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 design another printer, I really love my MK3.
I am surprised that they switched to a more powerful microcontroller. While it is something Reddit endlessly complains about (despite having no software engineering experience), a lot of engineering is invested into their existing 8-bit platform which works perfectly fine. You don't need 32-bit pointers to read a string like "G1 X42" and pulse an I/O pin a couple times ;)
In the release they say that it will come in 3 pieces that you put together, not a full from-scratch kit
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 The Atmega has been outdated for the past 10 years, the only reason it picked up in 3D printing was because of the accessibility through Arduino and similar---not for any good, technical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.
For example, Prusa filaments are perfectly rewind, so the possibility of the filament making a knot and stopping the print like has happened to me with other filaments in 14h printing sessions does not exist.
Or chinese aluminium printing beds, with 0.3-0.4 mms differences along the printer, that even with a touch probe you can't print big things over.
Those beds are so cheap, and you could print small pieces with them, but anything serious in size like 18x18 cms will fail. Prusa warrantees it.
Quality control is the great advantage that Prusa has over the Chinese(that love lying). He knows it, and sends you a report of the QA of your specific machine.
He truly believes it. Not only that, but his left arm has the Open Source Hardware logo tattooed with honeycomb infill :)
I've been there and saw his progress from the beginning. I was at the first MRRF, and he flew in from Prague. Back then, I had my Prusa i2 printer, designed by him to use 8mm threaded rod with a simple 3d prints to make your own printer.
Things have indeed changed since those old days!
https://github.com/Creality3DPrinting/Ender-3
Quality is pretty top notch. It worked out of the box flawlessly and with no futzing.
I don't really agree with that argument from a humanitarian perspective. That would simply further increase the vast economic inequality between the west and the rest. Even with lower wages, people in China are better off with more jobs than fewer. People in the Czech Republic for instance have more safety nets, more alternatives and opportunities.
Making products locally maintains a higher standard of living and can limit dependencies on others.
Not doing that takes a nations to largely service economy status and when that matures the standard of living declines, infrastructure development slows or stops, tax revenue goes down, and demand for new products gets tepid.
In short terms, the boost from cheap stuff is nice. As wages flatten, that cheap stuff becomes not so cheap and improving income more difficult.
For the future, I know I’ll replace the fans, and probably the main board
That’s without adding my time: updating the firmware (overheating protection seems cool), calibrating and configuration of the various bit (like the probe position relative to the hot end), finding the correct slicer and config for it.
Now it works fine.
Still, it cost me way more than the list price to get to this point. A prusa mini would have been a better investment !
Why exactly is it preferable to favor "the west" over other places? These types of statements read a lot like "us vs them" to me. What makes "the west" an intrinsically morally better source for products?
All in all, I consider this a solid contender.
I don’t really feel that way but your argument just isn’t sound.
I love my MK3, which I've upgraded to the MMU MK3S, but have had a bunch of projects where a larger printing area would be desirable (I print a lot of board game organizers, to reduce shelf space usage, speed up set up/tear down, improve playing ability during the game, etc., so usually this means 3-6 distinct sets of prints on the MK3S).
I have a good bit of experience on the Voron 2, and was thinking I was going to build a 2.1 - the CoreXY design also has the benefit of being able to print faster without quality loss, as well as being very amenable to designs that have built in enclosures, which is a godsend for printing ABS (and building exhausts to get the fumes out of the house), but with how great my experience with my current Prusa has been, I'm going to wait and see how it shapes up. It'd also save a ton of work, as the Voron is an entirely DIY design.
Interesing use-case-do you have some photos? (and possibly design files, although I currently don't have access to a printer)
https://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/186909/3d-prints-board-ga...
I've used some fairly generic ones where existing solutions don't exist, but there are some parametric generators on thingiverse that I've started experimenting with.
The real test will be comparing it to the Ender 3, which seems to be the form factor/market the mini is trying to go after. Even if the mini is 150 bucks more than the Ender 3, if it prints even slightly as reliably as the MK3 then the Ender 3 may be done for.
With low cost printers like the Ender 3/Maker Select/etc, after the first 50-200 hours of printing, you can end up spending more time on printer maintenance than printing. There's also small problems that can happen that for non-technical users would be the end of their adventure into 3D printing. That is easily the greatest pain point at the Ender 3's price point.
I'd avoid printers like the Ender for fire risk as much as the hidden cost of maintenance and upgrades. The Prusa Mini will be a much better entry option than the cheap Chinese knockoffs.
See Toms video: https://youtu.be/sPvTB3irCxQ
...with this being said, though - I'm happy to see a "entry-level" Prusa. One thing that lags the cheap printers are security measurements. I guess no one is keen on burning down their house, just because this giant hotglue on rails went rogue.
On their website, they state that they are:
- monitoring FAN RPM
- Have self diagnostic
- Have a high quality PSU
- and, even more important, use thermistors.
Taking all this into account, this might justify the price bump, if you aren't able to add all this to, let's say, your Ender or any other printer by yourself.
Print jobs can easily go 24 hours and fires are fairly catastrophic. I think Prusa just hit the ball out of the park with this pricepoint and approach assuming they are using their usual reliable, vetted components. I have never seen a report of a fire with a Prusa.
https://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=33012
I own the model before this as well as Prusa Mk3. They are both wonderful. Now that Prusa Mini is out, it will probably be the printer of recommendation due to it being open source over the MP Mini.
Tbf, that really depends on the market share. In the interwebs, I've read a total of 3 - 5 reports of printers catching fire. Now, if 20% of the 3D printers are Prusas, then the rest are chinese ones, which come all with the same bad components. There is not much surprise here, at least for me.
Despite from that, the groups I know usually go like "Yeah, get a CoreXY printer instead. Moving the printbed constantly in XY direction isn't a good idea."
My Ender 3 Pro cost 230$ and came with a magnetic bed.
Added about 30$ for Automatic Bed Leveling.
Adding a 32-bit board would cost at least what? 50$? ( The stock Ender 3 board has so little memory I had to remove LCD support to get Unified Bed Leveling working)
Max quoted hotend temp is 280 °C so unless Prusa is condoning heating up PTFE to life threatening temperatures it has an all-metal hotend, so another 30$ for a middle of the road one?
Adding steppers... I think we've hit what the Prusa costs, except you hacked together this kit so now it's on you to support it, and also the prices I listed are not for high quality parts.
Then there's just the fact, Prusa will make a 3d printer that just works, and if it doesn't just work, they'll make it right. Good luck if that 50$ Aliexpress-sourced 32 bit board conks out, and have fun tearing it down and returning it to stock if Creality wants to help you out.
This printer represents careful design and good support, I'm going to try and get rid of my Ender 3 immediately and get one of these.
I wanted a Prusa originally but didn't feel like sinking the money into a proper printer when I didn't know I was going to use it. Instead I ended up with something I'm not using because it never works correctly and has actively damned my enthusiasm for FDM...
You won't be using it make your own chair (or at least, you probably shouldn't) and you won't be mass marketing anything 3D printed nor will you compete in the marketplace with anything that can be injection molded or stamped.
But for a quick one-off part if beats whittling out of a piece of wood by quite a distance.
On another note: soldering irons and hammers are also not for everybody, some people will never get the hang of fabrication. But once you are in the group that likes to make stuff 3D printers are just one more option in the tool arsenal.
Genuinely if you are a creative person it’s an excellent tool to extend your abilities.
Plus I cannot express the collective relief my spouse and I felt when I was able to repair a poorly designed part on the malfunctioning coffee maker in an hour's time. We're solving the real problems here.
Haha, brilliant. Could have done with one of those...
Mass marketed are always cheaper and most of the time better. True.
So why creative professionals need it? Because not everything they need its mass marketted. In fact, one of the best uses is joining two mass marketted things together to create a system.
3d printing is fantastic for joining the gaps that exist between what exist in the market and exactly what you need.
Imagine you are an engineer creating a flight simulator hardware machine, or a driving simulator with VR. You probably will buy the chair, but then you will have to adapt it some way to your structure of soldered beams.
You can spend like 600 euros mechanizing and soldering little metal pieces and wait something like a month for those that make it to make it. Or you could print them and spend like 25 euros and have it ready at the end of the day, look at the problems in the design, iterate.
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.
And even if mass a produced version of these things would be cheaper/better, often you just won't be able to find it.
Plus it's nice to be the hero around the house when I can solve random maintenance problems with a quick search on Thingiverse or a couple of hours of designing and printing. Not sure it has literally paid for itself since I got one, but it has definitely be more useful than I expected and I would say it has been borderline indispensable for my household.
"Everyone" doesn't. If you don't make things, don't buy tools.
Metaphorically, you're comparing buying a radio to buying a piano. If you just want to listen to music, buying a piano is a very inefficient step to your goal.
I love my two printers. They enable me to achieve the kind of computer precision my artwork requires in a way I don't know I'd be able to achieve otherwise, at least not in such a short amount of time.
E.g. a 3D printer can be great for all kinds of creative hobbies.
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.
I don't use my 3d printer to 'fix' things around the house that often because it's frequently cheaper to work around it or buy a replacement. The times a high-value item breaks in a way I can fix with a printed part are rare enough it certainly doesn't justify owning one.
That said, if you really like designing mechanical things or working on electronics projects or similar, a 3d printer is a total blast. I'm currently using mine to make molds for real ceramic parts.
Any pointers on your process here? How do you cure/fire your ceramics?
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 rails from China, and most of the industry is moving that way as well.
What's curious is you can get a machine similar to the mini, using linear rails, and more metal or injection moulded parts over 3D printed parts, for just a little bit more than the mini.
Prusa has quite a good reputation though, so I'm skeptical they would release an inferior machine at a the same price point, so like I said, really curious to see how well these works.
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.
I don't think anyone is saying that China is incapable of creating high quality products - they very obviously are. But being capable of doing something doesn't mean that that is the product strategy being employed, or that if it is being employed, that it's the only or most popular one.
I would absolutely trust a 3D printer manufactured in China from a company that used quality component and put thought into safety from the start. I've put my money where my mouth is, and own a Milkshake3D (granted, it is an SLA printer and not FDM.) But I wouldn't purchase one of the budget FDM printers manufactured in China at this point in time. If Creality's printers look to hold up well with the new protections, I might reconsider them in the future.
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
Apple products could be built anywhere.
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.
It is also nice to know that I can print replacement parts and that my replacement is pretty much identical to the original.
Another point is that it allows you to print spare parts for your own or a friends printer if something breaks, or print upgraded parts if they tweak the design.
a) injection moulded the parts
b) provided all of the parts as 3d models for for spares
though. There's something else all you guys are being weird about.
Is it the IKEA effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect) in action?
I was interested in upgrading my 3d printer to a prusa model.. but... the having the parts being built to subpar-precision using a FDM printer in a Czech 3d printer cluster didn't seem super exciting in itself...
1. It looks like you are going to fight "ringing" with lack of rigidity.
2. Its a bowden extruder... which I suppose is a necessity due to the lack of structure. Still I would rather have direct drive on every machine.
3. It's very expensive. You can buy an Ender for $200 or less on sale... or around $230 normal price. Upgrade the board to a 32bit Bigtreetech for $60 with Trinamic drivers... plug and play.
4. Most people find they want a bigger printer... not smaller.
This is my initial reaction. I am always looking for innovation in this space and most of it is happening in the "industrial" realm. For example, I wish they would make an SLS machine or a "beginner" industrial machine.
The companies like Creality are just dominating everything.
We need prosumer/industrial machines that have features you can't get with $750 dollar machine.
>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.
But,I will say that my creality has been a bucket of pain, to the point where I almost exclusively use my prusa these days. So perhaps that's reason to hope this is more than just a crappy bargain basement printer warmed over.
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.
My next printer will be smaller, let's see how they'll price the kit version.
(The fact that this printer is small doesn't make it any better at small parts. It just takes up less space and can't print bigger parts.)
I got into 3d printing about 6 months ago and am thrilled every time I print something. But 100% of the things I design and print are practical and solve some sort of problem. My parts look 3D printed, but I don't care, because they're performing a useful task. Many people on the Internet are not interested in that, they just want to produce injection-mold quality parts from 3D models at home. If that's your use case, don't buy this. The SLA printers are much much better at that.
(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.)
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...
(After struggling with a cheap Chinese 3D printer and learning to hate 3D printing... I switched to a Prusa i3 MK3S and am loving it. The software doesn't annoy me. The prints stick to the bed every single time without fail. And I got to assemble the whole thing myself, so I know how every component works and how to fix it in the event that something breaks. And if something breaks, I don't have to order a replacement part, I can just go to the makerspace, print it out, and be back online!)
