Is there any guidance on improving the Core One chamber? I would like to add some thermal insulation around the chamber, but I'm not sure if the firmware will properly detect unexpected thermal insulation in problematic scenario's, if it blindly assumes its a stock Core One... the more you modify a printer, the more it operates in terra incognita.

Could too much thermal insulation cause the bed temperature to lower (to avoid overheating chamber temp) to the point the print no longer adheres? etc.

If you could recommend some articles on the subject I would highly appreciate it.

Wow, that’s a lot of money on upgrades. I also got the MK3 and upgraded it once.

Full upgrade to the core one will be AUD$2k

I can keep my current printer alive for a long time. But it’s hard to justify the cost.

I am still a bit iffy about the whole sending out fleets of 100s of printers to influencers during the pandemic while also increasing the price for their entry lineup.

I've been a Prusa defender for a long time, including when they added the break-off tab to enable custom firmware which caused a lot of upset.

They're doing what it takes to be a business. I was glad when they moved to more injection molded parts instead of trying to 3D print their own parts. It was a cool idea at the start but the time for that was long past.

My only slight objection is that you can tell they're trying to have it both ways: They want all of the good will and reputation of being open source, but they're also trying hard to put as many limits on this as they can. Like all projects trying to walk the line between open and closed source, I think they're at their best when they're honest about what they're doing. The moves they made with their open license are completely reasonable and I support them, but that blog post was a bit of a letdown when they tried to make it about fighting patent trolls for the community or something. When you reach Prusa scale you have to be honest that you're no longer one and the same with the community. You are the medium-ish size business that people rely on. Taking away the right for others to sell the products is a reasonable business move, but please be honest about it rather than trying to tell us it's for our own good.

They were so deeply undercut by Chinese clone vendors that buying Prusa made little sense to consumers. They couldn't survive without banning them. The situation was similar to IBM PC, but Prusa Research was no IBM.

Their printers are no longer open source hardware, according to the definition endorsed by a certain Josef Pruša https://freedomdefined.org/OSHW#Endorsements

It’s rough but I understand it.

You can be entirely in favor of the open source ethos, even as a commercial entity, but then certain actors can take advantage of that ethos and just directly commercialize your R&D investment and take all the proceeds of your investment, whether or not they comply with attribution or share-alike requirements.

It’s tough seeing an open source project you’ve poured tons of care and effort into (and WANT people to share and remix and build cool things) get more or less “extracted” for profit without contributing back (code or money).

At the end of the day, none of it really matters unless you’ve got money and time to actually try to enforce your licenses, or have enough customer mindshare to effectively change the behavior of bad actors without needing legal action.

I’ll probably use licenses like Prusas in the future for similar reasons, even though I generally prefer to use less restrictive ones. Bad actors, or even just non-benevolent actors, can really sour the open source ethos, and it sucks but there’s no way to legally enforce “don’t be a jerk” without restricting a legal document in slightly unpalatable ways.

Isn't Voron/Soval more open?

I understand your point, but to compete against bambu, I think is necessary. I still find is the best option.

So you want European companies to keep being nice and "open", do all the research and invent new technologies and products for the chinese to copy and sell cheap clones of!

It’s not problematic to restrict people from selling the thing you designed, made and sell without permission.

If I make an open source car, I don’t want someone else taking my design work, and then selling a cheaper version of my product, I want my consumers to build their own parts.

> On my home Voron,

You're not the target market for Bambu customers.

This is like complaining that on your dirt track racer it's a trivial process to swap the rear end spur and change final drive ratios. Someone who has their dealership do the oil changes on their leased BMW does not care.

Maybe they should care a little, because the long-term repairability of their BMW or Bambu is going to put a real dent in their resale value. But they're not the ones dealing with tweezers and ZIF connectors and flex PCBs, so it's mostly just not their problem.

3D printers used to be exclusively the domain of people who enjoyed doing all this work themselves, who loved a well-designed machine that was a joy to work with like a Voron. That's no longer the case, Bambu is offering unrepairable black boxes that "just work" for enough time that some people can afford not to think care how it's made.

Sounds like RC quadcopters society -- everyone knows DJI, but they make fan guards a part of the frame. Guards and props are the most fragile parts, a consumable really. Something an enthusiast often carry spares for, to quickly swap on the field for any other RC quad, but with DJI you need what, send the whole frame to factory?

I like my H2D, but it definitely hit a brick wall. I replaced it, and had the same issue with one of the nozzles not printing consistently.

This was after around 700 hours, which isn’t terrible, but working with their support is exhausting. I don’t think I’m going to touch it again until winter, unfortunately.

I got the V2 and same - no fuss, especially if I stick to Elegoo filament. Multicolour worked out of the box, to the point where it's difficult to think it was a Big Thing until recently.

Got the same printer, although I haven’t used it much it’s been pretty great for the price.

Im not sure what problems people are even envisioning having. I got a diy Anet8 that was badly assembled by somebody else years ago that they gave to me for free. I tightened up some fittings and strapped down some loose wires and it still just works. If newer and supposedly better printers were more difficult I would consider them junk, in operation they aren't that complicated of machines. The most complicated thing I gotta do is usually change the print temp up or down 5 degrees for different company filaments.

Core1, add an INDX if you want multi tool (far more flexible and less waste than the AMS).

I know it's popular to shit on 2D printers, but other than very often being very slow and running out of ink (or rubber rollers hardening after 20 years of use) - I actually didn't have any issues with them? But then I actually didn't really use them for 20 years either.

I do the same.

Ender 3 V2 that I paid <$250 for about 5 years ago. It paid for itself on the first print job where I repaired some Samsung stove knobs where replacements were $400 a set.

I'm now considering an upgrade and I'll likely just go with the Ender 3 V3 Plus (bigger bed, auto leveling, still an offline printer) and < $450 for cost.

It's been a fantastic printer for me.

I use Cura, stick with standard settings, use Sun PLA+ for all my prints, and the only thing I really need to do is level the bed sometimes.

There are a bunch of these I’m my local makerspace and they generally work great, and are often easily used by members on the more ‘craft’ side of things who’d never hang out here. Was surprised not to see them mentioned more in the discussions around this.

I have no first-hand idea of they’re ’morally’ better than Bambu - I haven’t looked into it - but I think the folks in charge of buying them considered that.

I have a Plus 4. It's usable but takes a lot of work to become decent, and needs a lot of maintenance.

I'm mostly happy with my Qidi Plus 4. It's pretty much plug and play. They are sometimes a bit rough around the edges, but mostly good. I'd say don't buy the newest model at launch because they tend to beta test at the customer.

No idea about the filament swirchers, but calling core XY designs bambu clones is really funny.

The core XY design that all manufacturers are now centering around has been around long before Bambu existed as a company.

I have about 15,000 hours on my Bambu x1c, and it's been fantastic. Their customer service has been great, too; the couple of times that I've had service issues, the tech genuinely worked with me to solve the problem. They were a lot nicer about it than the times I had to contact prusa about my older i3. FWIW.

>As long as they remain the lowest priced and the best, they can do whatever they want if you ask me. They provide insane social value through accessibility.

This is how you end up with overpriced "3D print cartridges", unfixable printers that fail at warranty + 1 day and control software that goes "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't print that."

> As long as they remain the lowest priced and the best, they can do whatever they want if you ask me

Are they actually still the best on price/performance? There are now dozens of Bambu clones at lower prices, I'm wondering how much worse those are (for example, a printer like the Elegoo Centauri Carbon 2)?

I just finished building a Core One+. It has a number of printed parts, but it also does have a bunch of injection molded ones, and they've just replaced another printed one with injection molding. Most of it is metal though, with the printed parts mostly used as relatively simple brackets to hold stuff in place that doesn't need great precision, and replacing those probably wouldn't save much on cost. I think these days they do the printed parts thing mostly to dogfood their print farm solution and I wouldn't be surprised if the next generation had only one or two printed parts for bragging rights. I wasn't a big fan of that either, the Mini I got in 2000 had a few critical parts printed and that did impact performance somewhat, but the Core One+ is fine in that regard.

From a hobbyist perspective, I find it's a much better designed machine than a friend's Bambu that recently broke down and turned out pretty much unfixable. Performance is at least on par, but the entire Prusa can be taken apart with basic hex and torx keys, it's highly serviceable and repairable, lots of fairly standard parts, not very highly integrated. I consider that a feature, but that will cause higher sourcing and assembly costs. It's built like a tank, lots of attention to detail, I expect it to last for a long time with minimal servicing.

That also means it's not targeting the same niche as Bambu's printers. That's not a personal insult, that's just a consequence of how things are right now. No European company is going to undercut a ultra high scale Chinese market dominiation vehicle, that's just not happening. Prusa is doing lots of R&D on much lower sales, they don't have the kind of access to Chinese industry that Bambu has, obviously the Bambu will be cheaper even if Prusa tried to compete in the same segment. But once the market domination thing is far enough along I expect Bambu will disallow non-chipped filament, lock everything into their cloud and jack up their prices. That's how these schemes usually end if they work out, but if they did that now, companies like Prusa would see record sales, so they don't do that just yet.

I'm pretty happy we still have some trace amounts of viable B2C tech industry in Europe. Companies like Prusa provide insane social value too by keeping skills and production in the EU. That's something we sorely need more of (not that companies are to blame, but we still do). Not sure how things will play out, and I'm not too optimistic, but perhaps with everyone else going all-in on dark patterns and pumping out disposable low cost crap, there is an emerging niche for reasonably open high-quality products that serve the owner first and don't data mine them for every last private detail.