This thread is meant to conglomerate purchase advice for both newcomers and people looking for additional machines. Keeping this discussion to one thread means less searching should anyone have questions that may already have been answered here, as well as more visibility to inquiries in general, as comments made here will be visible for the entire month stuck to the top of the sub, and then added to the Purchase Advice Collection (Reddit Collections are still broken on mobile view, enable "view in desktop mode").
Please be sure to skim through this thread for posts with similar requirements to your own first, as recommendations relevant to your situation may have already been posted, and may even include answers to follow up questions you might have wished to ask.
If you are new to 3D printing, and are unsure of what to ask, try to include the following in your posts as a minimum:
Your budget, set at a numeric amount. Saying "cheap," or "money is not a problem" is not an answer people can do much with. 3D printers can cost $100, they can cost $10,000,000, and anywhere in between. A rough idea of what you're looking for is essential to figuring out anything else.
Your country of residence.
If you are willing to build the printer from a kit, and what your level of experience is with electronic maintenance and construction if so.
What you wish to do with the printer.
Any extenuating circumstances that would restrict you from using machines that would otherwise fit your needs (limited space for the printer, enclosure requirement, must be purchased through educational intermediary, etc).
While this is by no means an exhaustive list of what can be included in your posts, these questions should help paint enough of a picture to get started. Don't be afraid to ask more questions, and never worry about asking too many. The people posting in this thread are here because they want to give advice, and any questions you have answered may be useful to others later on, when they read through this thread looking for answers of their own. Everyone here was new once, so chances are whoever is replying to you has a good idea of how you feel currently.
Additionally, a quick word on print quality: Most FDM/FFF (that is, filament based) printers are capable of approximately the same tolerances and print appearance, as the biggest limiting factor is in the nature of extruded plastic. Asking if a machine has "good prints," or saying "I don't expect the best quality for $xxx" isn't actually relevant for the most part with regards to these machines. Should you need additional detail and higher tolerances, you may want to explore SLA, DLP, and other photoresin options, as those do offer an increase in overall quality. If you are interested in resin machines, make sure you are aware of how to use them safely. For these safety reasons we don't usually recommend a resin printer as someone's first printer.
As always, if you're a newcomer to this community, welcome. If you're a regular, welcome back.
Back in the day, paint scrapers and razor blades were the perfect go-to for removing stuck prints from the build plate.
These plastic razor blades work just as well (if not better because you can be more rough with them) and cost a whopping $5 on amazon.
These work much MUCH better than 3D printed scrapers too, and are significantly safer to use than paint scrapers (for both your body and your build plate).
Edit: I never thought the use of scrapers was such a divisive topic but here we are lmao. Some folks have rather strong opinions in the comments.
I uploaded a remix of a model that allowed remixes. The next day, the original creator changed their model to "No Remixes Allowed". I would not have put the effort into the remix if I knew it would/could be removed with a flip of a switch.
Edit: please don't waste any boosts on my remix model. I'm sure all points will be removed once Bambu removes it. I appreciate the love though!
I'm working on another Slinky Escalator. This one is designed to be a bit more "stylish" with the goal to be displayed as kinetic-wall-art-picture...at least in my workshop :) Mechanically it's based on my previous designs, this version aims to look less technical.
Next month I'll be presenting all my work at MakerFaire Brno - a weekend festival and the second largest in the Czech Republic. Last MakerFaire I attended was MakerFaire Prague about three months ago, which was a huge milestone for me and my project.
I would love to hear from you, what you think about this new Slinky Escalator. I have stopped selling my designs for now so I can focus on engaging with community and share my progress more actively. I already have few (four exactly :)) requests from technical high schools interested in using this project for teaching.
I'm not selling here anything, I'm just looking for feedback and trying to "actively share my work" :)
P.S.: As I already know, many of you don't like AI content, so do I for creative work. AI wasn't used in this post at all. Also, before anyone asks if I copied Mark Rober: his work definitely inspired me (via my son!), but credit also goes to Matthias Wandel, who built his famous wooden slinky staircase over 10 years ago, before Mark did. I hope I've addressed the main questions upfront, and I'm really looking forward to your feedback :)
EDIT: It's "fully" 3D printed, including Slinky itself.
Decided my mower needed a garage. Neighbour challenged me to add an automatic door.
Had some composite left from our fence, had to design and print the rest. Used about 7,5kg ASA. I included fans to blow dry the robot when it has rained.
Un-illuminated phoenix modelilluminated phoenix modelWhite surface, cyan, magenta, yellow and white material shellsSource Model for the generator
Iāve been experimenting with a different approach to lithophanes for a while and finally have the process working at a sufficient quality level to show.
Instead of starting from a 2D image, the input is an ordinary textured 3D mesh. My software converts the texture into five interlocking material meshes that can be printed with white/cyan/magenta/yellow filament. Unlit, the surface is mostly white (with some shine-through when the surface is thin), but with a white light source inside, the texture colors appear through the surface.
The conversion itself is fully automatic now and takes around 3 minutes for these models. The output is just five aligned STLs just like 2.5D lithophanes, so after conversion the printing workflow is pretty conventional multi-material FDM.
The Phoenix and grinning cat were printed on an H2C using the Bambu CMYK lithophane materials. A 0.2 mm nozzle gives the best results, although the print times get fairly ridiculous (2 days and a couple hours each)
The main geometric limitation is that very thin features donāt illuminate particularly well because there simply isnāt enough room/light path inside them. Rounded or relatively solid forms work extremely well.
Curious what people here think of the visuals, and especially what kinds of models youād try with it.
If you want a model of your own converted, feel free to message me! I'll do a few for free! :)
And here is a second model, because it also looks mad nice imo
Weāve been putting a lot of work into making our printers easier to use and output the most accurate prints with just a click of a button. Better hardware, better firmware, less setup and less babysitting. And today, weāre taking a big step with the other half of 3D printing: the software you use to get your models ready to print.
Today weāre releasing the first public preview of PrusaSlicer 3.0. And this is a big one.Ā Itās the biggest upgrade in PrusaSlicerās history. We threw out the user interface completely and wrote it from scratch, driven by what our users, you, actually need. Weāre bringing a new project system, completely reworked profiles designed around modern multi-tool printers, better 3D scene rendering, much better performance, a safe plugin system, and much more.
Itās not the biggest update because of any single feature or because of the sheer volume of them, but because of the potential it brings for future updates. And the timing couldnāt be more fitting:Ā weāre releasing this first public preview exactly 15 years after the very first Slic3r commit, on September 1, 2011.
First 2 photos are from a year ago and the other 4 are from this week.
I found this cool model on Makerworld (https://makerworld.com/models/1390673) and wanted to print it for my hitch on my car. I used Bambu, Elegoo, and Polymaker PETG to print it. I live in a very hot desert that can average 115Ā°+ for weeks on end. Just the other day it was a nice 118Ā°. I wasnāt sure how the PETG would hold up with the heat so I said screw it and printed it. Itās held up amazingly well and has been on the car for multiple road trips as well. So here is the year update and how itās doing and itās great. Just a little dirty and a little warped. I think a few more walls wouldāve made the black warp less.
Just got a Centauri 2 (Iāve had other printers in the past), printed one object just fine, started a second object and had to go to work, completely fucked my machine up. Adhesion didnāt stick to the buildplate and the filament started forming around the nozzle so much so that it broke the support holding the fan in place. The filament is fully cooled and stuck to the extruder. Iām really stressed and donāt know what to do. Advice would be useful on how to fix this.
I originally wanted a little more control over my SUNLU S2 filament dryer.
That somehow turned into identifying an unmarked 8051-family MCU, dumping its
firmware, tracing nearly the entire controller PCB, reconstructing its custom
LCD and UI, writing replacement firmware, and adding an ESP32-S3 as a new main
controller.
The mystery MCU turned out to be a Sonix SN8F5703A with only 8 KiB of main
flash. Identifying it was probably the biggest early rabbit hole: I measured
pins, voltages, traces and behavior on the real board, and Codex was
surprisingly good at combining those measurements with the sparse clues until
we had a credible chip family and could confirm it through its 0x633D chip
ID.
From there I backed up the complete stock main image and hidden boot/parameter
area before changing anything. The stock 8 KiB image was then imported into
Ghidra as 8051 code. We eventually recovered all 48 functions, the interrupt
timing, temperature and humidity lookup tables, heater-control arithmetic,
settings layout, four-button state machine, buzzer behavior, and the complete
26-byte frame for the dryerās fixed custom LCD.
Some fun discoveries:
- The apparent TX/RX pads are not a usable UART in the stock firmware.
- Two daisy-chained 74HC595s drive the 16 active-low LEDs around the display.
- The LCD is controlled by a TM1729 and uses a completely custom fixed glass.
- The heater command is active-low through an inverter, so safe startup order
matters a lot.
- The original controller uses its own fixed-point PID-like law and a roughly
half-second time-proportioning heater window.
I first wrote a complete standalone replacement for the SN8 and tested it on
the real dryer. After that, the project evolved again: the SN8 now acts as a
fail-safe I/O executor, while an ESP32-S3 owns the profiles, countdown,
sensor conversion, Wi-Fi, OTA, Web UI and thermal control.
The two processors exchange a CRC-protected 32-byte process image 50 times per
second. The SN8 still independently blocks stale or unsafe heater commands,
checks its local sensor, enforces fan/temperature interlocks, and shuts the
heater down if the S3 disappears. During S3 OTA the link pins go high-impedance,
which deliberately trips that same local fail-safe.
The current Web UI has live temperature/humidity/heater graphs, profiles,
delayed start, keep-dry and cooldown behavior, diagnostics and session history.
The heater now uses feed-forward PI control with a learned holding-duty bias.
That part is still being tunedāthe screenshot is real hardware data, but the PI
and automatic bias/autotune workflow are definitely still WIP.
A huge credit goes to SN8Flash by silicagel777. It made
reading, backing up, flashing and independently verifying this unusual MCU
possible without buying a dedicated Sonix programmer. I used a second ESP32
with experimental bridge firmware plus a small self-made adapter PCB based on
the SN8Flash documentation. The adapter/bridge is still very prototype-looking
and its firmware needs cleanup much later, but it worked reliably enough to
preserve every original byte before the first erase.
Also, an honest AI disclosure: this was a collaborative project. I did the
physical workāopening the dryer, measurements, continuity tracing, soldering,
wiring, adapter hardware, flashing and supervising all real-heater tests.
Codex helped analyse the evidence, identify the mystery MCU, reverse-engineer
the firmware, write most of the replacement/controller code, build verification
scripts and keep the increasingly ridiculous amount of documentation organized.
The photos show the current prototype wiring rather than a polished product.
It is working on the real dryer, but Iām deliberately calling it WIP: PI and
autotune still need refinement, the hardware needs tidying, and Klipper plus
Home Assistant/MQTT integration are high on the list.
What began as ācan I improve this dryer a little?ā has become a much deeper
project than expectedābut seeing the stock LCD, touch controls, safety executor
and new ESP32 dashboard all working together is extremely satisfying.
This is the worst customer service experience iāve had in a while. They said the heated base was included in the package, then when I found video proof from my pet cameras they said I would still have to pay to return the item back to them. I disputed it through my credit card.
Made this replica post box as a wedding gift for a friend getting married last Christmas. Still the biggest and most frustrating thing I've ever printed š (cat for scale)
Saw it on TikTok and was cheap and easy to do, I think it really improves the finish and makes it look a lot better than straight off the printer. Iām just wondered if any one had any other things they do post printing to improve their prints
Hi everyone! šš
I just finished this Dragon Ball lamp, inspired by the iconic scene of Kid Goku and his Great Ape transformation under the full moon šš
The model is made of multiple parts, no AMS required, and the moon lights up with an LED. š”
What do you think of the result? šš„
Iāll leave the MakerWorld link in the comments if anyone wants to print it! š
