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.
[1] https://github.com/BelfrySCAD/BOSL2
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.
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.
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