My tweets

[johnridley]

• Tue, 12:56: Amazon was still listing a month to ship that little 3D printer, but Monoprice had them in stock. I went ahead and moved my order over.

Comments

[marsgov.livejournal.com]

This one? http://www.monoprice.com/product?c_id=107&cp_id=10724&cs_id=1072403&p_id=15365&seq=1&format=2

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

Yes, that one. I ordered it from Amazon originally which was $205 shipped. From Monoprice, $216 shipped, but Amazon was showing up to 2 months before they got stock. Now, often Amazon says that and then gets stock in a few days, but I wasn't worried about $10.

[marsgov.livejournal.com]

I'm now trying to figure out why I don't need one... I suspect that the first time I need something and I can print it, it pays for itself.

Of course the "only supports Windows" is offputting. And I don't know if it supports sufficient standard formats so I can download from Thingaverse.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

Pay no attention to "only supports windows" - this community is the most behind cross platform compatibility as any you will find. Probably 30% or more of those running small home 3D printers are running Linux.

Thingiverse is all STL files. No printer directly takes STL files (well, unless they have a computer attached like an Octoprint server or something). You run it through software first, and all the good software is available for any current platform.

I haven't gotten it yet but I'm assuming it takes standard gcode. I will include that info in my review.

Anything that can write to an SD card or has a standard USB port should be able to write to it. That acutally does include phones, Raspberry Pi, and others.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, and I originally got into this strictly because I wanted to play with the technology. Now it's part of my life and few weeks go by where I don't use it. There are printed parts in a lot of corners of the house. Broken fridge parts that are no longer available, caster bodies that I was able to model and print faster than I could have driven to the store to buy a new one, attachment devices that are broken on drawer slides for which I'd never be able to find matches for in the world (installed in the cabinets by whoever built them, 20 years ago, who knows what brand, and probably aren't replacement parts available separately anyway) - 30 minutes to model and start the printer.