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Prusa MINI: Smart and compact 3D printer

blog.prusaprinters.org

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Re: Prusa MINI: Smart and compact 3D printer

#71

Post by BoorishBears »

reaperducer wrote: post #66
olafure wrote: post #62

I like Prusa, but after they stopped releasing firmware updates for my MK2S for no good reason, so did my business with them. Such a shame.

Did your printer stop working when they stopped writing software for it? Does it no longer do what it did when you took it out of the box? (Serious question. I don't have a 3D printer, but I've been thinking about it. If they're reliant on constant firmware fixes, then I will probably wait another year.)

They're not.

Many people will never even update their firmware from what was in the box, and in fact, some require you to tear them down and wire up a ISP device to flash new firmware, since there's no bootloader (and even if you do all that, there's barely enough memory to hold a firmware with all it's features enabled)

Having firmware upgrades without tearing down the machine is literally a differentiator at the price point this is launching at...

Re: Prusa MINI: Smart and compact 3D printer

#72

Post by dhon_ »

mwill wrote: post #49

Really curious to see what the print quality ends up being like on these. Design wise they're very similar to something like a cetus, or many other Chinese printers with similar mechanics with a major difference: Smooth rods and bearings instead of linear rails. In my own designs I've pivoted away from rods in favor of rails and seen much greater quality, accuracy, repeatability, and speed, even with cheap knock off…

What I love about Prusa is that they eat their own dog food. They use their printers in a farm producing parts for their products. This makes reliability and repeatability first class citizens.

He mentions in the blog post that the motivation for this was wanting smaller & cheaper machines for the farm, as two small machines can print faster than one big one for the same cost.

I'll still wait for reviews, but this looks like a great little machine and I suspect that quality will be reasonable for the above reasons.

One issue will be corrosion on the rails over time though. This affected an original Ultimaker I had sitting around as I let too much dust gather on it.

Re: Prusa MINI: Smart and compact 3D printer

#73

Post by BoorishBears »

sitkack wrote: post #67

So much sinophobia and racism in this thread. Folks, remember that your exquisitely built Apple products are all made in China.

I made a comment referencing Chinese companies on this page...

It has nothing to do with racism, there's an obvious strategy most of them shared in the 3d printer space, and that was slap their name on a random 3d printer using the cheapest possible materials to get to a feature list

Search and see how many no-name printers are using exactly the same displays and various bits from the "named" Chinese sourced 3d printers.

https://www.aliexpress.com/wholesale?catId=0&initiative_id=S...

There are definitely companies in China being more selective than average now. Creality printers started off looking just like no name copies with slight changes, but they've been starting to innovate a bit more of late.

But it's not at all shocking, or racist, that people would group a market that operates in a certain way.

It's no more racist than saying SV tech companies vs Eastern European tech companies, we know they have differing cultures

Re: Prusa MINI: Smart and compact 3D printer

#74

Post by dfasdfasd »

jrockway wrote: post #50
j-pb wrote: post #8

I'm glad that prusa has stayed true to his open hardware pledge all these years, while continuing to push the reprap ideals. Everybody is complaining about the price, but c'mon this thing is designed printed and assembled in Prague, the EU. It creates local jobs for people with fair wages, social security and good quality of life, we should strive to have more of our stuff produced in the west. Happy to see him desig…

The price seems fine to me. This is going to print a lot of useful parts for people and comes with great software for both your computer and the printer that you can hack and modify. If this is anything like my i3, then it's going to have high quality parts (Noctua fans!) and come in kit form to let you assemble it yourself so you know where everything is if something breaks and you need to repair it. I am surprised…

> While it is something Reddit endlessly complains about (despite having no software engineering experience)

While I agree Reddit's obsession with weird technical details is annoying, this is a pretty arrogant position. I've written motion control code for both 8-bit and 32-bit designs, and the difference is bigger than "read a string and pulse an IO a few times". The Atmega has been outdated for the past 10 years, the only reason it picked up in 3D printing was because of the accessibility through Arduino and similar---not for any good, technical reason. They're going to need to switch at some point, may as well be now.

Sure, you don't _need_ a 32 bit processor, but a modern Cortex-M0 or M4 is much more powerful than an Atmega328 for the same cost or less. My Prusa Mk3 takes a non-negligible amount of time to sort files on the SD card, and the screen could really show more information. There is also much more advanced motion planning they could do with a little more power available.

Re: Prusa MINI: Smart and compact 3D printer

#75

Post by taneq »

jrockway wrote: post #60
m0xte wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The “no name” drivers are a bit more complicated than an H bridge: https://www.pololu.com/file/0J450/a4988_DMOS_microstepping_d... The typical H bridge has many failure modes and disadvantages which are handled by the controller ICs. Not to mention a lot less CPU overhead for the AVR running the show.

Yeah, you can get some feedback from the controllers easily (and then omit physical endstops). I am waiting for a 3D printer that uses servo motors, though. So many failed prints come from not knowing where the extruder is. But you can just measure exactly where it is, rather than guessing based on how much current the motor used.

Servos don’t actually gain you that much. If you’re meeting enough resistance to skip steps then your print is wrecked anyway.

Re: Prusa MINI: Smart and compact 3D printer

#76

Post by sitkack »

ALittleLight wrote: post #69
sitkack wrote: post #67

So much sinophobia and racism in this thread. Folks, remember that your exquisitely built Apple products are all made in China.

"Yes, China may be a brutal, authoritarian, oppressive regime currently trying to censor discussion of their occupation of Hong Kong - but at least they provide cheap manual labor due to lax labor laws, a disregard for the environment, and the general poverty of their people." Apple products could be built anywhere.

This comment misses the point I made entirely. People are making gross over generalizations about "The Chinese". I made no statements about consumerism, authoritarianism, or capitalism. Apple products could come out of anywhere (but they don't, they come from China), I use that example as a counterpoint to people talking about "what The Chinese" are capable of. Your quotes around the text are supposed to be done in my voice? No thanks.

Re: Prusa MINI: Smart and compact 3D printer

#77

Post by dfasdfasd »

jrockway wrote: post #58
j-pb wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is that driving that big color display and more importantly ethernet/ip stack would be a huge PITA on an 8bitter.

Yeah, I posted a few comments here without actually watching their marketing video, and didn't realize it had those two things. Upgrading to get those features seems like a good idea, to compete with the cheaper models. I don't think I would have engineered a new board and control stack just to get a web interface and a screen. Their last model (the i3 MK3S) has headers to accept a Pi Zero, and that seems like a good…

> I just want a USB serial port that accepts gcode. I have plenty of computers with much better screens (and SSL stacks) around for doing something more powerful ;)

That's fair, but then you've added an extra processor which adds a lot of cost. I don't want to tie up a full computer and the associated space just to run my printer. Many people don't have a spare computer they can dedicate to printing either.

Re: Prusa MINI: Smart and compact 3D printer

#78

Post by jdietrich »

ALittleLight wrote: post #69
sitkack wrote: post #67

So much sinophobia and racism in this thread. Folks, remember that your exquisitely built Apple products are all made in China.

"Yes, China may be a brutal, authoritarian, oppressive regime currently trying to censor discussion of their occupation of Hong Kong - but at least they provide cheap manual labor due to lax labor laws, a disregard for the environment, and the general poverty of their people." Apple products could be built anywhere.

Chinese labour isn't particularly cheap by global standards, especially in Shenzhen and the wider PRD region. We outsource to China because they're damned good at manufacturing.

Apple products could be built anywhere, but only because Apple have absolutely vast economies of scale. Most consumer electronics products couldn't be built anywhere else at a viable price, not because of labour costs but because of infrastructure. China has the supply chains and the expertise to build anything from a handful of PCBs to a couple of million units. There's just nowhere else on earth where you can set up several assembly lines in a few weeks or get a prototype built and tested in a few hours.

Re: Prusa MINI: Smart and compact 3D printer

#80

Post by dfasdfasd »

sitkack wrote: post #67

So much sinophobia and racism in this thread. Folks, remember that your exquisitely built Apple products are all made in China.

These threads are always a strange and uncomfortable bridge between valid criticism (many products made in China are cheap and break easily, the Chinese government uncomfortably authoritarian) and actual racism ("the Chinese" only make cheap shit, Chinese don't care about freedom).
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