware on it. It never once ran stock.

One thing I’ve noticed: my self hosted services are rarley, if ever, hounding me to check out features. I cannot emphasise enough how much I loathe a program fighting for my attention.

Maybe? It was/is on an old win10 I keep around (and came with it).

There’s a million better options, but I was glad it was there. Good way to get some kid fooling around early the way paint did. You used to be able to scan things with your surface and import them into builder (this was a good while back).

I’m going to toss out Microsoft 3D builder, strictly to dip your toe in the water. It’s bare bones and basically MS Paint but when I was getting started I used it for very simple stuff. I still use it if I’m making dead simple modifications/combinations of existing .STL files.

Microsoft actually had some cool ideas in the early/mid 2010s. Still had all the proprietary bullshit but there was at least nifty stuff going on.

This is a great conversation because I’m one of those people who’s terrible at arithmetic, but quite good at math. As in: I can look at a function, visualize it in 3D space, see what different max, mins and surfaces are dominated by what terms etc, but don’t ask me to tally a meal check. I’d be useless at applying any math without a calculator.

Similarly, there’s a lot of engineers out there that use CAD extensively that would probably not be engineers if they had to do drafting by hand.

The oatmeal did a comic that distilled this for me where they talked about why they didn’t like AI “art”. They made the point that in making a drawing, there are a million little choices made reconciling what’s in your head with what you can do on the page. Either from the medium, what you’re good at drawing, whatever, it’s those choices that give the work “soul”. Same thing for writing. Those choices are where learning, development, and style happen, and what generative AI takes away.

That helped crystalize for me the difference between a tool and autocomplete on steroids.

Edit: to add: you’re statement “I claim to understand but don’t” hits it on the head and is similar to why you have to be careful if plagiarism in citing academic review papers. If you write YOUR paper in a way that agrees with the review but discuss the paper the review was referencing, and, even accidentally, skip over that the conclusion you’re putting forward is from the review, not the paper you’re both citing, that’s plagiarism. Notion being you misrepresented their thoughts as your own. That is basically ALL generative AI.

this makes me feel much better. I’m debating spooling it up on wifi after disconnecting it and piecing it back together.

thank you! I had looked at the documentation but was unable to find that. I think to be safe I’m going to follow what @[email protected] said as well. There’s no reason not to label them.

Which means, sorry future people stumbling on this, I will not be providing definitive evidence one way or the other on this.

It was actually very low effort! There are a number of image to STL converters. I used this one: https://imagetostl.com/

Like you can see it’ll flub some stuff. I would have been better off filling in the areas of text and doing the emboss manually myself, but I just wanted to hit print. 2% infill, I think it was like 2.5g of filament and 20mins.

It’s fun to screw around with that process. I’m tweaking one of my friends cabin to use to make a mold. My goal is cast concrete or something similar so I can pound some thin copper around it, and be left with a cool wall decoration.

You don’t know me. Everything I’ve ever printed was critical.

Literally why I got mine. If you’re losing motivation use 3d builder. Use blenders clay tug and pull function to make something hideous.

So I have a FlashForge AD5X with the MMU. It worked amazing out of the box, including flawlessly doing some TPU. They actually mentioned the MMU was designed with TPU in mind. That being said: I have been struggling with basic PLA, even after swapping to nozzle that has run only PLA (even though I only ran <10g of TPU through it). I am still new to a lot of this, and don’t feel experienced enough to fault the hardware. What I can say though is it does seem folks are specifically improving the ability of MMUs to handle flexibles. A big reason I got it was to be able to do ABS parts with TPU gaskets. Ask me in a few months.

You can be pretty technical/capable and still write that article (especially if you have technical expertise outside programming). I have never felt so seen.

I worked my way up from arduino -> RasPi -> Debian -> Self hosting quite a few things. I’m very much a hobbyist/novice, but I’m used to learning. It is so hard to read some documentation and understand what something even does sometimes. This goes double for incredibly useful tools for monitoring/implementing other tools. Like I swear I read the kubernetes descriptions 30x before I realized what in the hell it actually does, and now I’m probably about to break my entire home network with it because I think it’s cool as hell.

Also, to your comment specifically: I can get sensors on PCBs I personally made collecting data, throwing it through my own MQTT broker, hosting a dashboard etc, all at a remote site across state lines. I have no idea wtf markdown is. I use yaml for HA stuff with the ESPs, but I don’t know why markdown is a thing and it’s not just python.

And I am 1000% sure there is a very good reason for 98% of this. But yes I found this article hilarious. In my personal circle of hell all nouns end in “-ly”.

Same here. Printing something like say, a cow, with frequent swaps would be wasteful, but I’ll do parts with 1-2 color swaps. It’s mostly nice as you said though to have multiples “locked and loaded” to do a 1 filament print.

I cannot emphasize enough how unwilling I’d be to interact with someone that has these.

2nd gramps. I spooled it up in about 2mins on an unraid server.

So that’s what I thought… Except for similar issu s with extended drying.

I building an enclosure with a rotary dehumidifier to keep things low, but despite the tell tale signs I think something else was going on.