Well, Creality is still making 8bit printers. AFAIK, it’s not even possible to by an Ender 5 with a 32bit board. You have listed some printers, but they are still the minority. I don’t think it’s a matter of printers in warehouses. I believe they are still coming off the manufacturing lines with 8bit boards. Yes, it will change, but not quite yet. Even the brand new JGMaker printer on KickStarter is 8bit. They just recently added a new pledge tier for a “Pro” version of the printer that does include a 32bit board. But the point is the standard version is still 8bit.
How many people are actually informed when they buy their 1st printer? I wasn’t, and I have decades of tech experience. I have no idea what you mean by “pausing and unpausing”. I’ve never seen this during a print on my Ender 5.
I disagree. It’s not a matter of support: it’s a matter of not needing support for the most part. A toaster will sit on your counter and make toast year after year with no service. An appliance, by definition, just does its work. It doesn’t need dialing in, configuration, troubleshooting: it just works. There are very expensive 3D printers where you can get close to that: the company will install the printer, configure it, and service it when required. The customer just uses it. It’s not quite trouble free, but pretty close. Cars are the best example I can think of. The vast majority of automobile owners just take their cars to the dealer for any required service. It not completely troublefree, but the inconvenience is minimal compared to years ago.
Since you don´t need any gaps between materials you should have perfectly clean and straight lines on huge overhangs and stuff like nut pockets are far easier to use.
Even better when the slicer has the ability to use the default material except for the last 2mm to 3mm where the support contacts the model. Saves on expensive dissolvable filament and there’s less mess to clean up.
Since I slice all parts 3mm over the build plate, so the full object is on a brim, which has zigzak supports on top. On top of the supports the actual part gets printed. Since the entire weight of the part is laying on the support, the bottom surface finish is not the best and more or less fused. And no. A raft is no option. It takes so long to print.
This is the best solution for ABS printing I found so far and it provides 100% flat prints, even when a side bends up. I just need to sand the bottom area to get rid of the zigzak pattern. Water desolvable ABS would be nice, but I guess impossible. But maybe printing on the usual desolvable material would be possible.
Folks, I have used Octoprint extensively and I am a big fan. Just to clarify Octoprint is not a slicer or printer firmware. It is a standalone application that connects to your printer over the printer USB port and provides wifi and remote (with the appropriate plugin) access to send prints and control your 3d printer. Most users install it on a Raspberry Pi using the specialized OctoPi version. It does also run on any computer support Python but I really do not see the utility of using it on a desktop except maybe as a gcode terminal.
Some of the confusion occurs because an earlier version of Octoprint had a version of Cura included and there are plugins that add slicers. I currently use support in both Cura and PrusaSlicer to send Gcode over wifi to Octoprint.
In addition to providing a wifi front end Octoprint via plugins includes a range of tools to improve your 3d printing workflow. For example, it includes a multi-filament (muti-color) workflow for single color 3d printers that I have reviewed in one of my Youtube videos.
Octoprint does have competitors. Astroprint offers a similar solution with the addition of a cloud/web-based modeling and slicing environment. Recently Creality started selling a $45 box called Creality Wifi Box for $45. I have two of the Creality boxes sitting on my back desk waiting for a review I am going to do on the channel.
I am bringing up an older-ish thread but Irv or anyone…Is there an opinion about AstroPrint vs Octoprint? I like the web based printing, ie. uploading the gcode file to the “box” and being able to print without connection to the printer or SD card. I am just curious.
I added cheap raspberry pi2 to all of my printers. It is just great to have a simple search engine within the web interface, so if you want to print something again. All remotely and feed back via browser and camera.
I have no idea about AstroPrint, but OctoPrint has tons of plugins and gets frequently updates and I can recommend it. It even disabled SD card support on all of my printers, as I never use it and connecting an USB to a desktop computer is no fun, when dealing with more than one printer.
My printers do updates via USB, so I just log into the Raspberry Pi (the one also running OctoPrint) using SSH and use a shell command to flash the firmware.
I guess there are tools to flash the firmware directly from OctoPrint, but I did not want to install plugins for that, when I already knew the shell command just works.
The printers are in another room and I was able to flash the firmware of all printers without lifting my ass from the seat
I also feel at home in shell. The up/download to my website could be done by directly pushing the file, but I have tools here, where uploading a file is just a click and downloading again with wget is just a simple command.
Once GUI interfaces became available, I was quite happy to migrate. After decades of long, laborious sessions at a keyboard, I was more than ready to move on to a mouse.
But maybe printing on the usual desolvable material would be possible.
![https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:3B2_model_400_sitting_on_grass.jpg[/U]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:3B2_model_400_sitting_on_grass.jpg%5B/U%5D){kind=link}