Ask HN: Have you used a 3D Printer?
49 comments
Maybe 9? If you find yourself making a lot of jigs, small thingies to hold one thing to another, or little mechanisms, it's a huge timesaver. Making a nice adjustable mount for a camera goes from being a lot of machining to a few hours design work.
Basically, it's very good for making things for holding awkward pieces in place while you machine them, or for holding a tool in place while you make something. Or like, all the little cable clips and bits of plastic you use to hold other components in place.
Basically, it's very good for making things for holding awkward pieces in place while you machine them, or for holding a tool in place while you make something. Or like, all the little cable clips and bits of plastic you use to hold other components in place.
FDM 7/10 when working 2/10 when trying to fix and debug firmware and retest etc…
Resin… fucking -1/10 because the entire experience is terrible if you aren’t going to use it often … I’m trying to sell all my resin stuff and try replacing it with a different printer I won’t hate if I use it only once a month.
Full disclosure I own 4 printers, a laser scanner and at any one time only one of which is always working and it’s the god damn miserable resin printer because I don’t use it enough to break it.
Resin… fucking -1/10 because the entire experience is terrible if you aren’t going to use it often … I’m trying to sell all my resin stuff and try replacing it with a different printer I won’t hate if I use it only once a month.
Full disclosure I own 4 printers, a laser scanner and at any one time only one of which is always working and it’s the god damn miserable resin printer because I don’t use it enough to break it.
I've used one maybe once and it went alright.
One of my close friends, however, uses them to make a living selling cosplay props/armor, and I've even put some of my own money into investing in a pair of giant resin printers. He's knowledgeable enough that the results are a solid 8 or 10 out of 10, but holy shit the amount of fiddling he has to do to squeeze out every last ounce of speed from what's inevitably a slow process without producing misprints is insane.
One of my close friends, however, uses them to make a living selling cosplay props/armor, and I've even put some of my own money into investing in a pair of giant resin printers. He's knowledgeable enough that the results are a solid 8 or 10 out of 10, but holy shit the amount of fiddling he has to do to squeeze out every last ounce of speed from what's inevitably a slow process without producing misprints is insane.
6/10, for FDM on plastics; mainly PLA and ABS. Bought an Ender3; dumped it after a month. Now have a Raise3D E2 (FDM printer) for prototyping parts and enclosures.
Overall experience is... can be finicky depending on what you're printing, the plastic type (PLA is generally the easiest; PETG will come out stringly; ABS has certain advantages, but can be more finicky), and the printer. I think the overall experience comes down to both use case and equipment.
Online articles and discussions are biased towards people who treat it as a hobby - with this in mind, the finickyness is viewed as a perk; it allows you to build skills working around the various problems, troubleshoot problems with a community, upgrade your printers for fun etc.
Overall, it would be nice to
Overall experience is... can be finicky depending on what you're printing, the plastic type (PLA is generally the easiest; PETG will come out stringly; ABS has certain advantages, but can be more finicky), and the printer. I think the overall experience comes down to both use case and equipment.
Online articles and discussions are biased towards people who treat it as a hobby - with this in mind, the finickyness is viewed as a perk; it allows you to build skills working around the various problems, troubleshoot problems with a community, upgrade your printers for fun etc.
Overall, it would be nice to
Treated as a hobby, for me personally, it's 9/10. I spent a few days this week upgrading my Ender 3 with an extension kit to allow for much bigger prints. Great fun. It all reminds me a lot of messing around with PC clone hardware in the early days.
If I were doing it for a living... Well, getting the printer dialed in to reliably produce prints is a bit of a black art - but maybe the higher end ones are better for that?
Come to think of it, a lot of 3D printer owners seem to spend all their time printing new parts for the printer, which is endearingly circular...
If I were doing it for a living... Well, getting the printer dialed in to reliably produce prints is a bit of a black art - but maybe the higher end ones are better for that?
Come to think of it, a lot of 3D printer owners seem to spend all their time printing new parts for the printer, which is endearingly circular...
From what I've heard, modification is both the strong point and the weak point of the Ender 3. There are tons of community-designed modifications, many of which you can print yourself without having to but a lot of parts off the shelf, but to actually get consistent prints you need to use some of those upgrades.
My girlfriend and I bought a Prusa i3 mk3s+ together, and despite going with the kit version to save money it was really easy to get good quality prints right away. One of the big things that I think helps with this is that Prusa has an auto bed leveling feature, so our printer checks the height of a bunch of points on the bed in a 9x9 grid before each print. It can then build a mesh of the print bed and use that mesh to adjust how it prints to compensate for a bed that's not perfectly level or even not perfectly flat.
My girlfriend and I bought a Prusa i3 mk3s+ together, and despite going with the kit version to save money it was really easy to get good quality prints right away. One of the big things that I think helps with this is that Prusa has an auto bed leveling feature, so our printer checks the height of a bunch of points on the bed in a 9x9 grid before each print. It can then build a mesh of the print bed and use that mesh to adjust how it prints to compensate for a bed that's not perfectly level or even not perfectly flat.
Buying a BLTouch (leveling probe) made a huge difference to the ease of use on the Ender for me, so yeah, a printer with one out of the box sounds like a good choice.
Some of the gory details of that upgrade here: https://paperstack.com/ender_extended/
I have a cheap $200 monoprice printer. I followed the advice of others and it works reasonably well. I've printed a few large threaded nuts and bolts to get a feel for what's possible, and haven't used it since. It's the CAD side of it that gets me... I just can't stomach getting into bed with AutoDesk ever again.
Maybe it's time for me to try OpenSCAD.
I also have a cheap $200 cnc engraver that I've done even less with, for similar reasons.
Maybe it's time for me to try OpenSCAD.
I also have a cheap $200 cnc engraver that I've done even less with, for similar reasons.
You may want to look at Solid-Edge: https://www.plm.automation.siemens.com/plmapp/education/soli...
HeeksCAM or FreedCad also have direct CAM gcode support.
For 2D engravers, check out MightyScape plugins for inkscape, and bCNC/GRBL.
HeeksCAM or FreedCad also have direct CAM gcode support.
For 2D engravers, check out MightyScape plugins for inkscape, and bCNC/GRBL.
Or tinkercad ?
9.
I have an FDM printer (ender 3), and I’ve made some (somewhat) neat stuff. So far, I’ve printed in PLA and transparent PETG (printing with a high layer height, thin walls, and gyroid infill looks really neat).
Overall, I would recommend it if you like making stuff and 3d modeling.
Also, my current CAD software is blender, so if anyone has something similar (or a plugin) that is better suited to making moving mechanical parts, leave a comment.
Also, my current CAD software is blender, so if anyone has something similar (or a plugin) that is better suited to making moving mechanical parts, leave a comment.
Solidworks or Fusion. If you need free, FreeCAD.
10. I have a 3d printer for about 5 years. Sometimes I don't do anything with it for months, then I suddenly have some kind of project which eats all my spare time. I just finished a RC car which I created from scratch using Autodesk Inventor. Even learned how to 3d printed molds to create rubber parts.
I guess for 3d printing you should also have an interest in cad design. Otherwise it becomes a bit boring.
I just bought one because they are cheap, I dunno what to do with it.
Its not like star trek you can't just ask for a toy car and you get it. There is a lot of setup leveling and tweaking of supports and the first layer of print to get the print looking clean or even printing at all.
Printing takes hours like 6+ for anything remotely complicated. It will probably take you two or three goes printing a thing until you get results you are happy with. Once its printed you then need to clean up the print removing support etc.
What material you print in will also massively change your results / chances of success. You may need to encase the printer to control the environment temperature, wind and toxic fumes depending on the material need to be accounted for.
The stuff on thingyverse all looks cool but it's all cool gimmicks if you want to do something useful you need to know how to 3d model.
TLDR: It's all a bit of a faff but if you are the type of person that likes to build their own computer its a lot of fun, being able to download a car felt awesome. The toy car has surprising detail and despite being made in PLA the easiest plastic to use its again surprisingly strong.
Ease of use 4/10. If you can't 3d model its fairly useless 1/10. If you can 3d model its so much faster and easier to get complicated parts 8/10.
Its not like star trek you can't just ask for a toy car and you get it. There is a lot of setup leveling and tweaking of supports and the first layer of print to get the print looking clean or even printing at all.
Printing takes hours like 6+ for anything remotely complicated. It will probably take you two or three goes printing a thing until you get results you are happy with. Once its printed you then need to clean up the print removing support etc.
What material you print in will also massively change your results / chances of success. You may need to encase the printer to control the environment temperature, wind and toxic fumes depending on the material need to be accounted for.
The stuff on thingyverse all looks cool but it's all cool gimmicks if you want to do something useful you need to know how to 3d model.
TLDR: It's all a bit of a faff but if you are the type of person that likes to build their own computer its a lot of fun, being able to download a car felt awesome. The toy car has surprising detail and despite being made in PLA the easiest plastic to use its again surprisingly strong.
Ease of use 4/10. If you can't 3d model its fairly useless 1/10. If you can 3d model its so much faster and easier to get complicated parts 8/10.
I'd echo a lot of these. You have to basically learn the skills of a modern machinist, including learning the quirks of the materials/machinery/environmental conditions. You can easily have something complex print for 20 hours, just to have it go off-the-rails at hour 21 and wreck the entire piece. It sounds like a dot-matrix printer running constantly for hours, the smell can be overpowering without some sort of air filtration, and the amount of finishing work that has to be done if you want something professional-looking cannot be overstated. At the end of my ownership, I realized that I simply did not need that many little plastic things that take hours to print and potentially hours to design if nobody else has created the exact same thing and shared it.
8 fun creating and printing, but early printers had issues, printer objects some times come of platform and you waste materials as well as time printing. Setting of higher heat need to know about as well. I like the new sites to get new objects to print and easier tools to make stuff.
Yes. Got one of those liquid stays in the base printers. Immediately found out the liquid cannot be touched because it’s very carcinogenic. So I could not run it in the house. Tried to make three prints in my garage and they all failed. Haven’t touched it since, that was two years ago.
5/10 I guess. It's a great hobby, and teaches a lot about CAD. But if I want to fix some broken plastic part quickly I still prefer superglue+soda trick cause it's stronger and takes 15 minutes instead of 3 hours of modeling and 6 hours of printing :)
I like Epoxy putty if I need a custom cable plug anchor in 5 minutes. =)
Cant praise Openscad enough. You dont have to learn anything, except maybe to use your brain.
If somebody could integrate Openscad into Blender better it would be just swell. Now the Openscad export produces just huge raw blob of faces, the defining structure is lost.
If somebody could integrate Openscad into Blender better it would be just swell. Now the Openscad export produces just huge raw blob of faces, the defining structure is lost.
I really liked OpenSCAD, because I didn't feel like I had the dexterity or the mindset for regular 3d/cad software, going back to the 90s. Mouse interface for 3D design never worked for me. Designing physical things using a programming language seemed ideal. For a while I was certain nothing could be better, certainly not traditional CAD.
However, I recently discovered FreeCAD and I have been converted. The paradigm of making a sketch, defining constraints and letting an optimizer figure out specifics is so much more easy and powerful than having to write all the functions myself.
Committing to getting over the learning curve was one thing, and just getting a decent quality mouse instead of using my laptop touchpad was also a big enabling factor.
I get really frustrated with how buggy and confusing FreeCAD is sometimes, but still, it seems infinitely easier to create "professional looking" parts. Fillets, chamfers, etc, are a lot easier. As I recall, Minkowski sum in theory might be quite useful in OpenSCAD, but in practice it was unreasonably slow. And last I'm aware, OpenSCAD was single threaded so I don't feel like I could benefit that much from upgraded hardware.
FreeCAD also can tell me stuff like the volume of my part as well as dimensions I didn't explicitly define. I don't recall OpenSCAD allowing introspection on your objects, which is kind of an obviously useful thing. Plus, FreeCAD does some finite element analysis, which may or may not be reliably informative in my hands, but in principle can give me some advice on the properties of a part before I print it.
It appears FreeCAD can integrate with OpenSCAD to some extent, but I haven't tried that.
However, I recently discovered FreeCAD and I have been converted. The paradigm of making a sketch, defining constraints and letting an optimizer figure out specifics is so much more easy and powerful than having to write all the functions myself.
Committing to getting over the learning curve was one thing, and just getting a decent quality mouse instead of using my laptop touchpad was also a big enabling factor.
I get really frustrated with how buggy and confusing FreeCAD is sometimes, but still, it seems infinitely easier to create "professional looking" parts. Fillets, chamfers, etc, are a lot easier. As I recall, Minkowski sum in theory might be quite useful in OpenSCAD, but in practice it was unreasonably slow. And last I'm aware, OpenSCAD was single threaded so I don't feel like I could benefit that much from upgraded hardware.
FreeCAD also can tell me stuff like the volume of my part as well as dimensions I didn't explicitly define. I don't recall OpenSCAD allowing introspection on your objects, which is kind of an obviously useful thing. Plus, FreeCAD does some finite element analysis, which may or may not be reliably informative in my hands, but in principle can give me some advice on the properties of a part before I print it.
It appears FreeCAD can integrate with OpenSCAD to some extent, but I haven't tried that.
> I get really frustrated with how buggy and confusing FreeCAD is sometimes...
I feel like every time I spend any time with FreeCAD I get stuck within minutes by some kind of "Error 1337 has occurred" style non-explanatory dialog, and then when I search for long enough I find a discussion thread explaining that it's an error from the (parametric) kernel, that there's therefore nothing to be done to improve the message, and you're just somehow supposed to intuit that certain orders of operation are impossible. I've given up.
Solvespace seems a lot more approachable and while it's less powerful, the power all seems to be reachable rather than booby trapped.
For quick stuff I'm using TinkerCAD, which is a doddle.
I will have to give FreeCAD yet another go, I suppose. Maybe there's a threshold where the bugginess starts to be easier to work around...?
Edit: I should add that I only use Linux; if I were willing to change platform, the commercial options seem to be a lot better than the open source ones.
I feel like every time I spend any time with FreeCAD I get stuck within minutes by some kind of "Error 1337 has occurred" style non-explanatory dialog, and then when I search for long enough I find a discussion thread explaining that it's an error from the (parametric) kernel, that there's therefore nothing to be done to improve the message, and you're just somehow supposed to intuit that certain orders of operation are impossible. I've given up.
Solvespace seems a lot more approachable and while it's less powerful, the power all seems to be reachable rather than booby trapped.
For quick stuff I'm using TinkerCAD, which is a doddle.
I will have to give FreeCAD yet another go, I suppose. Maybe there's a threshold where the bugginess starts to be easier to work around...?
Edit: I should add that I only use Linux; if I were willing to change platform, the commercial options seem to be a lot better than the open source ones.
This thread is old, just want to mention for anyone who runs across it, there is a FreeCAD workbench (like an extension) that is not installed by default I recommend checking out: it's called "Curves" and it is a huge improvement in productivity for me, almost as much as FreeCAD vs OpenSCAD in the first place.
One of the most powerful things about it is it lets you make two drawings at right angles and combine them to make a non-planar curve, as well as having a bunch of tools for manipulating results.
It may require watching some tutorial videos, but this seems to be how you reverse engineer complex curved shapes like, say, cars or other objects.
One of the most powerful things about it is it lets you make two drawings at right angles and combine them to make a non-planar curve, as well as having a bunch of tools for manipulating results.
It may require watching some tutorial videos, but this seems to be how you reverse engineer complex curved shapes like, say, cars or other objects.
They have done something to speed up Openscad quite remarkably. https://ochafik.com/jekyll/update/2022/02/09/openscad-fast-c...
Most of the problems with complex objects have magically disappeared.
Most of the problems with complex objects have magically disappeared.
CADQuery has completely replaced OpenSCAD for me. It's the best of both worlds - CAD as code like OpenSCAD, actual parametric CAD kernel like FreeCAD.
Their GUI is not good/stable (yet), but the Jupyter notebook integration is great and absolutely killer.
Their GUI is not good/stable (yet), but the Jupyter notebook integration is great and absolutely killer.
You can use Sketchup as well, it has high usability
I disagree. Unless building simple parts, SolidWorks, Fusion, or Inventor will be a much smoother experience. Even FreeCAD's a better pick.
I have no interest in owning and operating a printer, but e.g. Shapeways is expensive and slow, so I wish there were more service providers near me.
5
it's been frustrating to troubleshoot when I can't it to print without screwing up (using a model that other people have been printing with no problems).
it's been frustrating to troubleshoot when I can't it to print without screwing up (using a model that other people have been printing with no problems).
Great post! Which 3D printer would you all recommend? I almost bought this one https://usa.banggood.com/Creality-3D-Ender-3-3D-Printer-220x...
8
It just fun and useful to print stuff. Once you know a few basic tools and can think about what prints best.
5 - when if get blocked or 1st print layer is not good.
Starter is quite cheap.
It just fun and useful to print stuff. Once you know a few basic tools and can think about what prints best.
5 - when if get blocked or 1st print layer is not good.
Starter is quite cheap.
Can you give some examples of meaningful things you've printed/made?
This week - cake cutter - London underground roundal shape
Mounts for ESP32 camera
Parts for building a shed
Shower holder replacement
Lamp holder for outside, which alows me to have small camera inbuilt
Camera holder/mount for outside back garden
Roof for outside Fire Extinguisher to protect from rain (actually this broken over-night after about a year - hence remember I need to re-print)
Prototype cufflinks that I then had printed in metal.
Currently designing a treadmill with 3d parts
Off the top of my head.
Prototype cufflinks that I then had printed in metal.
Currently designing a treadmill with 3d parts
Off the top of my head.
10 with my prusa mk3s+. Being able to custom print stuff for specific use cases is very handy.
I've used a 3D laser scanner. Want to get a printer soon.
Is there any good photogrammetry software as oppposed to laser scanning? A scanning solution would make my life easier but as a condo dweller, i’d like to minimise the space consumed by single purpose hardware.
There is some CUDA accelerated stuff. I think CGMatter or one of those channels evaluates it on YouTube.
For scanning, you may want to check out COLMAP if you have a good GPU, CloudCompare, and MeshLab.
I am still waiting for a good 3d hardware scanner which is capable of scanning small 10cm parts. So far all my software attempts failed.
Revopoint Mini is a new unit for that scale at a low price point. I'm evaluating it now.
Really curious to your results. Let me know your findings.
1
very slow, nozzles get plugged now and then too
very slow, nozzles get plugged now and then too
Clogged nozzles are user error the majority of the time. I’ve had multiple printers being used regularly for the last 4-5 years and I can’t even remember the last time one actually clogged.
These things have a pretty steep learning curve to get good results.
These things have a pretty steep learning curve to get good results.
What specific thing do you learn to prevent clogs?
Most surprising thing is that you cannot use too much heat. Filament melts too early and sticks to the walls of the feeding tube.
This is very particular problem if you have high-heat extruder and you want to use low-heat PLA plastic. Even if you adjust the printing temperature right, all the other functions are for high-heat, and so the PLA sticks and clogs when you are feeding it in.
This is very particular problem if you have high-heat extruder and you want to use low-heat PLA plastic. Even if you adjust the printing temperature right, all the other functions are for high-heat, and so the PLA sticks and clogs when you are feeding it in.
Great answer, also too much retraction such that the filament gets pulled up into the cool zone while partially melted is another big source of clogs beginners run into. Usually while chasing down stringing issues. The balance between heat, retraction, and speeds are super important. But beginners tend to just crank up the retraction and end up with a clog.
Cheers, =)