ffhein @ fhein @lemmy.world

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Joined

2 yr. ago

Last one I had had the heater cartridge die, the leveling sensor die and be too stupid to properly communicate via USB (a typo in the protocol meant that Octoprint was waiting for receive-confirmations). Together with terrible support which took literally the whole month I had the thing, to answer about the first issue (and not actually help).

Which printer was this? There's ofc. always a risk involved when buying a cheap printer, but some brands are definitely worse than others.

Also if you got it in 2019 it's likely from before Creality dropped their quality assurance. Back in those days they used high quality components, like genuine Meanwell power supplies, which were later replaced with cheaper noname parts.

Here's my take on buying a cheap printer:

FDM 3D printers are high precision machinery, and there are many parts where a very minor flaw can have negative effects on print quality, or cause issues with first layer adhesion, clogs, etc. So when we're looking at products made by various Chinese companies competing to make the cheapest product, one shouldn't assume they're all good enough. I mean it's not like buying a hammer, which is difficult to screw up either during design, manufacture, or assembly :) There are definitely good stuff made in China, but you have to know what to look for and not pick randomly.

When it comes to printer designs, there is no company that consistently makes good printers. Most brands have a few good/decent models, and several bad/flawed ones. I.e. try to find a good printer model, not a good brand.

When it comes to quality assurance and support, there are definitely worse and better companies. For example Flashforge, Creality, Tevo and Geeetech are known to be lacking in both. This changes all the time, Creality used to be a good brand a few years ago and they largely live on their reputation. Likewise companies that make good printers right now might lower quality in the future in an attempt to increase profits.

With that said, most flawed printers can be fixed if you spend enough time and money on them, but if it's your first printer it might be very difficult to know if you're doing something wrong, or if something is wrong with the printer itself.

It's also possible to got a flawed printer from any cheap Chinese brand, but you reduce the risk if avoiding the companies known for bad QA. It's also a good idea to avoid Amazon if possible, because people return the flawed printers which are then repackaged to look like new and sold to some other unsuspecting customer.

If buying from Aliexpress, only buy from stores that have the brand name in the store name. Most brands have multiple stores but as long as they actually contain the name of the brand and have existed for a longer time they should be legit.

Since you mention Ender 3, afaik currently the only good one is the S1. Other models are kind of outdated, and all of them are overpriced compared to competitors, and as I mentioned previously it's a bit of a gamble with quality assurance when you buy Creality.

I like this list of 3d printers for buying advice. It is maintained by people on the 3D Printing discord who have first hand experience with a lot of different models, and to my knowledge are less biased than for example youtubers that will often skew reviews in exchange for new printers, or even money, from manufacturers.

Did you do any dual booting, so you know if it happened for other OS:es too? My current mouse is Razer and I think I have openrazer installed, but the first mouse was made by Steelseries

IIRC this board has a feature to prevent it getting stuck in an infinite flash loop, so it won't flash a firmware when the file on the sdcard has the same name as the last firmware. If you tried flashing "firmware.bin" try renaming it to "firmware7347.bin" or something else random.

At least in the past, Microcenter has regularly ran a campaign where they sell an Ender 3 Pro for $99 to "new customers", so from what I've heard you just get some friend or relative to register with their phone number to take advantage of the deal :) If yours is fixable its of course a better deal, but more of a gamble like you say.

Definitely better to take these risks when you have a little bit of experience with 3d printers. I was a little worried that this was your first printer and you were trying to fix it by looking up stuff online. If I were going to replace the mainboard of my Ender I'd probably go with Mellow's FLY puppet because I run Klipper already and I like it a lot. Or if you want to stay with Marlin I think FLY E3 Pro V3.0 is a decent choice. Having a board with 5 stepper drivers makes upgrading to dual Z much easier

I downloaded them from here: https://huggingface.co/TheBloke

Yep, and I think the best thing one can do is to not reuse passwords. Just wanted to point it out so previous poster doesn't think they're guaranteed to be unaffected by the hack because their account is supposedly deleted.

From what I found, it sounds like the BLTouch firmware may be installed, as there is also a leveling option in the menus. I’m not sure if this would explain the axis movement issues though.

Sounds correct, with a BLTouch you usually calibrate Z by probing the center of the bed.

It likely starts by lifting Z to avoid damaging something, because the printer doesn't know if it has a safe distance to the build plate before it is fully homed, e.g. the nozzle might scrape the bed if it was touching when you powered on the printer. I think both normal and BLTouch firmware does this though.

Grab the firmware that matches your printer, i.e. both mainboard version and accessory-wise, from Creality's support page. Based on what you've told us I think it should be the file named "Ender-3 pro 4.2.2 mainboard firmware (32 bit) 16 Jan. 2021". You can of course try a third party build of Marlin, but perhaps try the official one first? Btw. did you get the hardware version (4.2.2) by opening the printer and looking at the mainboard, or is that what the firmware reports? Not sure if it's possible to get this wrong or if it wouldn't even start if you flash it with something else. Maaaaybe it's possible that it could only move in one direction because the firmware doesn't match the hardware? Only seen this happen with a single axis before, not all of them..

Let's hope it's only a case of the wrong firmware, and that the printer you got doesn't have any mechanical issues too. If someone else has returned this to Amazon there's an even bigger risk than usual that it has some flaw. I've met people who bought new printers from Amazon and had to return multiple units before they got one that was fully working.. Supposedly there's a pretty big business around repackaging returned printers to make them look new so they can be sold to some other unexpecting Amazon customer, and they don't check any other functionality than that it turns on.

Difficult to know if actually deleted, or just marked as inactive in the user database.

I think they're seeing this as a traditional copyright infringement issue, i.e. they don't want anyone to be able to make copies of their work intentionally either.

What kind of business? The only place I worked that ran exclusively Linux, i.e. not in a VM on top of Windows, was Opera Software. Everybody got to install and manage their own computer, which might not be ideal from a security standpoint.

Most places I've worked use Linux VM:s on top of Windows, I'm guessing probably because management and/or the IT department only knows Windows and can't imagine life without it :/ Subsequently the vast majority of issues have been either directly related to Windows/Office/Teams, or accessing Windows shared drives etc. from Linux.

Vagrant seemed pretty convenient when deploying identical development environments, if that could be of any help to you.

Sounds like usenet isn't something for me then.. I think 90% of our movie/tv library is more than 10 years old

No idea if any one is less bad from a FOSS, ethical or ideological perspective, but personally I like Vivaldi. I switched back to Firefox for ideological reasons though.

Xubuntu has been my go-to so I installed 23.04 on both my wife's new computer, her netbook and our htpc recently. Turns out it ships with a broken xfce4-screensaver that crashes when you try to unlock the computer and you get stuck (unless you switch to a virtual console and kill the process). A xubuntu dev was helpful and directed me to a ppa that had a patched version, but I was still surprised that such a central feature wasn't working.

In addition there appears to be some kind of screen blanking that I haven't been able to disable. At first I just turned off the screen saver and all power saving features in the control panel, but the htpc would still turn off the monitor if left alone for some time, and then refuse to turn it back on unless I switched back and forth between virtual terminals while the TV was turned off. It got a little bit better after uninstalling xfce4-power-manager, and now the screen can be woken by moving the mouse, but it shouldn't turn off at all since it's supposed to be disabled.

I hope they manage to sort all those things out. I used Xubuntu for 5+ years with almost no issues.

I think it's some kind of modern UX design philosophy; Remove everything except the most basic features to make it less confusing for computer illiterate users. Then label the rest of the features as "advanced" and either hide them behind some menus or in a separate program. Obviously that doesn't mean that everybody who likes Gnome and similarly designed software is computer illiterate, but it's difficult to make one glove that fits all. Kind of like those failed experiments to make a unified OS for desktops, tablets and phones..

When Gnome 3 was announced I thought it was cool that they tried something new, and I really wanted to like it. I've given it a couple of more chances over the years, to see if it has changed more to my liking, but after a few weeks of use I always replace it with something else.. The way the UX is designed just reminds me too much of what I dislike about Windows. Having to use dconf editor to change settings feels just like being forced to use regedit.

Firefox also tried to go down this road IMO, but have reverted some of the worst changes and can be made almost to my liking with the help of extensions. Personally I like Vivaldi better but I think it's important to keep Firefox alive so that Chromium/Blink doesn't get complete monopoly.

Several times I’ve been stuck on a broken version of Discord because on the server side they force an update to the new client, and the new client has not been packaged as a Snap yet.

To be fair this is more of an issue with Discord than snap.. Would be understandable if it was an urgent security fix but they do it every time, and then it breaks for everybody who is using anything else than the deb or tar.gz they provide.

Workaround for Fedora: Edit /usr/lib64/discord/resources/build_info.json and increase the version number to whatever Discord tells you is the new version. And hope that the update wasn't a fix for some remote code execution vulnerability :)

Yea, manually adjusting the x axis and lubricating the bearings are mentioned as negatives for this printer in the buying guide that I linked, but those are very easily fixable "flaws" compared to other similarly priced printers.

I might've gone overboard with a few parts but I've spent €300 on upgrading my E3v2 to get it to a point where I'm happy with its performance

Sovol SV06 on sale for $219 seems to currently be the best cheap printer. It has all the features that Creality's best designed printer (Ender 3 S1) has and it's still $100 cheaper. In addition the SV06 has an all-metal hotend which allows you to print higher temp filaments, like PETG etc, but if you're only going to print PLA that's not necessary.

Don't trust anyone who recommends a brand when it comes to cheap Chinese printers :) Most of the companies have made both some OK models and some straight garbage models.

Was it ever? I mean sure, it's always been seen as a solid choice if you have $1000 to blow on a printer, but I would think the default is to buy a Chinese $100-300 printer. About 4 years ago the Ender 3 was a good choice for a first printer, but since then Creality went up in price and down in quality unfortunately. From what I've heard the Sovol SV06 for $250 ought to be the go to first printer for anyone on a budget right now.

All cheap printers tend to have some kind of flaw(s), but most of the time you can fix it by spending a bit of time on tinkering, printing some mod, or buying some upgrade. I think a lot of people getting into 3d printing think tinkering with and upgrading the printer is part of the fun, and don't have a large budget.

On the other hand, some people have more money than free time and just want to print things. With Prusa you're also getting unparalleled customer support included in price, and you're getting a product made in Europe, if that's something you value.

I also switched to Linux because I felt like I was addicted to gaming and wasting my life. Wasn't depressed though and I don't think it would've ruined my life if I let it continue.