A very related question to ask is: did your parents, or extended family, ever help you financially?

Here’s my answer.

Have I ever received help from my parents and/or extended family? Yes. I was able to live rent free after high school while I found my way. When I eventually started college I was able to live at home and commute. My family started a college fund for me when I was little, so I was able to cover about 15% of my in-state tuition. We also got a cash loan from my Grandma to put toward a down payment that we paid back over the course of a few years. Without it we wouldn’t have been able to buy our house.

Am I getting help from my parents or extended family now? No, I haven’t for years. Money and support have started flowing the other direction. I’ve given my mom a (used) car and also let her live with us for a year and a half while she switched careers.

Or random application availability and/or ease of use.

Two cases in point:

• Photo Mechanic. It makes it really easy/fast to sort through tons of photos. There are some Linux compatible alternatives, but they’re just not as good
• Fusion 360. There are a couple of things you can do to make it work, but since Linux isn’t officially supported the install process can be a bit fiddily and there’s no guarantee that an update won’t break things.

Things are certainly better now than they have been in the past, but if you’re somewhat time limited (eg your computer is more of a tool than a thing to spend time tweaking) Linux can still be a bit offputting - especially if some of the core applications you use aren’t officially supported.

You’re four forks deep now Slic3r to Prusa Slicer to Bamboo’s slicer to Orca. It also borrowed a lot of ideas from Super Slicer. Since it’s open source, and has been gaining some momentum, it seems to have a decent amount of contributors

Why Orca?

• all the features you know and love from things up the tree
• a revamped UI
• built in tuning tests (temp tower, extrusion multiplier, volumetric flow, pressure advance, etc)
• great Klipper integration if that’s your jam

Excellent photo! I fell into team photographer for my kiddos T-ball team and the parents really liked some photos of the kids being kids during games - playing in the gravel, making faces, etc. Many people appreciate well executed “normal” phoses, but it seems like well executed photos of not quite normal activities get more appreciation.

If mildew doesn’t get them, vine borers will :(

Thanks for the follow up!

I don’t know about this particular model, but the brand is well liked for their higher end printers. At budget price points there’s only so far you can stretch the BOM cost so I don’t know how much more I would expect of this printer vs other budget entries.

Nice photos! Whenever I see photos like this, I wonder if they’re a result of a heavy crop, a massive lens, or being able to get fairly close to the bird. Can you let us know your secrets? :)

If you want to print miniatures that are actually miniature in scale, a resin printer is probably the way to go. That said, you need to wash prints, cure prints, properly dispose of waste materials, etc. This article talks about their differences and shows somr a/b comparisons halfway through it. You can get pretty good detail with a small nozzle on a FDM printer, but resin will still blow it away.

As for a budget printer, most are generally pretty reliable but if you want good results you’re probably going to need to fiddle with them. You’ll also probably need to fiddle with them to keep them running and/or optimized (for example, better fan shrounds for your hot end, etc). I didn’t mind somewhat ugly prints from my i3 Plus, so I didn’t need to do very much fiddling beyond some basic mods over the 5 or so years I was fairly actively using it - especially after I replaced the bed springs with silicone and printed snug fitting thumb wheels.

There’s nothing wrong with an “old” printer. I bought a Monoprice branded Wanhao Duplicator i3 Plus a little over 7 years ato and from a pure feature perspective it’s not that different than the base Ender v3. The biggest advances are in quality of life things, like z-offset calibration and “auto leveling”, but it’s worth saying that most budget printers can’t adjust their extruder mechanically to be in plane with the build plate like say a Voron, so they compensate by tweaking z-height as the extruder moves between high and low spots. Geared reduced extruders on direct drive setups are also preferable over driving the extruder directly from a stepper motor like my old i3 Plus or early Ender v3 models.

Printers are generally very modifiable, so if some new whiz-bang feature comes out in a few years you’ll likely be e able to adopt it to your printer.

It certainly does show how many traditions, with their own sets of rules, English pulls from. That said, watching my poor kid learning how to spell and read has been painful. All the rules only exist to be broken. An example today was him trying to pronounce AMC. A fun word for spelling that came up recent was skool.

I was thinking it was a Russian Olive. It looks like their leaves and flowers are fairly close, but the plants are very different lol. Wonder which it is.

Nurses absolutely, especially since they physically have to move patients around. I wouldn’t expect that physical therapists would need to do that, but I also admit to not having any knowledge about the job.

Conversely, go the harbor freight route. If you use it until it wears out then upgrade.

I don’t know how much money there is in fixing things though? Between hard to find parts, general lack of repairability, and the fairly low cost of new it doesn’t seem like there’s much opportunity there.

Another commenter in here suggested filling the gap with concrete. I don’t think it’s worth it at this power level, cheapish BOM, etc. The enclosure is also ASA (the middle) and PETG (the top and bottom), so it’s a bit more dead than PLA already.

That looks like an interesting design. If you’re linking to something like that, you’ve heard of Hoffman’s Iron Law already. I chose size and low end response over efficiency. I did model some higher order enclosures, but they either didn’t get low enough (size, efficiency) or were too big (efficiency, low end response).

It would totally be a step up, the question is which step ups are worth it given the BOM components and their cost (around $200 for all the electronics and drivers excluding plastic). At the end of the day it’s a $20 tweeter and a $45 (used) car door woofer connected to a fairly cheap class D amp using Bluetooth. It has a slight turn off pop (no turn on pop though), it hisses some at idle, you can hear the noise floor decrease (eg more noise) when a Bluetooth device pairs, Bluetooth itself isn’t a super awesome media for audio (it is a lot better than it used to be, but your actual quality will depend a lot on device to device configurations), etc etc.

I’m not sure what I would prioritize first for the next step up in SQ, but I don’t think it would be the enclosure itself.

I had prints doing exactly what you described on my CoreXY because ABS and ASA are very warp prone. For me it all came down to chamber temperature and a solid first layer. I think you should be good to go on the latter thanks to your MK3.

You’ll need active chamber heating at a minimum to pull off larger prints. This doesn’t necessarily mean an aux heater, but it does mean bedfans. I’m not sure how easy those are to implement on a MK3, but I would be amazed if no one hasn’t figured out something, especially given the size of the community. In my case, I’m using 4x bed fans with two doing double duty in a filter.

My printer is a 350mm^3 Voron, which means its acrylic panels are fairly large. More surface area means more heat loss, so I need panels that do a better job of retaining heat than simple acrylic. This might also be the case for you thanks to having to move your bed back and forth. I’m hoping that ACM+radiant insulation will get me there. This print happened in a 60 °C chamber.

Thanks! Hexibase’s builds are super cool.

If by characterize them you mean measure the driver’s t/s parameters you can do it with a multimeter, a resistor, and basically any amplifier using a computer to generate the frequency. Elliot can be a bit verbose, which makes his instructions somewhat hard to follow at times, but here’s a guide: https://sound-au.com/tsp.htm

The top and bottom are PETG. The middle section is ASA. 0.6mm nozzle, 0.3mm layer height, 150% extrusion width, two perimeters and 30% infill. I was cruising, but did limit my max flow rate to 25 mm^3. I could have gone even faster, but I was in the rate of diminishing returns for print time. I printed it in my Voron, but it did need some extra insulation to get the chamber temp high enough to avoid warping. The print completing completely successfully told me it’s possible to do big ASA prints with a 60 degree chamber temp, so I’ll be spending the time to make some nice insulated ACM panels.

Ha, thanks!

Laziness and easy BMS board compatibly, but I totally understand the sentiment. It’s not like I can’t print a new top if/when I discover an easy/drop in solution that deals with negotiating power and voltage.

Go for it! 3D printing unlocks the opportunity to easily fabricate things that would be pretty difficult to make out of only wood. I’m mulling over making a baby array of BMR drivers https://www.tectonicaudiolabs.com/audio-components/bmr-speakers/