Got a PineTime for Christmas and so far been very pleased with it. I found the PineTimeStyle watchface and it’s been a bit like coming home to Pebble, but I do miss the wide array of watchface choices and effortless customization.

I’ve got a Steam family going with my siblings and it makes me feel significantly better about my backlog, because even if I don’t get to it there’s probably something for everyone in the mix somewhere. Plus every now and again it’s nice to break out a random indy game that nobody’s played and just collectively suck together.

Also a 2.4 owner, I bought the 350 LDO kit from Fabreeko and it was delivered back in August. Getting it assembled and dialed in was certainly a process, but aside from that it’s been an absolute workhorse (I think I’ve got something like 200+ hours of print time in; completely blows my Thessian Ender out of the water in terms of both speed and reliability). You certainly can tinker with it and make it a project printer, but they print really well stock. The only mod I’d say is anywhere near required is swapping out the magnetic bed meshing sensor, only because the sensor readings tend to drift as the sensor gets hot. You can totally work around it, by waiting for the printer to warm all the way up or cool down to ambient before printing, but I’m impatient plus the mouse switch mod (Klicky) tends to be more reliable and accurate (plus it’s temperature agnostic).

Don’t get me wrong I’ve totally modded mine: swapped out some of the plastic parts for metal ones, added a brush to clean the nozzle before my print (makes for more consistent Z heights), replaced the panel clips with snap latches, but none of it was required to make the printer print better (mostly just to make maintenance easier and partly because it looks cool).

The new hotness in the open source MMU space is ArmoredTurtle’s BoxTurtle project, which seeks to be an open source equivalent of the Bambu AMS. I’m still working on the parts for mine, but from everything I’ve seen the build is way less fiddly (and as a result more reliable) than the ERCF.

Seconding kit Vorons. While they certainly aren’t the cheapest option, they aren’t that much more expensive than other higher end core XY machines. Fabreeko* has the 250/300mm Trident kit at 1.2k and 350mm 2.4 at 1.4k + an extra $150 or so for printed parts. Compared to the new Core One at between 950 - 1.2k or the X1C also at 1.2k you’re looking at an extra $150 to 350, but that also comes with build volume increases (both the Prusa and Bambu are at roughly 250 mm³). Definitely wouldn’t recommend them as a first printer, but Vorons are shining examples of what’s possible with open source (and they’re absolute workhorses too).

* Highly recommend them with glowing praise for being all around fantastic (they also run sales on the regular, though kit deals are usually reserved for special occasions like black Friday, or Clee day)

That’s awesome! Wishing you both the best!

Lol, it actually kind of is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Steel

Migrating my laptop to Ubuntu and literally just ran into this with Thunderbird- the profile is in the Snap directory instead of the parent home folder like the docs say.

Echoing the other comment, I loved my Pebble because it was a smartwatch that was a watch first and foremost and everything after that was added to make life easier (rather than to pile on selling points that someone might want but that nobody needs). For example, the thing had a week long battery life (irrc the first gen iWatch had something like less than a day), but even when it hit the bottom 10% of the tank, it turned off non-essentials (like Bluetooth, calendar, customizations, etc) and just kept going on a default watchface. The UI was simple, easy to navigate, and generally useful. Physical buttons meant that I never had to fight with a touchscreen to clear notifications or check my calendar.

Plus the whole thing was stupid customizable. On the software side, the community grew a fairly sizable market for watchfaces to show pretty much whatever suited your fancy (TimeStyle was always one of my favorites, but I was also fond of this Pokemon one). On the hardware side, the watch used a standard 20mm band so you could go as far as to match it to your outfit if you wanted (I had a nice metal band to go with my Steel so I could dress it up for college career fairs (and have my calendar send me a reminder when it was time to duck off to class)).

Well that might explain some things.

Not to throw shade at your company but that process is so backwards that it’s no wonder the engineers are sparse on the details. I saw another comment likening software development to a crossword puzzle, which is a pretty good analogy. To further it, changing software once it’s done is like trying to swap out a clue/ word once the rest of the puzzle is built. It’s theoretically possible, but depending on how the puzzle is designed, it can range from an absurd amount of work to nearly impossible. Given the way you’ve described the state of things, your engineers are probably low on goodwill to boot.

I’ve worked on cobbled-together crunch-time hell-projects and the last thing I’d want after getting free would be a random BA coming to me about details that more than likely packed with the project PTSD and would very much like to forget. Doubly so if it’s issues that I bought up early in the design/ development process (when they would have been comparatively easy to fix) and was dismissed by the powers that be. I can only speak for myself, but I can only take so much “that’s not a priority”, “we don’t have time for that”/ “we’ll see if that becomes a problem in the future and deal with it then” before I throw in the towel, stop keeping track of everything that’s wrong, and just bin the entire project as dumper fire run by people who would rather check boxes than make things better.

This is excellent advice! I want to underscore that Engineers are very often much driven by the how’s and the why’s of things. I’ll admit to judging people based on how they answer those sorts of questions. From a project perspective, I’m far less interested in doing something if the why of it can’t be adequately explained to me. Similarly, I’m far more willing to take a “you know, I’m not actually sure”, than a “we do it this way, because that’s the way we’ve always done it” (the latter is probably the fastest way to tank any respect I might have had).

Was trying to compose a similar statement on that lack of details. Like, my background is scrum/ agile software development and if a random BA called me up out of the blue for project details, my first response is going to be “I’m busy, talk to my scrum master and/or manager” and failing that it’s likely going to be the minimum amount of information required to get said BA to leave me alone so that I can get back to work. Plus, unless I know that my audience has the technical capacity for low level details, I tend to leave them out (I don’t mind answering questions, but I also don’t have time in my life to spout information that’s going to go in one ear and out the other).

There’s some community history, but the short version is that the US patent office issued Slice a patent for surgical tube in hot ends* which Slice has then used to litigate away competition. As a result, Slice’s actions have not sat particularly well with the parts of the 3d printing community that value open source and community innovation.

* there’s some debate as to the validity of that patent as there’s evidence that this idea dates back to the early reprap movement. Source.

Additional commentary

Given that the video is over a year old, nice to see that slice hasn’t tried to sue him out of existence.

I’m not sure I could say I’m the sole producer, most of my mods are cases where the original author has stepped away from modding and I saw an opportunity to add some improvements of my own while carrying on the torch (I stand on the shoulders of giants and all). I think I’m most known for Camping Stuff and Snowy Trees, since those are the mods that I started with, but I’ve since adopted a few more, but if you’re interested in the full list, here’s my Steam / GitHub

I maintain a handful of RimWorld mods, going on about 6 years now. They’re in a pretty stable and mature place so they don’t take too up much effort, but I do check for Steam commens a few times a day, to make sure nobody found any bugs or major issues.

I highly recommend Orca Slicer, it’s forked from bamboo slicer (which is in turn forked from Prusa), so has their modern UI/ layout and natively, as well as natively support bamboo printers. If Bamboo’s not your jam, it also plays very nicely with Klipper. As an added bonus, it regularly gets new features added or ported from the other slicers.

I don’t personally own one, so that’s really good to know! I mostly thought of it since it checked most of what OP was looking for, without being a full on Voron. That’s said, I’m not sure how much of a beginner machine the Core One will be either. Regardless, I’ll add a proceed with caution on my recommendation.

Out of curiosity, what upgrades did you have to make to sv08?

(I also graduated from the Thessian Ender 3 program and went to a v2.4)

I just realized that there are some important questions that none of us are asking (it sounded like you’ve already done some research, and have an idea of what you want (or at least what you think you need), but just so that everyone’s all on that same page):

1. What are you looking to get out of the hobby?
2. What is your tolerance for tinkering? Or in other words, are you willing to learn and fiddle with the machine or would you rather it “just work”?
3. What kinds of things are you looking to print (not necessarily mutually exclusive categories: big things, small details, multi-color, outdoor/ automotive, etc)
4. What’s your budget?

Depending on how much you value open source vs domestic production, part of me thinks that you may want to consider the Sovol SV08. Sovol is based out of China, but that printer is basically a Voron 2.4 modified for mass production (ie much of the printer comes preassembled), and because of it the printer is very open source, as in here’s the GitHub repo. My only major concern would be that the machine ships with a non-standard hot end, however I recently learned (Here) that the community already has a mod to fix that. You also gain a much bigger build volume, for a fraction of the upfront investment. (Edit: That said, it may not be the most beginner friendly machine in existence (see replies))

I’m also somewhat hesitant to recommend a machine that isn’t out and doesn’t really have any reviews yet. With any new product launch like this, I’d almost guarantee that there will be a teething period as the bugs, glitches, and hiccups all get worked out (as goes the early adopter tax). Which means that you may face a slightly steeper leaning curve as someone new to the hobby (Prusa has been around for a hot minute, so I don’t expect it to be too bad, but it’s still worth mentioning). That said, if none of that scares you and if you’re already prepared for the pricetag, Prusa’s are known to be absolute workhorses, there’s no reason they can’t be entry level machines.