Prusa MINI: Smart and compact 3D printer

I print a lot of stuff around the house with a toddler. I printed guards to prevent him from turning on the oven, a insert for the piano that prevents him from pressing the auto play demo, a shim to get a drawer to close more smoothly, a shampoo caddy that hooks around our shower stall, a storage system for small hardware, a set of clips for the computer cords to keep them organized, a doohickey to strip leaves off of herbs, geez there must be more I’m forgetting.

Re: points 1 and 2, I think they're connected. The lack of rigidity is mitigated by the Bowden making the hotend so damn light it probably won't be as big of a deal as you might think. Also tweaking some jerk and acceleration settings will almost always fix ghosting and ringing caused by a "less stiff" frame with minimal hit to the print time. (And I'm assuming they'll do most of the legwork to have a great printing profile out of the box)

>You can buy an Ender for $200 or less on sale...

This is exactly why I love the idea of this printer so much more! You could get an ender for $200 (plus $60 to $100 to improve the worst parts and make it less likely to catch fire). But you're still manually leveling, you're still fighting with scraping prints off the bed, you're still missing stuff like filament run-out detection, automatic firmware updates, spring steel PEI print surface, crash detection, power panic, stealth mode, and a lot of other safety features.

And at the end of the day, an ender 3 is gonna cost $260 to $300 and require the user to know what to replace fix on day 1 for a safe printer, while this is $350. And outside of commercial manufacturing, most users don't ever max out their print area with most printers (at least from what I've seen spending a lot of time on 3d printing forums).

I'm super excited for this, because $800 to $1000 is just to much for the average person to spend on an easy to use printer like the MK3S. This is only slightly more expensive than other "starter" printers, and has most of the niceties, safety features, and support.

I bought a 3d printer when I got a hiring bonus for referring a friend. I had played around with one before but a nice turn key one was the real trigger I needed. I bought it without really knowing what all I'd do with it.

I make all sorts of things:

I work for twitch (built bits product initially), so I print a few hundred bits to give out at twitch con for my coworkers, it's a fun thing for them (I expense the plastic).

I needed to replace a bunch of boards on my deck and the dimensions of dimensional lumber have changed. So I could either pay $400 + cost of lumber to get boards cut correctly, or I could pay $175 for the lumber and print abs Shims to make the lumber the correct thickness. Shims at market price were around $75. I was able to iterate on a design and print the 80 shims I needed for about $3 worth of ABS plastic.

I also really enjoy solving problems with the printer in a pretty clean way compared to getting out in the shop. I can, in between matches of dota or pubg, iterate a design and hit print. A match or 3 later I've got a part, or a sub part (mating surfaces) done.

They're also amazing for coming up with templates for making parts out of more time consuming materials like well anything. I can cad a design up in seconds to minutes and hit print. That will get me a part that I can see if it fits. Even wood takes as long as the cad step. And you can iterate a ton.

Another good use case is enclosures and mounts for arduino and ESP32 projects. Lots of little lego parts of eletroics that need to be wired together. Getting them into a reasonable form factor usually requires hot glue and tape to make a shitty ball that's hard to work with, or leaving it on a breadboard which isn't a great form factor, or making a printed enclosure which can hit most of your needs. These can take longer, like 10 hours of iteration but that's amazingly faster than most other methods.

My friend makes furniture. I bought him a printer and he prototypes pieces on the printer. Makes full mockups of living room parts to give to potential customers.

My son does dnd, we print figurines all the time, they're fun weekend projects. He made and painted an infinity gauntlet over the summer which looks pretty sweet.

Have I gotten the $2k out of the printer in absolute value and replacement over mass produced products? No. Maybe about $700 worth of savings there. If you add the DND figures maybe $1000.

If you add the cost of learning, hobbies, time with family, and offsetting iteration and time spent with turn key manufactureres working on a prototype, yes, prolly at least $10k of value (that I wouldn't have spent otherwise).

At the end of the day, for not much space, it makes a lot of physical projects feasible mostly relying on just the computer for the design space.

PS: Another very important thing is that when you talk with an artisan to make your pieces it is craftsmanship.

You need to explain to the artisan what you need done. This person has to understand you. This take time and money.

The effort I make explaining what I need to an artisan is completely lost if I change the artisan.

With a 3D printer, you create a design that is a product in itself. It can be repeated ad infinitum. The work I do today improving the design is work I will not have to do tomorrow.

I routinely send designs to people living 2000 miles away. They print it and can play with it the same day.

Yes, if you don't value your time then yes, buying an Ender and modifying it is a better deal.

I am part of a Spanish 3D printer group called "clone wars", and dozens of people there have bought Enders because they are dirty cheap.

It really takes a master degree in engineering to solve most of them, because they want to print professionally expending 300euros.

That connects with the point 4, yes people want everything, expending nothing. But that they could get it is a completely different thing.

As the print bed goes bigger, the mechanical deflections increase with the square of it.

The price of things like milled precision beds or original linear rails, increments non linearly for a tolerance when the size of the bed increases.