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.

Me to! I was almost done with a batch of prints for a friends fundraiser (30x hat looms for knitting. Great little project, they’re knitting hats for the premies at the NICU, so they needed a custom model for the tiny babys). I think you’re right. With the oozing and whatnot that has to be it. I brought up the fundraiser because it had me making multiple prints of the same file. When I found a setting that worked (moving to the 0.20), the first few worked, but were a bit stringy, but by the 3rd/4th one they were printing flawlessly.

I guess maybe when things got screwed up at 0.16 the nozzle had some funkiness, and with enough material it worked itself through? Still doesn’t explain why that brand new nozzle screwed up in the first place at 0.16 (which suggests the flow rate issue you brought up), but I’ll take the win.

Thanks! This kind of insight is super helpful. Are you a poster here often? I was able to get decent prints again by changing the layer from 0.16 to 0.20. Still disappointed and confused as to what happened, but will probably keep the printer. Not sure if it makes sense to do a “wrap up” post for anyone else searching later.

Also: go team venture!

correct. I initiated a return with amazon. I have had a 250g spool in the drier since about 10am today, and will try it this evening, but if that doesn’t work I’m just returning it.

In trying to do a cold pull (which you do in this machine by attaching the nozzle upside down and manually pushing filament in), it was oozing and popping with the remnants of the previous filament, which to me says very wet filament?

I had tried drying filament for ~8hrs yesterday with no good results. Is there something else that could cause the oozing issue? My friend brought up that maybe the temperature sensor isn’t working properly and it’s hotter than it thinks it is?

I’m not sure if it’s the Z or gunk building up and dragging. Also with the new nozzle it’s been only PLA and no joy whatsoever.

Thanks to everyone for the input, after drying a ~100g spool of PLA for 8 hours and having failed prints on the original nozzle and new nozzle I have initiated a refund.

yeah I anticipated wear, but with <2kg of material that seems excessive no? I did have some feed issues, but even with those resolved and it feeding nicely, I still have problems. A friend of mine did suggest that maybe with the feed issues I managed to do something that brought the nozzle out of spec and that’s why I’m getting issues.

No special filament, other than <10g TPU. Interesting I’ll try the test. I think I’ll get the dragging though, as I was trying to do some business card type prints that were basically what you’re suggesting and got issues. Sometimes the first layer would be ok, sometimes not. It would wind up dragging it around and as it was warm, it would roll the layer into a “snake”

It was just normal PLA. The only special filament was some TPU, but that was <10g total.

This is helpful, I think it’s one of 3 things based on your input:

1. Wet filament. That’s causing oozing/build up on the nozzle and causing dragging. Fix: Try drying like you mentioned.
2. The hardware had a failure somewhere. Fix/Verify: ???
3. The firmware is bugging and not setting the Z properly after calibration. Fix/Verify ???

Edit: I think the fix/verify for scenario 2/3 above might just be trying the new nozzle after drying the filament. IE: If the filament is confirmed dry and still causing issues, then I try the new nozzle (after calibrating) with the confirmed dry filament. If that works fine then it was nozzle that was screwy (although the cause could have still been wet filament and me screwing it up unclogging?)

I’m glad somebody got the joke.

I understand you’re frustrated about the AI race. That’s an excellent point, and it deserves careful consideration. First, in considering the AI race we need to consider what AI is…