• 0 Posts
  • 42 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 18th, 2023

help-circle



  • I just realized that there are some important questions that none of us are asking (it sounded like you’ve already done some research, and have an idea of what you want (or at least what you think you need), but just so that everyone’s all on that same page):

    1. What are you looking to get out of the hobby?
    2. What is your tolerance for tinkering? Or in other words, are you willing to learn and fiddle with the machine or would you rather it “just work”?
    3. What kinds of things are you looking to print (not necessarily mutually exclusive categories: big things, small details, multi-color, outdoor/ automotive, etc)
    4. What’s your budget?

  • Depending on how much you value open source vs domestic production, part of me thinks that you may want to consider the Sovol SV08. Sovol is based out of China, but that printer is basically a Voron 2.4 modified for mass production (ie much of the printer comes preassembled), and because of it the printer is very open source, as in here’s the GitHub repo. My only major concern would be that the machine ships with a non-standard hot end, however I recently learned (Here) that the community already has a mod to fix that. You also gain a much bigger build volume, for a fraction of the upfront investment. (Edit: That said, it may not be the most beginner friendly machine in existence (see replies))

    I’m also somewhat hesitant to recommend a machine that isn’t out and doesn’t really have any reviews yet. With any new product launch like this, I’d almost guarantee that there will be a teething period as the bugs, glitches, and hiccups all get worked out (as goes the early adopter tax). Which means that you may face a slightly steeper leaning curve as someone new to the hobby (Prusa has been around for a hot minute, so I don’t expect it to be too bad, but it’s still worth mentioning). That said, if none of that scares you and if you’re already prepared for the pricetag, Prusa’s are known to be absolute workhorses, there’s no reason they can’t be entry level machines.



  • Agreed, it’s nice to see Prusa put up a modern consumer printer, but for the price I didn’t see anything in the announcement that would make it easier to recommend over the bamboo for the “I need it to just work” folks or the SV08/ voron for the folks that like to tinker (and value not living in a walled garden, Sovol’s hot end/ nozzles not withstanding).

    Having just built an LDO 2.4 kit a few months ago, I have no regrets. The 350 kit + printed forward parts weren’t that much more expensive than what this is slated to retail at, but I get a comparatively massive build volume, nerd cred, and the open source nature means that I can tweak, mod, or otherwise upgrade to my hearts content, from being able to run whatever hot end/ extruder I damn well please, to custom parts (hell, I’ve already swapped the tool head mount for Vitalii’s metal one- not quite the COTS ethos of the voron design, but about a thousand times easier line up and tension, worth every penny), or more complicated projects like ERCF or Box Turtle.


  • Just to key in on the overlap between FOSS and privacy, because the source code for the software is open, it means that anyone can take a peek at how everything is running under the hood (among other things). It becomes possible to verify that software is storing data locally and properly encrypting when applicable (as opposed to blindly trusting the software’s author and or lawyers).

    It may also be a fun fact that best practice in encryption is to open source your algorithms. The helps safeguard against backdoors and mistakes/ errors that could compromise the security of the algorithm. Much for similar reasons as above, as it allows the security community to check your math (in a field where it is incredibly easy to get your math wrong).




  • I mostly switched for the interface, it feels far more modern and easy to navigate compared to Cura and Prusa (while retaining all but the most bleeding edge features from each). Still not perfect, but I’ve found it to be leagues better at managing and swapping between multiple printers/ nozzles/ materials. It has native calibration tools for everything from temperature towers to flow rates and pressure advance. Plus it plays very nicely with Klipper. I haven’t used it a bunch on account of not being wholly set up for it, but multi color printing is also super easy. It’s kind of dumb, but I appreciate that updates actually update the app instead on installing a new instance (that I’ll have to go uninstall later, looking at you Cura) so that my “send to print utility” button in Fusions always just works. Updates also seem more substantial with meaningful features (things like scarf joints to hide layer lines come to mind), you can very much feel the love that community has poured into it. It’s open source software in all the best ways possible.

    I was pretty sold after Teaching Tech’s video last year, but a number of other channels (Lost in Tech comes to mind as well) have also done Orca slicer videos if you’re looking for reasons to give it a try.






  • I don’t know about a min length; setting a lenient lower bound means that any passwords in that space are going to be absolutely brute force-able (and because humans are lazy, there are almost certainly be passwords clustered around the minimum).

    I very much agree with the rest though, it’s unnerving when sites have a low max length. It almost feels like advertising that passwords aren’t being hashed, and if that’s the case there’s a snowball’s chance in hell that they’re also salted. Really restrictive character sets also tell me that said site / company either has super old infra or doesn’t know how to sanitize strings (or entirely likely both)…