>what's the value of paying someone for a product like this vs just building it myself?
Same thing it’s always been. Convenience. Including maintenance costs.
AI tools have lowered the bar significantly on some things, so SaaS offerings will need to be better, but I don’t want to reinvent every wheel. I want to build the thing I want to build, not the things to build that.
Just like I go to restaurants instead of making every meal myself.
Right, but paying for food at a restaurant doesn't get me any closer to owning a restaurant. If promises are delivered on for these agentic coding platforms (which I do believe in), it seems the most reasonable path forward is to use those platforms to build your own platform.
I lived in such a place and never had power outages. Mostly because the power company came through on a regular basis (two years or so) and chopped down and trees that could cause problems. Some areas definitely looked terrible from a beauty standpoint, but it meant keeping power.
I got a cheap Ender-3 V2 with a few modifications (extruder moved to the sled, CR-touch sensor mounted) which - after redoing the wiring which the previous owner somehow messed up, replacing some mismatched bolts, putting nuts and washers on the bolts underneath the hot plate, putting the springs in their correct locations, removing a metric ton of hot glue, aceton-glueing a few broken ABS details, installing more capable firmware [1] and tightening all bolts - seems to work just fine. Thus far I've only used PETG to print spare parts to repair broken appliances, this started out with some hiccups but works fine after installing the mentioned firmware. It isn't particularly fast, it isn't particularly pretty but it does work for my purpose: create parts to repair and build things. I have no doubt that a more modern printer can make life easier but thus far life hasn't been hard with this Ender: design a model, slice and dice it and send it to the printer which does the rest. I've printed some fairly 'hairy' models which came out fine (i.e. not hairy/thready) even though I'm using PETG. For those with some technical aptitude - in other words for people who are wont to build and repair stuff - these machines are an affordable step into the additive manufacturing world with the promise of 'spare parts at your fingertips'.
I just got a Bambu P1S (they are / were on sale since the P2S came out) and the difference to my Ender 3 is truly night and day. I almost never used the Ender, since it always resulted endless tinkering and even then, the prints never came out well. The Bambu worked flawlessly out of the box.
I picked up a P1S for Black Friday. I’ve been printing non-stop since December, including some stuff I modeled myself. Only failed prints have been because I printed the wrong thing. It’s been flawless with PLA. Haven’t done PETG or ASA yet.
I had an Ender 3 Pro, and it was also very finicky, ~18 months ago I replaced it with a Bambu P1S and that thing is just a (nearly) fire and forget machine. I've been super happy with it. In the 18 months I've had it, I've probably gone through 10-20 rolls of filament, in the 4 years I had the Ender I went through maybe 3-4 (because every time I wanted to print something I knew I'd have to spend an hour fiddling with it). A coworker has the Ender 3 though and his has been reliable, so it seems YMMV.
Ha, another Ender survivor here. I had the Ender 5 Pro for a few years, recently bought a Bambu H2D and it's like going from a bicycle to a car with heated steering wheel. It "just works" (it still has the classic 3D printing problems of edges of the print lifting up etc, but that's not the printer's fault). Vast majority of the time it just works.
Which problems did you have with the Ender apart from the mentioned classic 3D printing problems? As I mentioned in an earlier comment I'm using one of these machines without too much trouble after fixing the mistakes made by a previous owner. I did put more capable firmware on the thing which improved printing speed - especially in the preparation phase - and to a lesser extent quality but even with the stock firmware it performed well enough with PETG and some complex models after dialing in the temperatures, distances and speeds to the somewhat odd filaments I use. I can send code directly to the printer, no SD card needed, I can follow printing progress in a browser and I don't send a single bit of information to the Creality mothership while doing so. The same is probably harder - but maybe not impossible, I haven't looked into this yet - with Bambu printers?
>>Which problems did you have with the Ender apart from the mentioned classic 3D printing problems?
The kind of problems that could only be solved with a rather embarrasing amount of tuning every time I switched filament types or speeds or the temperature in my garage changed etc etc etc. Things that basically meant that every time I wanted to introduce any change I needed to print a new flow tower, new bridging tower, new temperature tower, the bed levelling took a huge amount of effort to install BL touch on it but it still worked....when it wanted to, with parts of the first layer being too close scraping the bed and others being far enough to not stick.
Don't get me wrong - the Ender 5 could print as well as the H2D can, absolutely. But it would need 10 test prints and me pulling my hair out first to get to the same level of quality - which I have done, repeatedly, but I just lost the appetite for the tinkering. With the H2D I click print and the machine calibrates itself so well I actually feel bad for anyone who only ever experienced this and never had to sit down calibrating extruder steps or flow rates manually. (yes, old man yelling at clouds).
>>and I don't send a single bit of information to the Creality mothership while doing so. The same is probably harder - but maybe not impossible, I haven't looked into this yet - with Bambu printers?
Bambu printers, even with the most recent firmware allow Home Assist integration where you can monitor all print parameters remotely. But to be completely honest with you - I did go through a phase where I cared about stuff like this, now I just want it to work and be more like my dishwasher than like my bike, I want to tinker with the bike but my 3D printer should "just" work.
Sounds mostly valid, if I ever get something more 'advanced' I may look back on my time with this machine the same way I look at my early history with (2D) printers - dot matrix, then HP500 inkjet with a sheet feeder and other such luxuries to the current HP and Canon lasers.
Having said that I must say that the firmware update did make quite a bit of difference. I have yet to print out any of those flow/bridging/temperature towers, I did get a few bad starts related to bed adhesion but those are 'common 3D printer problems' not related to the machine. Using some of my daughters' hair spray solved that for the most.
>simply moving to greener pastures, whether that be NC, TN, NV, or FL
Yeah, but then they’d be in NC, TN, NV, or FL which, frankly, sounds absolutely miserable. They made the right choice by being in NYC.
Adafruit seems to be doing very well where they are. Why would they want to suffer in such junk states like those with worthless governments when they could continue to be where they are and are happy? They’d also be scraping the bottom of the barrel in those places for talent for the necessary in-person positions. The stars up mentioned sure are cheaper, and they still cost more than they are worth.
I’ve tried most of the coffee making tools and fads, including the above mentioned recipe. I’ve spent thousands and hours and hours of time chasing the feeling others like you describe.
It was so easy for me to go back to a cheap drip coffee maker and pre-ground coffee. I realized that I’ll never appreciate the flavors and process as much as the investment would call for.
My dad is adamant that coffee beans should only be ground right before use because the resulting coffee tastes so much better. I, on the other hand, can't taste a bit of difference; there's no way I could pick out the pre-ground coffee in a blind taste test.
Me too. I actually bought a selection of freshly roasted beans from a local roaster, and when I came back I said that I could not distinguish the Peruvian one from the somewhere else one. The roaster was shocked.
I‘d love to have better taste, but I‘m saving so much money, I do not really care.
They know. Most of these green troll accounts are alts of older, established accounts that don't want to risk their karma and a ban on their main account.
Don't bother interacting with them. Just flag them and move on.
SparkFun filled a very important gap for me during the downfall of RadioShack. Their Free Day was a source of excitement and goodies. Around the same time they realized the legal implications of Free Day and had to cancel it, (but not because of it) I started buying from Adafruit. Since then I’ve spent many thousands on their stuff. Even when I could get it cheaper elsewhere, I was OK spending more there because of their open source work. I even made a pilgrimage to their office when it was by Ground Zero.
I’m not sure I can find them now, but Sparkfun’s Nate has definitely posted public comments over the years that are not friendly to Adafruit, always clearly rooted in jealousy. One that comes to mind was him telling Adafruit to stop pretending they are an underdog and stop preening that they didn’t (at that point) have millions in sales. I totally believe Adafruit’s account of what Sparkfun was doing.
At the same time, Phil has always rubbed me the wrong way to - too aggressive and a bit rude, even in their own forums, including where they provide customer support on orders. The threads shared of his egregious behavior do not shock me in the least.
I guess this is a good of a reason as any to stop supporting both. I’ll save thousands and I won’t have a continuously growing supply of components for projects I’ll never get around to.
Same thing it’s always been. Convenience. Including maintenance costs. AI tools have lowered the bar significantly on some things, so SaaS offerings will need to be better, but I don’t want to reinvent every wheel. I want to build the thing I want to build, not the things to build that.
Just like I go to restaurants instead of making every meal myself.
reply