2012 Slicer vs 2022 Slicer! 3D Print test
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 6 ก.ย. 2022
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Gayer-Anderson Cat - www.myminifactory.com/object/...
Clearance Castle - www.makersmuse.com/clearance-...
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3D Printing Essentials - www.amazon.com/shop/makersmuse - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
Now we need an episode on if a 10 year old printer can handle gcode from a modern slicer :)
If you could get the right settings to compare with on a wanhao 3 dual extruder then I would be amazed😎
I have a ten year old solidoodle 2 sitting in my basement
Funny enough, as I type this I'm printing some parts on my Makergear M2 which I purchased in 2012. Used PrusaSlicer 2.5.0 Alpha3. Had been using Slic3r 1.3.0 up until a few months ago, the upgrade to PrusaSlicer was a giant leap in options.
Maybe something with DC motors.
I'm still using a printer I've had since 2014
When I worked as an FAE, I advised customers to make an image of the drive they used to build their software and ensure it worked in a virtual machine. As you showed, having to work on something from 10 years ago benefits a lot from foresight :)
interesting, can you elaborate a bit on how that helps? aside from a back up.
@@OnceShy_TwiceBitten it has all the software you need already included, and the virtual machine will emulate the correct processor. If you put the disk image on an external drive, you have a handy way of revisiting the project quickly. The problem nowadays is that everything is a subscription that requires calling home over the internet :(
I've had the same experience as an embedded software developer. When you get asked to fix a bug found in a 20 year old product it's a lot easier if you have access to a virtual machine with the original environment.
I honestly had no idea how spoiled I was unboxing a 200€ pre-built printer and producing great parts out of the box with conveniant slicer software. This video is also a fantastic resource on 3D printig history. Great job!
A man of culture - has a AoE2 shortcut on the desktop.
good game !
@@MakersMuse Really good game*
Lifetime favorite
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Area of Effect?
10:00 "top/bottom concentric"
Concentric can give really nice top surface finishes on shallow curves, or flat surfaces. Since top and bottom are essentially 100% infill concentric is the same as dialing your walls up to infinite, which is pretty commonly accepted to be the strongest method of making solid prints, so structurally it is sound too.
Concentric or spiral infill can also give very nice results with silky PLA filaments. I have printed some coins this way, that ended up having a bit of an appearance as if they were turned on a lathe.
I like that in Cura you can use a mix of concentric and lines for beauty and strength!
And if the top layers need overhangs, concentric can get great overhangs
I was wondering why he said that. For anything circular or fairly round especially, concentric infill is going to be most pleasing to the eye.
Watching this process sparked some memories of my first printer in early 2016. It was a plywood kit. No heated bed, no part cooling. No display - I had to stream Gcode via Repetier Host. It wasn't until later I added a display (with SD card - gamechanger!), my own design for part cooling, and community designs for belt driven X/Y (to replace the fishing line drive) and lead screws for Z (to replace the threaded rod) that I really started to get decent prints.
Oof. I'm so glad I have my Prusa with a Pi 3 running OctoPrint now.
Ha, same here. I started with the PrintrBot 1405 Simple, laser-cut plywood kit. Reasonably decent prints. I, too, used Repetier Host and Slic3r. Ah, the good ol' days. I'm now using a Creality-10S with various upgrades.
My first MDF wooden frame printer from 2016 (Prusa-Mendel i3 clone) is still my only printer! :D With how good the modern slicers got it's printing better than it ever has!
It's 2022 and my trash picked plastic framed printer is not going to be replaced any time soon. Being poor sucks.
I started with a printrbot simple in 2014 and used all of those tools, just recently dug it out of the box it was in and once I reset the strings (lol) it worked again! Definitely getting a new printer once I get the time and money for it. Repetier host with slicer on my mom's macbook was quite an adventure to get working right, especially when printing over USB like I did.
Concentric infill is still useful today. Some models with thin lobes will have very short straight line infills that is a lot of jumping around. You can then use concentric to make smooth movements around.
I started with Skeinforge. I was soooooo happy when the original Slic3r came out! It was like moving from the stone age straight into the modern age (maybe this is an exaggeration.)
I miss Skeinforge. It was timeless!!
Get excited!
I did as well. Remember how long it would take to slice a complex model!
You are a young guy but for most of us you are a 3d-printing grandpa. "When I started printing I did it up-hill, both ways! In the snow because it smelled so bad my mom wouldn't let me print inside!"
Hahah! It really did feel like that some days.
It's odd how visually similar some of the interfaces of that old slicer software is to Amiga software I used in the early 90s. That style actually appeals to me. Buttons - with text! No need to remember which function is activated by a small, random color smear of one of a hundred on-screen icons (07:55 in the video shows what I mean)
I love this. Great to see how far the tech has come and the steps of improvement we took to get here. Thank you for your time.
This was fascinating to watch. I only got into 3D printing in June 2020, so by then slicers and 3D printers were pretty much sorted. Amazing to see how far the hobby has come in 10 years!
you went absolutely nuts with the CAD on your icing 3d printer good lord
You're taking me back to my start of 3D printing, which was also ten years ago. I remember when Repetier Host was the new thing! Oh Mendel 2, you will be missed. Later on when I moved to Cura for slicing after being away from printing for about a year, I was amazed at the new pathfinding! It felt like an entirely new printer.
I just had the same experience! Started in the summer of 2014, then life happened in the intervening years and comparing my latest stuff to the few remaining prints I've got hanging around from then is wild.
Do the artifacts maybe have to do with the numerical precision ? I know that in recent Prusaslicer versions they had added various resolution / precision settings. So maybe you got more artificats if older software intentionally made compromises in numerical precision ?
I remember using Replicator G and having to wait 45 minutes for a model slice. I'm so glad we have come so far.
haha yeah ! you'd hit slice then go do something else
I just got back into 3d printing. I played around with it for a couple of years about 7 years ago and man oh man have things changed. I used Slic3r on a Geeetech i3 POS that failed more than it got right. But now on an Ender 3 S1 Pro using the latest Cura, bridging is a breeze and support just snaps off. And now that retraction and z hop work so well, I can print things that the old printer just couldn't handle. Thanks for the flashback, Angus. This hobby is soooo much more practical now than it used to be.
I love how we can see how slicers have gotten better over time, and how the ease of 3d print has gotten!
This was very fascinating! I really liked learning about early 3D printing. Imagine how far 3D printing will come in another 10 years!
Have you seen the SLS printers they've got now? These big tower printers with hoppers filled with powdered material. It's actually pretty amazing. No support material at all, and the powder can be reused a bunch and you can take a failure and powder it to reuse.
@@anon_y_mousse Really? that's really cool!
@@anon_y_mousse Interesting to hear that the powder is used over! In 2019 I toured a massive industry-sponsored maker space in Europe and they told us about the EUR 1.5 bn SLS printer they'd just gotten in. A 300x300x300 mm powder fill cost 12k and they said they'd discard all leftovers after each print run to avoid any contamination.
The whole place oozed money and we felt a bit out of place there. I work at a small, somewhat underfunded maker space and we've always prided ourselves in trying to salvage, improvise and make do, in order to save costs, protect the environment and because we simply enjoy it. Picking the electronic waste can be a massive rush of happy chemicals in your brain! Over there they were literally: "We don't tinker. We produce!". It was all about efficiency and professional, marketable results.
I use concentric top/bottom sometimes for the look it gives for some designs. Especially if it is a circular shape :)
Such a great vid to let us that didn’t start at the beginning of this wonderful art that is 3d printing see a glimpse of what that was. Thanks again for your work good sir ! ❤️🙏🏻 we are all one
I love using a concentric bottom layer for filaments that have trouble with unsticking. Instead of anchoring to the perimeters (like rectilinear), it continues adding loops; it seems it better manages the thermal contraction, but you'll have to give it a test for yourself to confirm.
I'm also a big fan of concentric, I typically use it for both top and bottom fill mostly because I like the way it looks.
The reason Soildoodle gave for the low ABS temp was that where they placed the thermistor resulted in the reading being about 25 - 30 C lower than it actually was. They also did have heated beds if you went with the pro models and could get up to 100 C.
Oft now that you mention it I seem to remember hearing about the thermistor issue, but thought it was the opposite! Such a kludge fix
I still print on my Solidoodle 3 and can confirm the thermistor was capton taped to the nozzle so it read 30 deg lower then the heater block
That struggle with the supports brought back some memories of impaled fingertips and sliced knuckles. It also didn't help that back then printers were doing giant macrosteps on wiggly frames. Even with modern settings they would not have printed as clean as modern printers do.
the old Slic3r cat model looks almost like it was printed from voxels and it's actually a really cool style if you find somebody wants that kind of look (or you find a model that'll look great with it)
I would love to see a series of you recreating this project with the resources and technology of today!
Repetier was the first slicer I used and it was one I stuck with for years! Bringing back memories with that one.
19:58 that’s where I have learned that using concentric top layer helps a lot in the quality even in modern slicers because there is more for the next layer to stick to, it is never going in the same direction as the infill and it leaves a more finished look 😀
Love your videos too😀
I've been wondering this for ages now!!! I've got that same make magazine issue, and I've wanted a comparison between modern printer with old slicer vs a MakerBot cupcake printing with modern PrusaSlicer. It'd take some searching to find a still working unit, but I'd be really curious to see the results!
(If this gets covered in the video, I apologize for not waiting to comment, haha)
I will have to try track down an old makerbot or mendel! It's the reverse of the test in this video haha
@@MakersMuse Fantastic :)
In a similar vein, I've also had deep on my back burner the idea to see how close to the original suggested BOM you could get while trying to build something like the cupcake CNC. I imagine you'd have to fabricate some of the parts yourself, or substitute with modern components. Somehow I doubt there's still a wealth of MK6 Stepstruder parts out there, but maybe I'm wrong!
With which electronics, extruder and fw on the cupcake? Dc motor struder or stepper? Acceleration or not etc?
So interesting, thank you for the awesome episode!
Love your retro revisit and explanation of where we are today. Always learn a lot from your videos. Thanks!
Your microcenter deal is only available to just handful of your viewers because it's in store only. Here in the entire state of California, there's only 1 and it's too far away. And they are not in most states. 😢
Thanks for the Video. Brings back memories.
1am and I'm still watching your vids haha! Too addictive man 😅 watching from nsw
Something to remember is that Slic3r was pure Perl up to 1.1.7.
From 1.2.0 onwards more and more got rewritten in C++ (libslic3r).
Dude, your final year project is just nuts! Wow!
The first printer we bought was a Solidoodle 3, and it was a pain to get printing reliably most of the time. We still have it, and it turns out at this point you literally cant even give them away.
I have an Anycubic 4max pro now, and it has been a great experience!
man what a throwback i remember building the first ultimaker
concentric top/bottom infill looks great on some shapes!
Concentric doesn't just make a spiral, it follows the contour of anything on the layer. It can give some interesting results when used with silk filaments.
When you got that error withthe Benchy print it blew my mind! I vividly remember having that exact issue when printing Benchy for the first time with Slic3r back in the day, I was so confused lol. Crazy that you reproduced that error all these years later.
I think going back to such software is a good way to understand why there are so many settings now. And just to apperciate them.
@24:50 Careful application of a scalpel is the best solution that I have found for supports...
With each video I drool a little more over that eurorack setup
Since I live near a Microcenter I use inland filament almost exclusively. It really is fantastic stuff.
When I first started with 3D printing in 2012 on a Makerbot Replicator, I lived through the horrors of Skeinforge and seeing the title of this video gave me flashbacks. I was almost disappointed to see you were going with slic3r, which was a huge, huge improvement.
Although I never got slic3r to work with my Replicator for some reason (probably the same gcode flavor issue that prevented you from using Skeinforge) and so I went with Makerbot Desktop, which was also pretty nice to work with (if extremely limited).
The video is perfect and thoughtful, worth learning！
i love the "no stop" as it flung the bed off lol
Damn this bring back memory. The year was 2013, I had access to my first ever 3d printer, an i3 clone made out of wood. It kickstarted an university fablab that is still operation to this day. The slicer was slic3r, and tom channel had like… 10k subscriber lol
Love that you're an Industrial Designer. Worked with Craig Andrews, (long ago in Boston MA) Principal of "Design Momentum" in Sydney. From him I learned that Australia has a great manufacturing based focus on ID. Great to see your hands on and maker inspired degree project.
While I certainly feel that anyone who buys a printer simply on the strength of a single TH-cam advert deserves any unhappiness that results - I also feel that things have reached the point where any recommendation of "a great starting printer" needs to clarify which half of the hobby it's aimed at. Is it a "mostly works and will be a good platform for learning to do mods on" type printer, aimed at the tinkerer? Or is it a "not great for fiddling with but will reliably and repeatably work whenever you need" aimed at the CAD artist who just wants a tool for making their projects exist? The 3d printing community definitely includes both of these neighbourhoods and the two groups do have divergent needs and interests.
Also - I use concentric bottom infill a lot! I find it gives slightly better adhesion and looks more interesting.
In my case, I got an original Ender 3 back in the day. It's been wonderful for both aspects. Printing was amazing to a noob like me and printing upgrade pieces was fun. Now, it's a fire and forget printer. I haven't observed a first layer go down in over a year. That experience with the Ender lead me to a Hictop Prusa clone that has the potential to blow the Ender away. It's also really tweakable too. Maybe I'm out of place with my comment, but this is what your comment brought to my mind. Stay well, Internet person!
I guess I meant to add that, for $99, that Ender deal cannot be beat.
@@TechGorilla1987 An honest relaying of your personal experience, with no agenda attached, surely is never "out of place" !
I agree that the Ender price is a very good deal. However, your own comments make it clear that for you, tinkering with the printer was part of the fun.
I hate it. I absolutely hate it. I've had an Ender 5 for two years; I'd been saving for a Prusa Mk3 and decided that I had enough electronics and other skills to deal with the probable issues on the Ender and that saving several hundred dollars was a good thing. For the last year I've been devoutely wishing I'd saved for that Prusa instead. When it works, the Ender is a useful tool for me to create parts for my actual hobbies. But when something goes sideways - which I usually discover when I get home from work - instead of being able to indulge in a nice relaxing hobby, I instead have to spend time and energy figuring out why the f my printer isn't working this time.
Has that helped me build troubleshooting skills? Yes. Would some of those issues have occured on the Prusa? Probably. But now I have a Bambu X1C and the difference is night and day. I *like* using the X1C. I'm reluctantly still using the Ender-5 because it handles silk PLA better, and because there's a few things I can do in PrusaSlicer that I can't do in BambuSlicer.
But overall - having to deal with that gorram Ender-5 almost pushed me out of 3d printing. The only reason I stick with it was because I'd sunk too much money into the printer to just walk away. If I'd only spent 100$ on the thing, I guaruntee I'd have just given it away to be done with it. And then I'd never have gotten into learning CAD and making my own unique things, which is awesome.
To be fair, I don't know if the printer Angus is advertising would be nearly as frustrating an experience. But I do think it's very, very important that as a community we recognise that there are two different sorts of hobbyists using 3d printing, and shape our suggestions of "this is a good starting printer" to match what the user actually wants to do. For someone like you, who wants to tinker and mod and upgrade, a 99$ Ender-3 is hands-down perfect. For someone like me? I'd rather spend 1,000$ on a printer than *just works* than 100$ on one I have to constantly fight with.
I remember using Repetier on my first 3D printer, which was a Folger Tech i3 back in 2014?
Man that brings me back
Now I need an entire series on making the icing printer fully operational.
Very interesting. It's amazing how stuff that happened since I finished highschool has already become part of history
Seeing this is such a wild trip. I remember playing with 3d printers in like...2012-2013, and it was so fun, but I put it down because I just didn't have the time to commit to the DIY nature of it all. 3d printing parts to improve it, wiring new power supplies and I remember what a big deal it was to add a raspberry pi based solution to have an SD card! There was so much to do, but the print quality wasn't ever that great for me. I put it down for awhile.
Cut to 2024 where I found an Ender 3 pro at a good price, and what a difference the decade made. I still get to have my DIY fun, upgrading parts, etc, but god it's so amazing how out of the box, I was now able to just...print files off an SD card with Cura slicer. and the quality is nothing like I could have gotten 10+ years ago without a LOT of work.
Its amazing 3D printing ever took off with supports and settings like that.
Really great content Angus.
That stepping pattern that you pointed out on the cat is always prominent on resin printers. I've only ever seen resin prints in person as my friend has one. I didn't even think FDM prints don't usually have those. That's very interesting to me.
Yeah that would make sense, as the ‘stepping’ would just be because of the LCD pixels
I have a colleague who absolutely loves the Stratasys we have at work and its 2007 slicer.
There are two layer height settings. 0.254mm and 0.324mm. You can also choose between «sparse» and «smart» infill. That’s your only two settings.
It does NOT handle any kind of unmanifoldness.
Ypu have to sit there for hours to let the printer warm up, and if you leave and don’t come back in time, it goes into standby and STOPS PREHEATING so you have to wait again.
Tom totally had a point calling it "Slic Three R". I remember first time getting into 3D printing and hearing from people that I need to get "the slicer". I googled that and downloaded the first, most popular result, which was a totally wrong software. Then I spent 2 days being totally confused trying to make sense of it. I think whatever I found wasn't even 3D-printing-related.
A travel down Memory Lane... My old prusa clone was made almost entirely of MDF (graber i3 model) and didn't even have a parts fan! Had to point a fan at the printer while making the fan shroud and ducts😅 I remember being totally overwhelmed by Skeinforge settings. There was also Kisslicer, but never actually used it. Another memory unlocked by this video: using the "Triffid Hunter's Calibration Guide" to fine adjust the extrusion steps and rate...
Very cool walk down history lane mate loooved it!
I will say, that the main print quality improvements I've seen in my old MakerBot Rep2x are from slicer updates, and from filament improvements. The old MakerBot slicer (and the Arduino/processing ide style one whose name i forget) was blown away by Cura 3.x, and then it got even better when I upgraded to PrusaSlicer, partially leveraging some configs for a Flash Forge Creator Pro (basically a Rep2 clone). ABS was a pain to print, PETG isn't quite as bad but had a learning curve, and amazingly for an abs-focused machine, PLA Plus/pro, which I tried "on accident" as I was gifted glow filament in that polymer instead of ABS, has been the most consistently lovely results: it just works. I did end up adding a part cooling fan, of course, and often run with the lid off and or door open.
I still desperately avoid support material. I guess I am still stuck in the past? Maybe haven't figured out how to configure it right...
Loved this video!
Solidoodle was the first printer I used and printed ABS. It did have a heated bed. Sliced with Skeinforge.
I used skeinforge back in the day, probably still have it too on my old laptop, somewhere.
It worked well enough. Even preferred it over the "new" slic3r.
But then I transitioned away to Cura, then back to slic3r, then to this fan dangled Simplify3D, then to PrusaSlicer.
Between firmware optimisation and slicer optimisation, skeinforge still holds a special place
My first experience with 3d printing was 2014 when we did a class project together with the local university, we designed our files to print without support, unfortunately the person who sliced them put them in the wrong orientation so they were printed with maximum support material and with the layer lines perpendicular to the direction of force, which was especially bad since layer adhesion was terrible, we put our drone together, but taking off the support material was a pain and the arms did eventually break.
Thank you Angus, now I feel like an old wizard with grey/whitish beard.
you can use skeinforge pretty easily on windows 11 and get it printing pretty well if you know it. it has some features like bridging internal floors from wall to wall that newer slicers still don't seem to do as an option and it prints pretty similar to modern slicers and you have pressure advance etc in firmware now so you don't need that from the slicer. I still have it as working.
with skeinforge if you use with repetier host right now it does not automatically import the produced gcode properly so you have to drag it to it after slicing but it's not like the software itself didn't work in 10/11.
Slicers have come so far just in the past 2-3 years. You're brave! 😂
i just took advantage of the $99 ender 3 from the last video and i can confirm it still works and i now have a second ender 3 for half the price of the first one
Ah this brings back so many memories
Hey there! I was printint on a Solidoodle 3 at this time. It did print ABS, very well for its era. I actuslly miss some features in Slic3r/repetier host that no linger exist. We have cameras now, but back then they had a 3d image if the Gcode veing sent ti the printer where you could watch aa CG 3D live feed if your print, or view it kayer by layer. It also had a graphical view of ask/demand from your mother board to return as far as tracking tenps and such. Pretty neat stuff baxk then
Ive had multiple printers from enders to prusa and I have never been as happy as I am now with my X1C.
Thank you for another fun video Angus! No disrespect but i loved when everyone used the backward facing "e" as a 3 slic3r i just get a huge smile when Tom mentioned slic 3 r "sorry Tom and others" but you frequently made my day.
Big up the Cubex Duo from back in the day. What a weapon 😂
I started using 3D printer slightly before 2020. And I'm so impressed that even I witnessed some slicer improvements live.
The last one I had before selling my Ender 3 Pro was variable line widths. I immediately loved it. Because I'm a mechanical engineer and I printed many small detailed parts. Sometimes I designed the complex parts myself. But non-variable line width added some level of uncertainty to the prints. There would be so many very small filling lines that the machine would do many vibration movements. And vibration is not something I like. Especially after I learned that I could use much higher than default accelerations.
I just gave Cura changelog a check, and I noticed that they added "heat the nozzle and bed at the same time for Ender 3 Pro" on V5.1, which is crazy good. I couldn't try it myself, but I always felt the need for that. Because of not having that, I would always use preheat profiles of the machine. If I forget the preheat before starting the print, I would either cancel the print during heating, or manually add the missing heating. This change is huge! An exact same time may not be the best for preheat starts. The time between heating starts for the nozzle and the bed can be adjusted for completing the preheat at the same time. But even starting together is great!
Cura 5.0 marketplace improvements were also great. Vanilla Cura is good, but I always preferred to have some marketplace plugins.
And of course, many of the greatest changes are the behind the scenes improvements. Cura was not difficult to use when I started. But when I took a break from printing for a few months, it was much easier to use when I started printing again.
My FlashForge Creator Pro came with ReplicatorG back in 2016, but it was such a pain to use that I didn't even try. I looked for an alternative and found Slic3r, which at that time was already a bit more advanced than the version you're showing here. It already had a usable 3D slicing preview. Support generation was better with more parameters that could be tweaked to avoid the welding issue, but still it was bad enough that even to this day I will always avoid the need for supports whenever I can. However, the overall quality of what Slic3r produced was pretty good, and I'm amazed that you demonstrated it was already pretty good back in 2012.
I remember a friend would print decent sized abs parts on his solidoodle (without a heated bed), just by printing very slowly, using a ton of glue stick + painters tape
That micro center ender 3 pro deal is crazy, im not in need of a snd 3d printer right now buy i just had to pick one up, not i have a Lk5 pro and a ender 3 pro, thank you so much.
IT does amaze me how much a slicer can really tweak a machine for the better.
i got a solidoodel 3 from school back in 2019 when i was 16 and it prints very good without changing the motherboard. I've added a few things
and to answer your question angus yes solidoodle 3dprinters did have a heated bed
Love your vids! I'm bringing out my Flashforge Finder in order to make next summers lures. There are Pikes to catch 🤣
i remember setting up my old ender3 with slic3r and having to change the movement settings for the motors. The steppers used on the ender3 models match up best in .04mm steps. I don't exactly remember what all i changed, but it involved changing the degrees/step and getting it to match up correctly. it also solved some of the artifacting issues.
For layer heights, i've had the best success at .08mm, .12mm, .16mm, etc. It removes some of the odd gapping that 0.1mm and .15mm layer heights caused.
I'm not sure how true this still is, or if it's still how things work best, I've moved on to the ender3 S1 pro, and it still seems to print best in multiples of .04mm layer heights.
A friend of mine I believe still has a functional ThingOMatic and the skeinforge install for it.
Wow... I remember getting my printer in 2014. Powerspec 3DX (a Flashforge Creator X clone). Came with the ReplicatorG software, which was simply basic at the time. It also used the Markerbot x3g binary files, so I had to run it through a converter, which didn't work. For the longest time my workflow was to slice it in Slic3r 1.2 (which I was always using the beta version), then to take the gcode and run it through ReplicatorG (now modified for Sailfish firmware). And even then, Slic3r supports were bad, and it had wall adhesion issues (straight wall layers were literally separating).
It wasn't until I bit the bucket on Simplify3D, replaced the bowden tubes (which were both blocked), and changed to hardened nozzles that my prints turned out a lot better and printing things were much more fun. (still a chore, I still manually level my bed, and I have to watch for when my filament runs out)
I started printing on a WANHAO 3 dual extruder about a year and a half ago using slicer, what a nightmare as there were no guides or how to when you searched for the printer Google laughed at me. None the less I managed to push through and made the best of what I had. I have since upgraded to a ender 3 max and actually have a much better understanding of the slicer and settings. I'm a little undecided about using the actual official creality slicer? You have great videos and insights keep it up
Seeing that ad for the Solidoodle 2 brought me back for sure.
You're correct about them being easy to use nowadays. Ultimaker Cura has built-in profiles for every printer imaginable, and you can easily get away with the non-advanced settings, which means you only really have to mess with 5 options.
holy crap i remember all this my first printer was a velleman k8200 kit taught me alot building it. i used to use repetier
impressive work 👍 Wow.
Fantastic video as always 👍🙂
How come that you don't cleanup the Bency in Windows 3D builder?
Thanks for sharing your experience with all of us 👍🙂
I mean it has only been 4 years since I fired up my prusa clone, But this is pretty inspiring to get back into it.
oh man im getting flashbacks to freshman year of college, looking up solidoodle and kickstarter campaigns for early makerbot knockoffs. i swear i can smell the lab i sat in while doing all the temp and print volume comparisons. almost no heated beds, no standards, and a lot of companies thought they could get away with ABS prints if they stuck the whole thing in a flimsy plastic box for a "controlled environment". i was lucky enough to go to a nerd school where we had a makerspace with guys who put the hours in over time to fix all those settings as least. Id like to see the mess the default settings would cause but maybe it would hit too close to home lol.
Man I remember building a Cupcake CNC and Thing-O-Matic back in high school. I have completely forgotten about the software we used for those.
No! Stop! ... awesome. Thank you for including that.
Up until last month when a servo of my MiniFab broke I worked with Repetier Host and used Slic3r.. never realised it was that outdated until I tried finding a replacement servo or even documentation for it.
thinking back to early 3d printers I always found wood to be very hilarious, at the time it made sense because it was that or a mess of rods (acrylic is annoying to work with in my opinion) but in retrospect making a machine out of wood with a giant home milled heated bed that maybe could have been better insulated and a loosely attached hot chunk of brass flying around so I could stick it in my house was maybe not my best idea ever.
If only I had known you were making this video! I got in to 3D printing ten or twelve years ago with a Flashforge 3D, which I think is a Chinese clone of a Makerbot. I used the ReplicatorG UI that came with it and had Skeinforge and Slic3r incorporated in it.
The thing is I'm still using it to this day, both the machine and the slicer. I only use Skeinforge, which I last updated years ago to version 50. I had tried using the Slic3r but could never get a good print with it. The only thing that has changed since then is that I also got a small resin printer, the Anycubic Photon which compliments the Flashforge rather than replacing it.
From time to time I think about upgrading but I'm discouraged by the new learning curve I'll have to climb and even with today's much better technology it will probably take me a long time until I can print stuff at least as good as I can with my current machine and slicer.
100% what you say about supports. I always regretted it when I used them and instead I construct my own supports as part of the model, making them end in thin edges where they contact the model. It has generally worked well for me and doesn't take all that much effort to builkd in to the model.
Maybe one day I find the courage and the time to update.
I love your content and I wish for a Micro Center in Las Vegas, NV. Prusa slicer I don't have the greatest understanding of support material (separation from the model), Cura was easier but Prusa I have gotten used to and it works much better than Cura accept the support material separation.
I think another part you didn't mention is the precision of the newer printers (talk about rigid compared to the old flying buttresses) and the consistency of filament both in terms of uniformity of product and precision of size. So few clogs. No winding errors. No underextrusion based on the filament being too small or clogged because the filament was swollen bigger than the bowden or nozzle.
Nice to know benchy doesn't just benchmark your printer/setting it also benchmarks your slicer.
Being on the presence of so much wisdom and expertise, always make me forgot how young most of you content creators are.
I don´t mean it in a bad way, quite the opposite! I point that cause when you get older, 10 years become just a blink, and 2012 actually feels like yesterday to me. In fact, the Windows 7 situation almost made me laught as I still use a Win7 desktop as my second main computer half the time, and if feels like "just a couple years ago" when I retired to the shelf my XP one when it ran out of long term support.