Very nice. For 3 months, that's very pretty solid amount of print time - about 75% uptime. It's cool to hear about people turning this hobby into a business and being able to sell things.
I also have about 3 months of print time on my build. It's not a MK4 though. You have more print time on yours, but but in terms of m/day I think I have you beat.
I'm guessing you print slower and/or with narrower extrusion widths? I haven't bothered swapping my 0.4mm nozzle for something chunkier yet, but I usually print with 0.2mm layers and 0.6mm wide extrusions with speeds between 70 and 100 mm/s depending on feature type.
This is consistent across runs in the exact same spots.
I think it's either mechanical on your y axis hardware or you've got a corrupted slicer file somehow. are you converting these differently than other prints in the past?
I will just put in my 2¢. I maintain 3d printers for a local library and while the 4 mk3s+ machines have been solid the Mini+ has been nothing but trouble.
First we had issues with the extruder, then the Bowden tube kept causing jams. Replaced that but still have a ton of stringing with the default Prusaslicer profiles with every kind of filament we have tried.
And honestly having messed with both, the additional space needed for a "full size" printer is marginal once you factor in the spool holder.
Prusaslicer is amazing. The MK3 is/was great. I don't know how much I love Bambu lab but the Prusa Mini was not great.
When it comes to my decision making for what printer to get, while the price does matter, what is more important to me is being able to maintain the printer for a long period of time.
And I am not talking about right here, and now. There are a lot of parts for the Bambu A1 mini on the market today. I am talking years from now when the printer is considered old and obsolete, but still does the Job.
Prusa has a proven track record of not just providing parts themselves for their older printers. Going so far as to even offer upgrade kits for previous printers. But also using off the shelf components, making matienence a non-issue for me, even if Prusa was to get wiped off the face of the earth.
Meanwhile Bambu doesn't have that track record. And being, yet another Chinese Company, making an injection moulded machines using closed source firmware, and non-standard parts and tools to cut the costs down to be competitive. They've yet to prove to me that they will support their printer beyond when they are selling it.
Take for instance the most use and replaced part on a printer, the Nozzle. The Prusa Mini's nozzle is just a standard E3D V6 nozzle with hundreds upon thousands of spares of various quality available online. While the Bambu Labs A1 mini is a proprietary affair that includes the heat sink, that's only available from Bambu today.
Will someone make a clone? Who knows, but Bambu certainly hasn't built the trust yet to make me confident that they will. Or will open up the designs when they inevitably chase the next shiny, and drop the A1 mini for... let say the A2 mini, which might have an entirely new hotend assembly.
I wasted my Money years ago on a Flash Forge Adventure 3, a printer which killed itself by breaking it's X-Axis motor wire. I was out of warranty, there was no replacements on their website, and to even access the motherboard, I had to completely disassemble the printer. For $25 dollars more I can get a guarantee that not only my printer will work, but is repairable and will continue to work for years to come. I think I will pay the extra $25. Honestly I spent an extra $300 CAD to get a MK4 over the P1P for this reason alone.
I did however buy a Prusa MK1 ten years ago for 650€. It has since received the MK2 conversion from 3mm to 1.75mm, plus autoleveling. The heatbed needed a new connector at some point, and I've enquired about old STLs to replace some parts.
It's still running great to this day, and support has been excellent.
To be clear I’m grateful that AutoDesk provide a free license at all, and it’s an incredible piece of software, but I have a sense of vulnerability while using and honing my skills in it.
No, nope, nope, nope. Abolish this line of thinking right now. Any company that employs the predatory licensing tactics like those AutoDesk uses are not worthy of one single synapse's worth of your continued thought. Fuck them. Shed not a single tear. They're not giving you anything; they're trying to lock you in as a future revenue source. Thus you have nothing to be grateful for, other than the bullet you've now dodged. You are Lot. Walk away and don't look back, lest you turn into a pillar of salt.
I don't usually get into this sort of Stallman style FOSS rant, but the behavior of the major players in the commercial modeling space -- especially AutoDesk and SolidWorks/Dassault -- is just exceptionally bullshit. Pandora's box is already open on the hardware; any fool with thumbs, a credit card, and internet access can either buy or build an actual 3D printer. So instead they'll do anything to lock the software side of this wonderful technology in their own proprietary, pay-to-subscribe box.
The Topological Naming Problem has been a thorn in the side of FreeCAD users since the dawn of time time, and while some work was put into the 0.2x release to address this (previous versions were even worse) it's obviously still not perfect. For anyone not comfortable keeping track of forks and splits and unofficial releases, the intent for the Topo Naming fix developed in this release is for it to be incorporated back into the main line release... eventually. Also, even the most recent release of Realthunder's fork is one major revision behind the main line release, and also has not been updated since the beginning of this year.
Despite all of this, FreeCAD along with all of its quirks and foibles represents an incredibly important bulwark against keeping a critical aspect of our hobby out of the clutches of corporations and other related doers of evil. Stick with it.
I’m looking forward to seeing further iterations on this fun idea. The build area is the only part that needs to be submerged and even then only when printing certain features.
I don't know this exact meter, but I had a little optical sensor on my meter for years. There was a dial that rotated once per a given volume, it had a black part and a white part. This way a single led and light detector could measure exact revolutions and be able to read out the value. This way it didn't have to read the numbers, which is much harder and can't measure small increments very well.
My meter got replaced with a smart kind years ago, so now I simply have a port that can be read out directly with way more information. But my janky led and light detector thing worked very well for years. Since this was years ago it ran a very simple PIC micro, nothing like a full fledged ESP platform.
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