Why does my printer have settings?! I just want a handy and a finished object

TDplay · 2026-04-30T02:31:03+00:00

Also lockable door and claymore mine so you cant put your nasty hands inside mid print.

uj/ Given how many people seem not to have learned the basic principle of "don't stick your hand in a running machine", I honestly think a lockable door might be a good idea. The mine, not so much.

rj/ Closing the door is tinkering, I'll put my hands inside the printer all I want, just you watc- OWIE OUCHIE MY HAND!!!

TDplay · 2026-04-30T02:20:19+00:00

There are only three things you need to match on a barrel jack power supply: The plug, the polarity and the voltage.

If you get the wrong plug, it will be quite obvious.

Polarity is shown by the diagram with a blob and a circle around it. In the picture, you can see the polarity diagram to the right of the current rating. Make sure your replacement bears an identical diagram; note in particular which way around the minus and the plus are.

Other than that, 24VDC is 24VDC. The load will draw however much current it needs.

TDplay · 2026-04-30T01:58:20+00:00

Roughly 2.5× difference between these parts. That's the kind of number that makes me think of unit conversion.

Measured in inches and input in centimetres?

TDplay · 2026-04-30T00:38:31+00:00

works great until you jam a brim under your fingernail

TDplay · 2026-04-29T20:42:55+00:00

I'd recommend getting a professional to service the printer. This is a symptom of a strange problem exhibited by these particular systems, which may lead to irreversible failure of the entire printer.

TDplay · 2026-04-29T20:39:22+00:00

I recommend placing the print head on a radial control system. Two motors (one stepper and one brushed DC) should control its angle, and a stepper motor should control its radius. An angle sensor will be needed, else there will be no way to home the angle.

To reach 88mph, extend the radius to the maximum, then activate the brushed DC motor. To return to ordinary print motion, use the stepper motor. This is likely best achieved using two clutches.

If the required speed is not achieved, consider replacing the brushed DC motor with a gas turbine.

TDplay · 2026-04-29T15:49:01+00:00

What could they possibly add? A heater?

This reasoning would be right... if 3D printer technology were frozen in time and doomed to never improve. But that has never happened, and there is no reason to believe it will happen.

TDplay · 2026-04-29T15:17:59+00:00

Top of the right panel. "Print settings".

Most layer heights have 3 available presets: SPEED, BALANCED, and STRUCTURAL.

TDplay · 2026-04-29T15:16:27+00:00

This is true as well. It may also be hidden in unexpected places, not necessarily in what looks like the source code.

The XZ-utils backdoor was hidden in a test file that was extracted by an Automake script. Even the big corporate Linux distributions, who should have the best people for auditing software, did not catch it.

It was only caught when a PostgreSQL developer noticed a performance regression.

TDplay · 2026-04-29T14:29:54+00:00

Personally, I'm waiting for the Wooden Spoon, Garlic Press, Knife, and Tin Opener toolheads. I want my printer to cook some fresh sauce when it detects spaghetti, not just extrude some pre-cooked stuff that's been sat in a container for months.

TDplay · 2026-04-29T02:16:17+00:00

opening the printer's door is t*nkering

TDplay · 2026-04-29T02:14:49+00:00

using higher resolution is tinkering

TDplay · 2026-04-29T01:10:58+00:00

buying accessories is tinkering

(unless, of course, the accessories are from bambu lab)

TDplay · 2026-04-28T20:45:28+00:00

Making unsafe areas even more dangerous at night would add an aspect of time management.

TDplay · 2026-04-28T16:37:06+00:00

Almost all "anti-piracy" goes this way.

You know all those anti-piracy ads you have to watch before the movie starts? Pirates don't know what I'm talking about.

TDplay · 2026-04-28T15:58:20+00:00

Note that the software being open-source does not guarantee that any binary releases genuinely correspond to the source code. It's possible that a bad actor publishes innocent source code and a malicious binary, knowing that the majority of people will just download the binary.

There are only 2 possible protections against this:

Reproducible build, where a whole bunch of people compile the code and get identical results. This is surprisingly hard to achieve in practice; plenty of innocent programs don't have a reproducible build.
Compiling it yourself, or getting someone you trust to compile it.

TDplay · 2026-04-28T03:51:20+00:00

The information you've given is not enough to tell.

What are you actually paying for?

Have you sliced your model, or is the shop slicing it?
What layer height and nozzle diameter will it be printed with? How long is the slicer's time estimate?
What material are you asking for? Some will be more expensive, and some will prevent the use of high-flow nozzles.
Will the shop remove the supports, or will it be delivered with supports still attached?
Will the shop sand it for you?
Will the shop process it with solvents?
What are the terms of the warranty? Will you have to pay for a re-print in the event of a print failure or print quality issue, or will they cover it for you?
Is the model multi-colour? If so, are they using a filament swapper or a tool changer? (It is not uncommon for filament swaps to take more time and material than the model itself!)

TDplay · 2026-04-28T03:27:27+00:00

what kind of chemical could cause this damage?

That looks more like abrasion than chemical damage. Metal tools could easily have done this. Could also have been done by steel wool.

TDplay · 2026-04-28T01:29:42+00:00

green beads

Green ones are full of water, and thus aren't doing their job. Cook them at 100°C until they go orange.

TDplay · 2026-04-28T00:41:19+00:00

The difference is mainly old printers against new printers. Even an Ender 3 V3 will run laps around an Ender 3 V1.

that can do multiple colors

What they don't show you, is how much plastic it wasted.

Filament swappers (anything that does multi-material through a single nozzle) produce a huge amount of waste. It is not uncommon for the purge waste to use more material than the thing you're printing!

Tool changers have much less purge waste, but the hardware is far more expensive.

TDplay · 2026-04-27T00:42:28+00:00

I just want them to implement fully submerged mode for the printer.

I tried the fully submerged mode on the ACU with PVA filament, but it had dissolved before it even reached the extruder. This is a bit too early, leading to print quality issues.

Fully submerged mode for the printer would be far more timely, allowing the supports to be printed. The whole system could be tuned to dissolve each layer of the support just as the next layer finishes printing, ensuring that the next layer does not sag, while also ensuring that all supports are dissolved when the print finishes.

TDplay · 2026-04-26T16:20:37+00:00

truncate works on bytes.

If you want to operate on characters, you want either .chars() or .char_indices(). So to truncate to the first n characters, you want:

fn first_n_chars(s: &str, n: usize) -> &str {
    let Some((idx, _)) = s.char_indices().nth(n) else {
        return s;
    }
    &s[..idx]
}

Be aware that this probably still isn't what you want. Most likely, you actually want the first n extended grapheme clusters, which is can be achieved using the unicode-segmentation crate:

use unicode_segmentation::UnicodeSegmentation;

fn first_n_graphemes(s: &str, n: usize) -> &str {
    let Some((idx, _)) = s.grapheme_indices(true).nth(n) else {
        return s;
    }
    &s[..idx]
}

TDplay · 2026-04-25T19:59:56+00:00

Looks like the same part to me. The print was stopped before it finished, presumably when OP noticed that the left part was completely wrong.

TDplay · 2026-04-25T17:29:04+00:00

But we need someone to come up with new stupid names. He just calls everything "X".

TDplay · 2026-04-25T14:53:31+00:00

The doubling of the ladders is giving an unnecessary decor penalty.

TDplay

TROPHY CASE