I have been mostly happy with my flashforge AD5X starting as a newbie. Its got a good range of material capabilities, but 95% of the time I’m printing PLA anyway. PLA is the most common filament by far.

I will say I have had two hot ends (the part the filiment comes out of) get covered in enough filament they broke during a misprint ($40 repair each).

I don’t really have experience with other makes/models but that is my loose endorsement of the AD5X. My only real complaint is how expensive the nozzles are compared to other brands.

I think we can both agree tautology works because it works, and that’s good enough for me.

Well, them and the bandits, I’d imagine.

I spun it up it up in may to fool around. Today I opened a brand new air purifier and imeaditley disassembled it to flash ESPHome firmware on it. It never once ran stock.

One thing I’ve noticed: my self hosted services are rarley, if ever, hounding me to check out features. I cannot emphasise enough how much I loathe a program fighting for my attention.

Maybe? It was/is on an old win10 I keep around (and came with it).

There’s a million better options, but I was glad it was there. Good way to get some kid fooling around early the way paint did. You used to be able to scan things with your surface and import them into builder (this was a good while back).

I’m going to toss out Microsoft 3D builder, strictly to dip your toe in the water. It’s bare bones and basically MS Paint but when I was getting started I used it for very simple stuff. I still use it if I’m making dead simple modifications/combinations of existing .STL files.

Microsoft actually had some cool ideas in the early/mid 2010s. Still had all the proprietary bullshit but there was at least nifty stuff going on.

this makes me feel much better. I’m debating spooling it up on wifi after disconnecting it and piecing it back together.

thank you! I had looked at the documentation but was unable to find that. I think to be safe I’m going to follow what @autriyo@feddit.org said as well. There’s no reason not to label them.

Which means, sorry future people stumbling on this, I will not be providing definitive evidence one way or the other on this.

So I have a FlashForge AD5X with the MMU. It worked amazing out of the box, including flawlessly doing some TPU. They actually mentioned the MMU was designed with TPU in mind. That being said: I have been struggling with basic PLA, even after swapping to nozzle that has run only PLA (even though I only ran <10g of TPU through it). I am still new to a lot of this, and don’t feel experienced enough to fault the hardware. What I can say though is it does seem folks are specifically improving the ability of MMUs to handle flexibles. A big reason I got it was to be able to do ABS parts with TPU gaskets. Ask me in a few months.

yeah, like I always liked the Pi as essentially an arduino and easier way to spit stuff out to a screen, and native wifi. As they evolved some of the micro-pc stuff was cool for hosting a few services, but why do they keep pushing into the mini-pc sphere.

I guess I get that this is an expansion of the Pi-5, and that does kind of make sense for those who want it, but it seems like they’re going to lose the plot in one of these generations soon.

You can be pretty technical/capable and still write that article (especially if you have technical expertise outside programming). I have never felt so seen.

I worked my way up from arduino -> RasPi -> Debian -> Self hosting quite a few things. I’m very much a hobbyist/novice, but I’m used to learning. It is so hard to read some documentation and understand what something even does sometimes. This goes double for incredibly useful tools for monitoring/implementing other tools. Like I swear I read the kubernetes descriptions 30x before I realized what in the hell it actually does, and now I’m probably about to break my entire home network with it because I think it’s cool as hell.

Also, to your comment specifically: I can get sensors on PCBs I personally made collecting data, throwing it through my own MQTT broker, hosting a dashboard etc, all at a remote site across state lines. I have no idea wtf markdown is. I use yaml for HA stuff with the ESPs, but I don’t know why markdown is a thing and it’s not just python.

And I am 1000% sure there is a very good reason for 98% of this. But yes I found this article hilarious. In my personal circle of hell all nouns end in “-ly”.

Same here. Printing something like say, a cow, with frequent swaps would be wasteful, but I’ll do parts with 1-2 color swaps. It’s mostly nice as you said though to have multiples “locked and loaded” to do a 1 filament print.

Absolutely. I don’t watch every giants game but it seems like the hallmark of his career is keeping games close… Regardless of if they should be easy wins or outright losses… For a quarter or two and then imploding.

Hope they sort it. Giants cost my bills historically but also cost tom brady, which means I like em.

I’m so bummed for him. Can’t deny the reality but he was a part of some damn fun years in Buffalo.

2nd gramps. I spooled it up in about 2mins on an unraid server.

So that’s what I thought… Except for similar issu s with extended drying.

I building an enclosure with a rotary dehumidifier to keep things low, but despite the tell tale signs I think something else was going on.

Me to! I was almost done with a batch of prints for a friends fundraiser (30x hat looms for knitting. Great little project, they’re knitting hats for the premies at the NICU, so they needed a custom model for the tiny babys). I think you’re right. With the oozing and whatnot that has to be it. I brought up the fundraiser because it had me making multiple prints of the same file. When I found a setting that worked (moving to the 0.20), the first few worked, but were a bit stringy, but by the 3rd/4th one they were printing flawlessly.

I guess maybe when things got screwed up at 0.16 the nozzle had some funkiness, and with enough material it worked itself through? Still doesn’t explain why that brand new nozzle screwed up in the first place at 0.16 (which suggests the flow rate issue you brought up), but I’ll take the win.

Thanks! This kind of insight is super helpful. Are you a poster here often? I was able to get decent prints again by changing the layer from 0.16 to 0.20. Still disappointed and confused as to what happened, but will probably keep the printer. Not sure if it makes sense to do a “wrap up” post for anyone else searching later.

Also: go team venture!

correct. I initiated a return with amazon. I have had a 250g spool in the drier since about 10am today, and will try it this evening, but if that doesn’t work I’m just returning it.

In trying to do a cold pull (which you do in this machine by attaching the nozzle upside down and manually pushing filament in), it was oozing and popping with the remnants of the previous filament, which to me says very wet filament?

I had tried drying filament for ~8hrs yesterday with no good results. Is there something else that could cause the oozing issue? My friend brought up that maybe the temperature sensor isn’t working properly and it’s hotter than it thinks it is?