looking for a good 3d printer

[Greeny]

Inspired by this thread, and on a bit of a rush of blood, i decided to buy a Wanhao Duplicator i3 Plus.
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Wanhao-I3-...72.m2749.l2649
It arrived yesterday :-)

I'm a total 3d print noob, so the reasons i went for this particular one are:

• Was mentioned as a good choice in this thread.
• Price, £379.
• Generally positive reviews on internet & You Tube.

Overall I'm very impressed, for the money.
As I had already watched quite a few YouTube guides, assembly & setup was a breeze.
It took me about 45 mins from the box coming through the door to starting my first print. (the 'ok' hand that comes on the SD card)
The print quality is pretty good. Again i'm more than happy with it for the money paid.

I've printed a lens cap & gimbal mount for my camera using STL files downloaded from the internet(Thingiverse) and then used Cura to generate the G-Code
It was all relatively straightforward & again very happy with results

Next step is to try some of my own stuff drawn in Fusion 360.

It's worth pointing out that I have never even seen a 3d printer 'in the flesh' before this one, so don't take my impressions as worth much. I don't have anything to compare to!

The photo's are of my first few prints. They look better in real life than in the photos! (The white plastic doesn't seem to photograph very well)

I'm stoked
Cheers

[Ross77]

Inspired by this thread, and on a bit of a rush of blood, i decided to buy a Wanhao Duplicator i3 Plus.
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Wanhao-I3-...72.m2749.l2649
It arrived yesterday :-

Nice one, Kind of wishing I had just bought one now...

[Greeny]

Nice one, Kind of wishing I had just bought one now...

Swings & roundabouts i suppose

In terms of getting going quickly and ease of use, it's a winner.
However if building your own you will almost certainly end up with a better machine.

For the money paid I'm very happy with it, but it's definately built with parts supplied by the lowest bidder

[Ross77]

Does this look like a good controller? 32 bit with screen and replaceable drives

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Motherboar...EAAOSwpHFZaYj9

[AlexDoran]

Does this look like a good controller? 32 bit with screen and replaceable drives

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Motherboar...EAAOSwpHFZaYj9

What firmware is it supposed to use?

If you want a solution like that i am personally using MKS products, the MKS SBase and MKS TFT32. The S Base is a smoothieboard clone which obviously uses smoothieware. The TFT32 is a host controller and can also be fitted a Wi-Fi addon, smoothieware also has a web interface if you wanted to connect to it via ethernet.

Thanks

Alex

[Desertboy]

Does this look like a good controller? 32 bit with screen and replaceable drives

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Motherboar...EAAOSwpHFZaYj9

The firmware for this can be found here
https://github.com/St3dPrinter/Marlin4ST

[Ross77]

The firmware for this can be found here
https://github.com/St3dPrinter/Marlin4ST

Looks like a a really good option as its ARM processor and can run Marlin but I cant find anybody using it or support.

If you want a solution like that i am personally using MKS products, the MKS SBase and MKS TFT32. The S Base is a smoothieboard clone which obviously uses smoothieware. The TFT32 is a host controller and can also be fitted a Wi-Fi addon, smoothieware also has a web interface if you wanted to connect to it via ethernet.

Is the smoothie a standalone or can I use a pi to controll it? looks like hard work to set up the smoothie tho.

[magicniner]

Smoothieware has a reasonably well commented text config file on the SD card which you simply edit in a text editor on your PC then reboot the smoothie.
That makes smoothieware even simpler to tweak than Marlin on an Arduino, which again is editing a text config file but then compiling and uploading from the Arduino development environment - that took me a few hours to work out and complete from scratch when I swapped to higher micro-stepping drivers and needed a higher hot end max temp ;-)