Excellent article. It is very hard to understand a few things about Prusa, lately:
1. The Nextruder looks 5 years behind Bambulab nozzle switching, without to mention the cost of a new nozzle. A clogged nozzle is a non issue in a Bambulab printer, but it causes me a big cost and more work with my MK4 (which has the same extruder as the Core One).
2. How is it possible that these printers still lack at least a cheap webcam?
3. One of the strengths of Prusa should be support. It used to be very good, years ago. Now the issue the OP is reporting about the app that is not able to detect the principal component in the sound of the belt, is an example of a more extended problem, that one can see in many ways, especially in the MK4 / Core One documentation, that is especially lacking.
In general, here the OP is doing the work that Prusa should be doing to provide a better experience, without to mention all the design issues that they are not fixing directly before shipping their printers. I'm also a Bambulab user, and my A1 costed a fraction of my MK4 and it is the printer I always hit because of the zero-issues. It just works.
Now companies may have ups and downs, but there is some problem at Prusa: they are still not understanding what's really happening and where their problems are.
1. I think even on bambu people switch extruder so they have swichable nozzles. Atleast thats what i did on my P1S. There is huge aftermarket with these if you need them.
2. Reasoning i heard is that Prusa printers are used a lot by print farms that dont want them for security reasons and that there are aftermarket cams that are going to be a lot better than what they can deliver. Again cam on Bambu P1S is pretty bad so if you like the feature you end up changing it but because the chip in P1S is pretty low powered you end up adding whole different camera system.
3. This is very good point. I guess they were under pressure to release asap and the docs are rushed / in process. The upside is that they have track record of long support for the products.
I am not sure that they are so clueless.
I’ve had P1S for some time. It’s great. I wanted focus on 3D printing not on 3D printer.
But now? Bambu is update away from not being able to print outside their cloud. There is zero openness. They do everything to stop any kinf of reverse engineering or alternative firmwares. Afaik they might just decide tomorrow that they stop support some of the older models and they simply stop printing.
I still ended up messing, modding, tweaking and learning about the Bambu printer anyway.
But i also found a lot of use for 3D printer. So idea of buying 3x times more expensive printer kit that will take me 20h to assemble and then even more time to tweak to print as good as Bambu… is OK? Almost intruging? I will know that with care it will work for a looong time i will know how it works and it will be valuable knowledge.
It seems a lot like linux vs mac. At some point you bite the bullet and never look back. Or you do and go back.
I just buy the built version.
Yeah i am probably cheap OR i have this false idea that i will ubderstand the printer more…
I just finished assembling my Core One.
I definitely understand how the printer works better than if I bought it assembled. It'll definitely save me time troubleshooting/maintaining/repairing it later. But I spent more time building it than I could ever save during teardown/rebuilds.
I bought a kit because I like building stuff, the Core One kit had the same appeal as a Lego model or a model car. If that's not appealing to you, do yourself a favor and buy the completed printer.
If you do get the kit, get a couple of ice cube trays to use to organize fasteners; keeping them organized in the bags Prusa sends was a battle I wasn't interested in fighting.
Thank you! Seems like i am cursed and thus will have to go for a kit.
I assembled the mk3s from kit. It was long but at least I have a mental model of where things are, and what to remove first if I needed to exchange parts.
The Buddy3D camera has a firmware update recently, now it can RTSP stream inside your LAN and you can force day/night detection. Also, it saves timelapses to a local microSD. Still not super cheap, but yeah.
I think someone says this in every HN post involving CAD, but the reason FreeCAD is "buggy" and Solvespace is small and fast is Solvespace has a fraction of the power. FreeCAD uses the Open Cascade kernel, which can do complex 3d boolean and fillet operations, not having these operations severely limits the geometry you can create, and you will run into walls very quickly using Solvespace, OpenSCAD or anything else with a hand rolled geometry kernel. Even commercial projects use an off the shelf kernel, they're just difficult to write.
This is true, but it's not a reason to put buggy in quotes. FreeCAD is, objectively, full of bugs. Running into bugs all the time also limits what you can create. For hobbyist 3d printing purposes, Solvespace and OpenSCAD can cover the vast majority of simple single-part designs.
I could not imagine trying to design a 3d part without fillets. I use Build123d mostly, and have even gone as far as using the Open Cascade library directly, but if I had to choose between FreeCAD or OpenSCAD/Solvespace I would rather work around FreeCADs jank than give up fillets.
Have you tried BOSL2? [1] Adds a lot to openscad, enough to keep me going at least. Fillets, chamfers, rounding, common parts, anchoring options, and it makes use of parent-child relationships between parts.
Not entirely perfect and some compromises, for example faceting isn't always consistent and hashtag highlighting doesn't seem quite right, but overall still it's good enough for me. The wiki on GitHub is pretty good, and with the source in hand I have had an easy time understanding what it does and tweaking it as needed.
For openscad itself, there are nightly builds with the new geometry engine, which too mostly works for me and is a huge speedup over the older CGAL engine. Renders that took minutes in CGAL now take seconds with the new engine. I like to take faceting through the roof for nicely rounded curves, but that kills CGAL apparently.
I see you still have to add a fudge number to stop the faces intersecting when doing a difference boolean. I'm afraid this is still strictly worse than Build123d or any other DSL than wraps OpenCascade.
Understandable, there are plugins and workarounds for fillets in OpenSCAD but they're not great.
If you're using Open Cascade through something other than FreeCAD, you may be having a better experience anyway. FreeCAD uses their own fork, which is hundreds of commits behind.
OpenSCAD is verbose, but fillets are just a cylinder subtracted from a rectangular prism.
Fillets in BREP software are so much more complex than this, your statement is a huge oversimplification.
I tried build123d with ocp vscode standalone and it seems interesting, but edit->run script->check browser-workflow feels annoyingly slow.
Maybe I'll try blender addon tomorrow.
I've been using it for a while and I honestly don't even check the output until I'm done sometimes. I think it's more important to make good preliminary sketches and have a good idea of what you want to make, checking the output every time you change a dimension isn't that useful.
FreeCAD is a mess. Especially if you're doing things like CAM.
Hard agree.
Alibre CAD has affordable permanent/monthly licenses, I recommend that as the affordable commercial option.
Good timing with this. I had an old maker select v2 from ~2015, and at some point, the SD card got jammed in and ripped the card reader off the PCB, so I just ordered a Core One (preassembled) over the weekend. The CoreXY system (and enclosure) seems more elegant than bed-slinging, but it's evidently more fiddly. Hopefully the enclosure also prevents it from accumulating dust as quickly.
You mentioned you stripped one of the tensioners - does a screw thread into a 3d printed part? Is there a more robust version of the part?
> You mentioned you stripped one of the tensioners - does a screw thread into a 3d printed part?
Sort of. A metal screw is threaded into a square nut that sits inside a 3D printed part. All good unless one gets to the end of the screw's motion range, after which the square nut begins to turn inside the plastic part and strips it.
I have printed spares for the plastic part, also I know better than to trust Prusa's frequency detector applet, so this is not a deal breaker once you understand the system. There are much better ways than Prusa's applet to detect the belt's frequency, some described in the linked article.
Prusa offers free downloads of all the printer's plastic parts: https://www.printables.com/model/1167816-core-one-printable-...
> Is there a more robust version of the part?
The original part is printed using PCCF, very strong, but the embedded square nut is too small to resist worst-case forces.
I didn't realize Paul Lutus had an active blog! I would highly recommend not only reading this post but checking out the author. I read their book Confessions many years ago and it was one of the things that helped push me to look for fulfillment outside of tech.
It looks like he posted this so may see my comment. I just want to say thanks, I appreciate the things you've put out into the world.
The site is filled with cool stuff. I wanted to learn more about optical lenses and found https://arachnoid.com/blender_graphics/index.html to be very useful.
You are most welcome! Because AI has taken over most low-level coding, I think more people will be looking for fulfillment outside tech.
And thank you for your kind words.
Link to my free book "Confessions of a Long-Distance Sailor": https://arachnoid.com/lutusp/sailbook.html
Has anyone made any experience with printer head changes (similar to factory robots exchanging grippers)?
I dont want the print to pause in some gcode function waiting for me to pick &place
There are a large number of "toolchanger" printers out there, include Prusa's XL. They're pretty great: multiple nozzle sizes and types, multi-material and multi-color without a lot of waste, and even the ability to use different tools (like lasers and subtractive manufacturing). In the consumer space the technology is still fairly expensive, and the complexity reduces reliability, but I suspect is going to become more and more of the norm over time.
Most modern printers also support simpler multi-material setups which change the filament in a single tool automatically. Waste is fairly high (because of the need to purge), and speed fairly low (because of the need to purge), but the technology is mature and cheap.
Bambu also has their new 2 head printer the H2D where you can print incompatible materials like PLA and PETG for perfect supports that don't stick to the main print.
Yes, but you could print incompatible materials before just fine. It was just either time-consuming (manual change) or time-consuming and wasteful (AMS-like systems that cut filament)
Printing multiple materials with an AMS-like system will usually cause print failures. Remnants of the materials will stick in the single print head and mix with the incompatible materials. And manually switching isn't feasible if you're trying to do something like print supports--are you going to swap filament rolls by hand every layer?
I've printed _many_ parts with multi-material using AMS: PLA, PETG, different support materials. Never had a single failure. It's wasteful, but never had issues.
> And manually switching isn't feasible if you're trying to do something like print supports--are you going to swap filament rolls by hand every layer?
No, first because I would use support material just for the interface and if it's curved, then no. Even with X1C's AMS, any IDEX, H2D print time would be hilariously ballooned. I'n saying that dual-nozzle design didn't make it possible, it made it more convenient.
That is curious. I've only tried multimaterial work with an AMS Lite on an A1, but it critically compromised layer bonding due to residue, and it was a reproducible problem.
I have a whole rc plane printed out of PLA-LW and PETG for interface, model used a lot of supports. Still in one piece. My only print issues with x1c:
- I forget which plate was used for petg and which one for pla and mix them up
- Revo nozzles had clogs, solved by switching to diamondback
- Can't pull the very end of the 3rd party spools and either gives me "motor overloaded" or void layers.
I've printed both PETG and PLA just fine (using PETG as a support interface) in the AMS. The key is to turn off the prime tower, and increase the flushing volume between those materials. (I do now have an H2D, and it's definitely an upgrade over having to do that)
Two heads lets you keep them completely separate which is good because PETG to PLA tends to jam and you need to purge a LOT to get all the PETG out or it can mix with the PLA causing really weak parts.
The Prusa XL[1] can be configured for 5 toolheads for fast, automatic switching ala factory robots.
[1] https://www.prusa3d.com/en/product/original-prusa-xl-assembl...
What you're looking for a printer with tool changing capabilities such as Prusa XL or DIY like Voron with mods.
What practical reasons are there to choose the Core One over an MK4S or vice-versa? The Core One is slightly more expensive.
The Core One uses a "CoreXY" system where the extruder moves in X and Y directions instead of X and Z, and the bed moves in Z instead of Y. It eliminates issues caused by large prints progressively increasing the mass/momentum on the Y axis, but it requires a more complex system of belts. Also, the Core One only comes in an enclosure, which is good for some materials that need warmer air, but can hinder PLA, which needs cool air.
Generally, it seems like if you just want to reliably print PLA, get a MK4S, but if you want the temp-controlled enclosure or filament versatility, get a Core One.