A couple of times. It depends on the printer, the filament and the user. While the cleaning filament is a consumable, it’ll probably outlast my printer, since you only need to use a few centimeters per cleaning.

Happy to help. Feel free to message me if you have any more questions later on.

I haven’t had my printer clog up completely anymore since I started using it. That’s the advantage I’m seeing.

I’m extremely happy with my Elegoo Neptune 3 Pro. I got mine for about 165 bucks last year (new) and it looks like you can still find it for about this much.

A few things to do to get decent results out of it (these points also apply to most other 3D printers):

• Spend a couple of hours researching aspects like which print settings to use for which kind of print. Experiment and test - there are all sorts of useful test files on the usual sites.

• Put it in a well ventilated room that you’re not spending much time in, especially if your asthmatic. Both noise and air pollution are substantial.

• Calibrate it properly: This printer, unlike its successor, has automatic bed calibration, so this aspect is a breeze.

• Be careful with the belt tensioning. You can accidentally overdo this. Ask me how I found out…

• Get the following small accessories that you will inevitably need: Tweezers, a small wire brush (tooth brush size) to clean the nozzle with, spare nozzles in a few sizes (look up how to change them - the printer needs to be hot for this), cleaning filament (use it any time you’re changing between different filament types), a long “clog poke” needle with a proper handle (trust me, you’ll need it eventually), a pair of wire cutters (to cut filament), a scraper with plastic blades (to clean up the print bed and remove some especially sticky prints without damaging the bed) and a few sticks of glue for bed adhesion with some materials. A spare PEI bed sheet also makes sense.

• Make sure to use dry filament. No other point on this list has a bigger impact on print quality. This means that a decent filament dryer is mandatory. I went with a Creality Space Pi for about 65 bucks (don’t get cheaper models with fake sensors). You can print directly from this dryer, but make sure it’s bolted to the desk, since the printer will otherwise pull it across said desk. Store the filament, once dried, in an air-tight and light-protected place. I recommend large plastic cereal boxes with a handful of desiccant each (the type that discolors when it’s used up), placed in either cardboard boxes or dark cupboard. If you’re feeling fancy, you can place air humidity and temperature sensors in each box. Do all of this and you can achieve prints that rival and even exceed those of machines that cost more than ten times as much a few years ago. Sure, the prints will take about three times as much as on an expensive printer, but having used both, I’ve been consistently impressed by the quality of the prints this cheap thing manages to achieve.

• Don’t buy the cheapest filament possible. Cheaper filament tends to have inconsistent diameters, which can ruin prints. 20 bucks a spool is a good middle ground for normal filament. Fancier materials can cost a lot more, but aren’t needed unless you actually need them for a print due to their appearance or other properties. Having said that, inexpensive, but properly dried filament is still superior to expensive filament that was allowed to soak in moisture from the air and get blasted by light for a few weeks.

• This particular printer appears to be ideal for PETG, which is considered a more challenging material to print compared to PLA, but I’m actually getting better results with it more easily than with PLA. Bed adhesion in particular is far superior, to the point that I have to wrangle with some prints to get them off the damn thing. Since it costs about the same per spool and has superior properties (UV, strength, elasticity), it’s a no-brainer, especially for functional prints. I doubt I would have been able to print a complex full-size (and quite dangerous) repeating crossbow after a just three weeks of learning to use this printer had I used PLA instead of PETG.

• If you don’t want to run to and from your printer with a microSD card with the print files all the time, set up an Octoprint print server. I’m using an older laptop for this, but you can even use Android devices (provided they aren’t too slow). This allows you to control the printer over your network - and with a webcam, you can monitor prints in real-time. Octoprint is not trivial to set up, but if you can follow instructions and have at least intermediary computer skills, it’s doable.

A word of warning: You need to be able and willing to tinker, experiment and have the ability to deal with failures and issues for this hobby. No printer on the market, including far fancier and more expensive models (I’ve also worked with those) are trouble-free. If you’re the kind of person who has been building and troubleshooting computers since their 12th birthday, you’re probably fine, but if you’re more the kind of person who buys electronic devices instead of building them and needs help from others any time they go wrong, it’s probably not the right hobby for you.

Clearly a lot of thought and effort went into this, but for as much as I enjoy 3D printing myself and finding new uses for this technology, I really don’t think this makes much sense. It’s a solution in search of a problem, which is a trap one can easily fall into with 3D printing in particular.

The frame is by far the cheapest part of a pair of glasses, it needs to be durable (this one is not and can not be) and UV resistant (PLA isn’t - why not at least use a better filament?). The 1940s-looking design isn’t helping either, unless you want to cosplay as a cough Indiana Jones villain (I know it’s much older, as mentioned in the text, but that’s the association people are going to make). You’d think that a proof of concept like this would at least try and make use of the unique advantages inherent to 3D printing to come up with a design that isn’t possible or economically feasible with mass-produced glasses, but there’s none of that here - apart from the high degree of customization, but I would personally rather trust a professional to fit glasses to my head instead of winging it myself.

This statement simply isn’t correct. I can procure much faster chips as a consumer, even at the low end. This isn’t the fastest single board computer either, not by a long shot. Like I said in another comment, it’s only about as fast as a 2010 Macbook Pro. That’s not “very fast” by any metric.

I’m using a Core i3-N305 based single-board computer (Odroid H4) for my Plex server and it performs easily twice as well at just 3W more - while being x86 and fully compatible with any relevant OS without having to modify boot loaders and drivers or worry about incompatibilities. Reducing its power draw to the 12W of this chip would still easily outperform the Rockchip and would allow for a smaller heat sink. Best of all, MSRP is nearly the same compared to the CM3588 with the RK3588 (admittedly without RAM). You’d have to do something to the rear IO to make it slim enough for use in a laptop project, but that’s trivial on a project like this.

Huh, it uses the same Rockchip SoC - but they are dishonestly claiming that it’s “very fast”. Not a good look.

This is a highly impressive project, not just for a high school senior, but it should be stressed that this is nowhere near as powerful as a similarly priced modern laptop. This is a legendary school project, impressive enough to open doors to universities and lay the foundation for a successful career in the computer industry, but not really something you should try and build yourself if you’re looking for a laptop in this price range.

A Geekbench 5 single-core score of 492 and a multi-core score of 2019 points are about comparable to a Macbook Pro from fifteen years ago. There is a small NPU present on the chip, which the old Macbook doesn’t have, but if that’s not important to your use case (which is very likely), then this device is not suitable for anything but the most basic tasks and will feel sluggish with any current software. There’s a reason the video barely shows the device in use, because it just wouldn’t be very pleasant to look at.

ChatGPT has taken the joy out of these sites more than creeps have, because you just can’t really be sure anymore that there isn’t some sort of LLM at the other end.

Thank you, I’ll check these out.

Thanks for the reply. I might come back to you at some point.

A quick heads up: For some reason, this reply does not appear in my Inbox here on Beehaw. No idea why, maybe it’s worth looking into.

Any cool webcomics you can recommend? Doesn’t matter how obscure or weird they might be. I haven’t read any, not even xkcd, in ages.

The motor that pulls in the filament is ridiculously strong on this printer. It has never been unable to feed, even if it had to drag the entire printer or a full filament roll across the table. It has broken filament holders and arms, to the point that I had to modify the current solution with a metal core so that it wouldn’t snap apart. I’m feeding from a filament dryer and I had build a crazy contraption that fixes the thing in place so that it’s not dragged around by the sheer torque of this motor - and after this mishap, I have clamped the printer down with metal profiles. My worry is that the next time a filament roll gets stuck sideways in the dryer, the printer will tear itself apart or at the very least dislocate the print head (or destroy the plastic housing of the dryer). We’ll see.

Either way, I adore this thing. With careful calibration and the properly dried and stored material (mostly that, I have to admit), I’ve been able to exceed the print quality of printers more than ten times as expensive, make complex functional prints within days of setting the thing up for the first time. It just took two or three times as long per print.

You’ll quickly realize that this place isn’t fundamentally different from reddit from an end-user perspective. The same highly opinionated people who think they are better than you (I’m not excluding myself from this, but there are quite a few others here who tend to lean far more left politically than your typical reddit user, sometimes until they fall on their knees and kiss Stalin’s boots), the same kind of moderators with god complexes as in every other forum ever since forums have existed, the same misinformation and propaganda, the same potential for people to ruin your day by showing their true colors. The best intentions by the creators don’t really change all that much, because they are flawed human being like all of us and because it’s ultimately still just the same flawed human beings who make up the user base, people who are not suddenly behaving differently, just because there’s some vague rule to “bee nice” in the sidebar.

Make a decentralized copy of reddit and you get people behaving like they are on reddit, it’s as simple as that.

You can totally have nice time here and I have managed to get my own blood pressure back down to the usual far too low levels by blocking a few communities with the worst moderators and users (or with topics that showed less flattering sides of their personalities and beliefs) and spending more time on topics that offer less potential for conflict, but ultimately, it’s the same ol’ as smaller subreddits or smaller forums of old. The best thing you can do is use Beehaw like a smoker would use an e-cig: As a (hopefully) less harmful detox from social media that ultimately leads to abstinence. I’m not there yet and might never get there, because it’s still social media and still addictive.

Either way, welcome to smaller reddit with bees and lemmings. Sorry for the slightly less upbeat introduction and I hope you’ll still enjoy your stay.

I had a nice day playing board games with my family (Dorfromantik ftw!) and wrestling with my cheap 3D printer (Elegoo Neptune 3 Pro) - which is strong enough to lift itself, not exactly light at 8.1kg, almost entirely off the table on a filament string. Can you believe it? I wish I had taken a photo of this mishap.

Thanks, I’ll give it a go!

How mature is the game? Can it be recommended to players looking for a complete experience or are there still many bugs and obviously unfinished features?

What matters is that TI has an effective monopoly on scientific and graphic calculators in the US in particular, which means that it’s the platform that matters to most. It’s irrelevant whether or not some alternative is better. It’s also extremely widely supported by software and tutorials.

There is one crucial difference between image editing software like Photshop and Gimp vs. 3D software suites like Maya and Blender: My hypothesis is (and feel free to pick this apart) that you can totally teach yourself to use the former rather competently without any outside help, not even documentation and tutorials, but I would argue that this is nearly impossible with the latter due to their far greater complexity. This in turn means that people will look up guides and tutorials and learn the idiosyncratic UI patterns that way, which is why Blender with its extremely nonstandard controls managed to gain a foothold far beyond the broke hobbyist sphere.

Thanks for gently letting me down on RISC OS. I guessed that there wasn’t much going on with it, but I wanted to be sure.

Forks to do this have come and gone.

Oh, absolutely. None of them have any momentum and suffer from 1) long-time Gimp users usually not caring 2) former or present Photoshop users (in the case of PS imitations) rarely hearing about them and 3) those that do being hesitant to commit to them due to both their often half-baked nature and what you said (and also no plugin support, which is one of those things that binds people to Adobe, often against their will).

This is part of a thing with open source, it’s not possible to force something on the developers.

Most open source projects are firmly in the hands of rather conservative people who are doing their thing and really don’t care about what people think. I’ve seen it often enough. I’m essentially saying the same thing as you do, but less kindly. It at least partially explains why so many projects are suffering from severely outdated UI designs, both in good and bad ways. Maybe it’s the lack of economic pressure and competition too, especially with programs like Gimp that aren’t actually competing with commercial tools, even though some of them could if there was enough motivation.

I am totally a freak in my software background

You’ve piqued my curiosity though. Risc OS is one of few operating systems of note I’ve never actually tried (and I have tried some freaky stuff - remember BeOS?). Let’s say I wanted to give it a go today (in a VM) would you recommend it and if you do, which of the two (Open or not) should I choose? What can you actually do with it today?

You have to admit though that your background is quite unusual. I would assume that there are far more people looking for a free alternative to Photoshop after having used Photoshop for a long time (especially in the wake of the switch to a subscription model, but even earlier when prices were increased) instead of coming from an OS and using tools written for an OS that even among techies are extremely niche.