bluewing @ bluewing @lemm.ee

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2 yr. ago

Ok, I will look forward to looking at it.

Yeah, the noise of the K2 seems to be a common complaint. But placed in a different room, if you have one, would solve much of that. Nor do I know what user hacks have been developed to mitigate the noise. Still, there seem to be more users that like their K1 than not. Crealty, if nothing else is almost a tinker's dream machine. The installed user base is very active and highly talented. Crealty might not care much about their users, but they ain't stopping anyone from modifying their machines. If you can dream up a hack, someone somewhere has probably already done it. I would almost bet there is an Ender 3 somewhere that has been rebuilt into a bread machine. :)

Qidi also gets dinged in reviews for fan noise. But if you have a printer that has active chamber heating, you are going to get a rather large fan to pull air into and exhaust air out to help control temperature. That's the price you pay to print nylon filament I suppose. Qidi's after sales support gets decent marks from users also. They seem to be pretty responsive to customer issues. Personally, I place high value on support. It's worth more than the color of the paint and the badge glued to the machine. Being involved in million of dollars in industrial machine purchases over the years, I've learned that the hard way. Print quality seems to be considered average at the worst. Oddly, there are few reviews on line and no one seems to test the high end engineering filament printing ability. I think to really understand what the issues are you probably need to hang out in reddit's r/Qidi for a while to gather a good sample. I did and while users had issues, they seem to get resolved and people could get on with their printing. I'm kind of wishing now I had bought the little X-Smart3 rather than the Bambu Mini.

I don't think anyone does at this point.

I tried switching to LAN, it took multiple attempts and half a day to get my mini to show up as a choice for LAN mode in Bambu Studio. And then when shut off for the night, it was gone again in the morning. As in it couldn't be found. And now it's back to Studio not connecting to it.

I'm not sure what I can do besides using the sneaker net to run it.

There are the usual suspects-- Prusa, Creality, Qidi, Soval etc. They all have their fansbois and detractors. Prusa is the most expensive Soval the cheapest.

Everyone complains about Prusa's price while ignoring they need to pay EU wages and taxes. Personally, I think Prusa knows they can't sell printers to cheap ass consumers. So they are slowly withdrawing from that segment and switching to entry level business printers. Still, they offer the best long term support out there. My trusty 6 year old Mk3s+ stills works as good as as new and I just downloaded new and improved firmware for it yesterday. That's support and worth a lot of money to some of us. There is a community mod I'm considering trying to convert it to run Klipper.

I find Qidi an interesting brand. Priced between Prusa and Bambu, (though cheaper than Bambu's CoreXY offerings), they often get passed over, but they offer printers with more industrial features than anyone else. All enclosed CoreXY printers with active heated chambers with high temp extruders and hardened steel nozzles, Qidi makes printing difficult engineering filaments easier than any other consumer printer available right out of the box. You can even get an idex model. The Plus4 is the newest offering and they are bring out an ams style filament box for it soon. The biggest complaint seems to be fan noise. I almost bought one, but they dropped their X-Smart3 180³ printer. So I ended up with the A1 mini.

Crealty is, well Crealty. The K2 is supposed to be a pretty good printer. And based on user reviews, Crealty might have finally gotten one right. But it's large and more costly than the rest of their offerings. I do not follow Crealty at all.

Soval offers a mix of budget style printers. From Mk3 knockoffs to a not quite CoreXY machine-- the gantry moves up and down and the bed is fixed. But they are budget priced. Reviews seem mixed. No multi filament printing offered or on the horizon.

Do your due diligence and pick out the one that seems to fit your needs.

It's a nice thought, but it's not going to do much in the real world. Between the system reaction time and the device assuming the filament is actually round-- it's not-- and absolute accuracy of the device, this isn't doing anything to improve print quality beyond a placebo effect.

But it might make PandaPi some money.

At some point as the old stock inventory is sold out, the new inventory WILL ship with the new firmware. I'm willing to bet, new machines are being built with the new firmware as we speak. I have no idea how soon those hit the pipeline. Might be a few weeks, might take a couple months, might be today.

It only appears so. It's flipping the xz and yz planes only as it hits each quadrant. It just does it really fast. Looking closely at the layer lines will show you it's not a true 3D movement.

Bambu has stated the same is coming for us with P and A series machines also as they roll out the new protocols.

Since your printer will be drawn from "old stock" on the shelf, it's more than likely it will have the old firmware included. Now, the new slicer versions may not function with it anymore-- and that may include Orca. But that remains to be seen.

To be fair, that's most likely a CloudFlair problem and not a malicious action from Bambu. CloudFlair is a curse on the internet and websites that use it should be shunned and ridiculed.

Certainly. But that's not what the vast majority of users want to do though.

Prusa and Qidi are 2 places to start.

There are other brands you can look at. Try looking at Qidi to see if that meets your needs.

There are licenses can be changed. Even you admit it.

You have never had older software devices go bad have you? It's not only cloud connected stuff you lose.

This is a risk with any item that requires software to function. Companies can change software licensees, lock-in buyers, and even open source can flat out abandon a project.

I just bought a Bambu Mini to sit along side my trusty 6 year old Mk3s+ and this pisses me off to no end. I was expecting my mini to simply be abandoned rather than suffer a lock-in AND then abandonment. So, I guess I won't be updating my firmware nor will I run anything through their cloud. I was thinking of uploading a few designs to their cloud. But that ain't going to happen now.

PLA is more resistant to degradation than it often has a reputation for. So yeah, it can holdup pretty well in a lot of use cases. For most, PLA frames would probably hold up just fine until they needed a new prescription. The issue with either common consumer PLA or PETG, is you can't be sure of just how anyone person will react to the constant contact with the material over time. Allergies can popup with continuous exposure. As always:YMMV

I pronounce it AbbyWord and Gnumeric. I'm too old to have need of a full office suite anymore-- Libre or not.

French Canadians, (Québécois), believe it's a way to fight other Canadians. If it works against Americans? Well that's just a bonus.