As someone who has spent an unreasonable amount of time mucking around in this exact swamp, here are some things worth knowing:
* HEPA is the extreme edge of a much larger scale called MERV, which rates filtration performance.
* You'd be surprised how few contamination threat models _mandate_ HEPA. If you're doing petri dish work, contaminants you care about are probably in the 1 to 3 micron range or larger.
* This means you can get adequate results from lesser filters, which has massive implications for cost (because filters are cheaper) and ergonomics (because the same dollar buys a bigger filter, which is less cramped to work in).
* Laminar filters are only laminar under specific circumstances, which include both pressure and distance. Too much or too little force and the output will be turbulent (non-laminar). Fans need be adjusted to get this pressure right, across the entire face of the filter.
* As you get farther away from the filter, air falls back into too-low speeds and becomes turbulent again. The lids in the "clean" test for this post are farther away than I'd put them.
* As the filter traps more particles, it becomes harder to push air through, so optimal fan pressure varies for every filter across time.
* The pressures we're talking about here are very small. It's normal for correctly pressurized airflow to be undetectable to a bare hand. Easy to overshoot.
* In theory, you can test this with an anemometer. In practice, I've not found a cheap one that will so much as _turn the prop_ under such a light load.
* A cheap but inexact test of laminar flow is a vertically held lighter's flame being pushed to a flickerless ~45deg angle.
* When working in front of a hood, movement technique matters. If you put a dirty hand in between your hood and your dish, you're still blowing contaminants onto the workpiece, you're just doing it in a straight line.
* Or a turbulent line: obstacles like the end of the acrylic sheet can cause air to whip around the edge and become turbulent.
* Gordotek has a video that's probably of interest here[0], where he shows a cheap filter blowing zero PPM, as measured by a swanky lab particle meter that costs more than most people's rent. He received an enormous amount of heat from keyboard warriors that said this is BS and doesn't work. Notably, the number of haters who came with particle sensor readings of their own is also zero PPM.
* A laser PM2.5 sensor with 99%+ accuracy in the ranges we care about (1+ micron) can be had for under $50. This moves your measurement -> result interval from days to seconds, making it feasible to test more parts of the filter.
* Owning such a sensor, I've seen a duct fan taped to a trash bag taped to an unfinned MERV16 blow every bit as clean as a real-deal university lab HEPA filter in the 1+ micron range.
> * In theory, you can test this with an anemometer. In practice, I've not found a cheap one that will so much as _turn the prop_ under such a light load.
Hot wire anoemometer ? Given it's rapid response you could probably even measure the turbulence in the flow. Probably possible to DIY too
I adore camelcamelcamel and check them often. Does anyone else notice that their data has gotten much lower quality ~lately?
Anecdotally, in ~2018 it felt like CCC was in sync with amazon's listed price (including sale prices) nearly 100% of the time, and often had price data going back 5+ years. These days it's common to see that a sale price hasn't propagated to CCC, and that the chart only goes back 12 to 18 months.
My assumption is that there's hostility / volatility from amazon re data availability, combined with things like sellers delisting and relisting items to get a new ID (and thus a blank slate on price history).
Regardless, big thanks to CCC for the work they do on price transparency.
Cosmetically it's probably fine. The downsides all have to do with predictability and the ability to reason about what the wall is made of in the future.
A person who goes to eg hang a picture frame or shelf there will encounter a different material with different load bearing properties than expected. Pushing into the center of that area with EG a drill bit will not have the same physical response or give, and depending on how it was braced/integrated with the surrounding wall, the patch itself may be pushed or pulled out of place. Similar for anyone that leans on that area if it's at such a height.
It took thousands of years for people to discover agriculture. Eventually they all do or they get assimilated by the ones who do. But I think this might have taken a very, very long time as well.
Bambu P1S, no question. Enclosed with filter for ABS fumes etc. Personally I've only used their A1, but it's the best printer I've ever used by far, and it's the first one that you can treat like a paper printer: plop it down, ignore it til you need to print, hit print and assume it works with no supervision. An absolute joy. It's also FAST compared to last gen printers.
They do have a bunch of cloud service BS and phoning home that runs afoul of the HN spirit, but there's a LAN mode that allows you to send prints from LAN without opening up to the wider internet. If that's still too restrictive, you can always do direct SD card transfers via sneakernet.
Software might be too closed for you, IDK if there are jailbreaks. Repairability is possible but fiddly – akin to current gen car engines, rather than 70s types. They're very popular printers, I've only needed to open the head once, and there were plenty of YT teardown videos to help.
The Bambu slicer is good. They've got niceties for basic operations like snapping to bed or scaling up/down by a few percent. I believe it's based on cura slicer, which is also excellent.
P1S is at the midpoint of your budget. Their next model up is $1200, depending on your flexibility. Might have some value if you're doing more obscure materials. Didn't realize how cheap the enclosed ones had gotten. I've got half a mind to upgrade myself now....
I agree that the Bambu printers are as good as it gets for plug-and-play printing, but I wouldn't trust the tiny carbon filter for toxic fumes in an indoor environment.
The better VOC filters use a larger amount of activated carbon and they recirculate a high volume of chamber air inside the chamber.
Activated carbon also needs to be replaced over time as it loses capacity to adsorb more VOCs.
Fume hoods have an exhaust to outside the inhabited area, which allows the interior of the hood to operate at a negative pressure. This means air is drawn in through the gaps rather than allowed to escape through them.
If this filter itself is effective, not saying it is, then gaps aren't necessarily a problem depending on where they are and if it still maintains the right pressure/airflow to the filter. Brought up a fume hood because if one of those had a filter for whatever was bad inside, and instead of exhausting outside it went through the filter, it would work still work despite the intentional gap.
I'm not saying the gaps are intentional or in the right place here, but that there could be an ok design with gaps. If you are exhausting through a filter you have to pull in air from somewhere.
What's the timestamp? I can't tell from the part near the beginning if the holes that aren't on the part with the fan (presumably with filter in front of it?) sealed to it would be intaking or exhausting, and/or if some of them are for heat from the electronics but not contiguous with the build chamber.
Except this person cares about privacy and openness, and Bambu is an awful VC funded push everyone out by undercutting prices and then enshittify company.
To all the people in the comments popping off about how "it just works". I have a Makerbot 2 running Sailfish, it's "just worked" for 12 years. I haven't replaced a single part on it. Ever since I started using the Prusa Slicer I've got dimensionally accurate parts every time I hit print. At least from my PoV "the printer just working" is a solved problem and has been for a long time now. PLA, PETG, PCTG, TPU. No issues with anything and I've been able to drive it at about 150% the speed I could with the original firmware/software.
Yes, but you said it yourself - you had to replace the firmware with one that lets you run faster than the original, and you're using a different slicer.
With Bambu Labs printers, you just plug them in, turn them on, and feed them filament and your files. They work so well that you don't have to think about firmware or anything else.
I got my first 3D printer around a dozen years ago as well, and the comparison to the experience you get with a Bambu Labs X1C or H2D is absolutely night and day. It feels like with the previous generations of 3D printers, that operating and maintaining and tuning the machine itself was the "hobby". With Bambu Labs (and I'm sure some of the other competing printers that have come out since the X1C was released), the "hobby" is what you actually make.
It just works, requires no tweaking, no fiddling, no flashing firmware or bed leveling or hairspray, and it has totally changed 3D printing from a nerd hobby to something anyone can do (IMHO).
Sure but the last tweaking I did on this printer was years and years ago, and it's been "just working" ever since. I haven't fiddled with anything, I haven't even leveled the bed, I don't use hairspray. I don't think you can even find the firmware I flashed onto it in 2014 anymore because of link rot. It's just a solid printer that makes the part I want every time I hit print. I use it all the time for mechanical parts. I do prints that pause to embed hardware. Heck I even have it clear the bed by hitting parts with the print head so I can make multiple copies of things unattended. (only works on parts with low bed adhesion)
It's not a brittle system. I don't deny that Bambu makes a good product, an excellent product even. If you can't afford to support the general ecosystem get one and do your thing.
I just think the reason Bambu is where it is right now is because they are VC funded vampires on the ecosystem and supporting them will make things worse in the long run. If you can afford to support someone else you should because it helps make things better for everyone.
FWIW until recently I championed Bambu as just the default easy solution, recommending it to my friends every time, but I had a long conversation with Josef about the future of 3D printing and it really changed my mind.
> I don't think you can even find the firmware I flashed onto it in 2014 anymore because of link rot
This is exactly what I am talking about - you claim to have a reliable and easy to use solution, but it's not a solution that someone who wanted to print dragons for their grandkids could use. Bambu Labs is (and Prusa's current offerings, to some extent, are as well, although that is up for debate as you can imagine).
It sounds like your issue is not with Bambu Lab's products, but with their business practices, and I share your concerns there - but it still doesn't mean that "my old printer I've spent a lot of time getting to work the way I want it do" is a viable alternative to "I can buy it at BestBuy, plug it in, and hit print"
I think the point I'm trying to make here is that my printer is bad and old and it works every time, and I attribute that to Prusa Slicer, a free open source piece of software. The Makerbot was a finnicky piece of shit before Prusa Slicer, and now it's excellent and makes dimensionally accurate parts every time, I don't even remember the last time I've had a print fail and I use it all the time, tens of hours of printing per week recently.
The upfront ont-time cost to get to something that works reliably with a non-Bambu printer is real, but I am perhaps naively assuming that if my ancient makerbot has been working reliably for years now the same one time cost can be paid with any modern printer and amortized over hundreds of hours of printing to be nearly negligible, and you still have a reliable printer AND you're voting with your wallet for a better future.
I am not claiming that what I've done is the same as "go to best buy, plug it in and hit print" but I do think the alternative is really really not bad at all.
This isn't "For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially...". I'm saying "surely if my ancient makerbot is like this with really minimal tuning, a modern non-bambu printer is worth the cost of a bit of extra setup in order to fund people who are improving the space".
But he's also using a 12 year old maker bot. They're not really even in business anymore. Why are you pushing so hard that GP needs to provide a completely turnkey solution for their long out of production printer? All of your comments are attempting to make it sound like bambu is the only turnkey solution, and you aren't doing a terribly effective job refuting GP's point that there are and have been other printers that just work as well. For another comparison point, my prusa MK3s (also now out of production I believe) has been absolutely turnkey and has required literally zero fiddling. The only print failures I've had have been due to part design, which would also apply to a bambu. I bought mine as a kit, it was a fun few hours to build but you can buy them fully built and assembled. Literally plug into an outlet, load filament, and hit print. Bambu isn't the only option for printers that work reliably and aren't a separate hobby, I don't know why this narrative gets pushed so hard.
yeah, Prusa Slicer....who do you think Bambu labs got theirs from? All of the major slicers are forks of Slic3r. Hardly a "oh wow this is such a pain in the butt" change.
> no flashing firmware
BambuLabs have firmware, and they have updates too. Or are you complaining about, what, having to take an SD card out and drop a file on it?
I wasn't complaining, I was noting that the commenter was not comparing apples to oranges. They are using a 3rd party slicer (not the one that came with their printer, which is the old Makerbot Desktop) and an alternative firmware, but claiming that their printer was just as easy to use as a Bambu Labs product.
It's like trying to compare installing Gentoo on an old Lenovo and a Macbook Pro - yes, they both work fine, but the amount of work that one might have to do to get one of them to work reliably is much different than the other. Once you get them working, sure, they are reliable, but obviously most people would rather not have to flash an alternative firmware, etc.
I guess. Having just bought a Prusa Core One because of concerns about the direction Bambu is headed...
I regret it. Hands down. It is absolutely worse from a practical standpoint than the much older X1C I have, and the absolutely maddening part is that the "worse" bits are mostly software related.
You can hate on Bambu all you want (and frankly - a good chunk of it is well earned, but some is exaggerated or false) - but it feels like they use their products, and they care enough to fix the rough spots.
So while I like the ideals of Prusa... I can't say I'm super impressed with their latest offerings. Bambu's ecosystem is justly WILDLY better. The slicer is less annoying, the printer is more consistent, the monitoring tools are better, and most importantly - when I hit print, it just fucking does it.
I've had the Core One for less than 3 months, and I'm already into the double digits for number times I hit print and I come back 5 hours later to find.... it hasn't even damn well started the job. Instead...
"nozzle wipe failed. Retry?"
"different filament is loaded. unload? Select No to start print" (side note - it's just fucking wrong here, the filament from the correct MMU slot IS loaded, I just did it manually at the printer because if I don't and I switch materials - the next print is a guaranteed failure. The MMU is a whole different clusterfuck of bad software design, cool 3d printed engineering, bad software design)
"Nozzle clean failed. Retry?"
"The bed appears to be unlevel. Perform leveling?"
"Bed heating disabled due to inactivity" (This one still stumps me, I hit print, and came back to this message - my guess is nozzle clean fail and this just dismissed the first one... but who knows).
"Nozzle wipe failed. Retry?"
---
Basically - I am fucking tired of "Core One needs your attention!" popups on my phone. Especially for the stupid things like approving a nozzle clean retry, or re-leveling. I am also sick of wasted time thinking the machine is printing when it's not.
Right now, I would absolutely buy a Bambu over anything else in the market for FDM.
The reality is that “just works” is going to outsell just about everything, including high ground on morals and privacy. If competitors want to keep up they’re going to have to offer models that don’t require any tinkering/tweaking even if doing so is possible, supported, and encouraged.
Yeah... The market is still shifting in response to the X1C.
10 years ago... I would manually level my ender, religiously monitor it, and still deal with a decently high failure rate (esp for anything other than PLA). Tuning the printer took easily as much time as I actually spent printing with it. I upgraded all the things, flashed firmware, ran octoprint, etc...
It was like driving - gotta keep the hands on the wheel and maintain alertness at all times. It was an activity that required my attention and focus.
Then I caved and got an X1C in 2023. It's... a really, REALLY good machine.
It's like flying somewhere. I get on the plane, start up a movie or a book, and someone wakes me up when the flight is over. It's a tool that is doing things for me while I do other stuff.
I'm at the point where I'm not really interested in the "middle" all that much. Either go with a Voron and get the "I'm driving" feeling if that's what you want. Or get a Bambu and get chauffeured to successful print.
I agree entirely with your first two sentences (I like both).
But I disagree pretty hard with the rest of it. An X1C spits out prints that are higher quality than my ender 3 would do, in a variety of materials the ender couldn't handle, even with a HUGE amount of time understanding the ender and how it works (incl upgrading or replacing just about every component).
Further - I think some of the divide is between the folks printing models, and the folks printing functional parts.
When I print nice models (ex: toys for my kids or gifts) then sure - I tweak still because appearances matter.
But if I just want a functional print because I need an enclosure for an electronics project, or I want a hanger for my wall, or I need a new footpad for a desk... Mediocre is a-ok.
And again... The X1C is not spitting out mostly mediocre parts. If anything - the "learning" you need to do mostly lives in the slicers/models at this point.
I have been using a Core One at home for the past six months or so, and have not had this experience at all. For me, it just works. I can send prints to it and it completes them, hands-off.
It sounds like there may be a hardware problem with your printer. Did you buy it assembled or do it yourself? You may want to contact Prusa about this, because I can confirm this is not normal behavior for this printer.
Very interesting. How long have you had this multi desk setup for, and how has it evolved? I've tried similar things over time and found a huge amount of variation in the results.
The worst are sort of "negative equilibrium" situations, where the station feels good enough to keep indefinitely, but is actually unproductive. I ran my main desk in the living room for a couple years, and it was only when I moved back into my studio full time that I realized how valuable it is to have gently lit walls on both sides of my peripheral vision, preventing attention hijacking from things going on around me. My ADHD greatly benefits from a room that acts like a horse blinder.
I've had many other "stations" but they tend to be transient, getting lots of attention initially, and then falling into disuse and accumulating crap that gets set on them like any other table.
I've ended up with one main workstation where I do everything, and a few other low-use high-specificity stations tied to specific hardware (an iMac that runs a CNC machine, a flow hood for mycology work). These are idle 98% of the time but it feels great to be able to sit down and immediately resume those things without having to rebuild the container so to speak.
The biggest ADHD-related gotcha is "out of sight out of mind". If a station isn't in a place I see or walk past regularly, I forget that it exists.
This does make me want a typewriter. Is there one you recommend for a couple hundred or less?
>How long have you had this multi desk setup for, and how has it evolved?
Since 2018, the first time I ever had my own multibedroom rental. After I had established my second desk, I was hooked.
I have since moved, and the new location was a smaller half-renovated location... so I spent Summer 2024 building an "office" / shed (120sqft no-permit legal; after reading Michale Pollan's A Place of My Own), which has its own two desks, on opposite walls (12ft apart). No internet available in my shed (by design). In the main house, I split the larger bedroom in half, which created three separate work areas (plus hundreds sqft of storage / shelves). The smallest desk is dedicated entirely to laminating (internet memes, mostly) =P
Both my typewriters are on custom-built stand-up desks (barstools work, but normal chair-height is too low). My tax and music-streaming computers are also stand-ups. Main browser (this computer) is a seated 48" AORUS, which admittedly has four work-stations on a single display (counter-intuitive to multistation, but never use any connected machine simultaneously).
>falling into disuse and accumulating crap that gets set on them
The secret here is to create even more horizontal spaces, without any technology atop, for the simple purpose of setting all your crap. Having a box / closet labelled "Box(es) for unique one-off items that I cannot seem to throw away because I know I'll eventually need it" — is also helpful. So is throwing anything away after its sits within, unused, for over (e.g.) a year.
>typewriters / machines?
My oldest desked computers:
two 2006 Core2Duo (x86): a 20" iMac running MacOS Snow Leopard (taxes only, USB printer, offline); the other is an online Win7 Pro machine that is solid, used for anything with a login (e.g. government paperwork, e-file, direct stock purchases)
My favorite computers are all modern Apple Silicon (M2/M3/M4) — I held-out with a MacPro5,1 for over a decade of daily-driving... until the M2Pro Mini came out early 2023.
But my favorite composing machine is a Smith Corona Super12 Coronet (it's a bulletproof typewriter). Aside from using a proprietary ink cartridge (readily available online, even Amazon), and not traditional ribbons, you just can't go wrong with an electric-strike typebar.
The G.O.A.Typewriter is generally considered to be IBM's Selectric II — and I'll agree, but only if you own two and can service them both full-time (i.e. don't depend on them to always work). This is the only typewriter that can "keep up" with 100+ wpm [theoretically 220+ wpm is possible] because there are no individual typebars to clash/interfere/sieze [just a typeball]. Mine sits unrepaired, after its commonest deathknell: broken drive belt, requiring full dissassembly.
My daily correspondence typewriter is a thick&wide-platen Smith Corona Secretariat, which can handle paperweights up to 65 lb (without creasing; typical platen can handle up to 45 lb), up to 12" wide. This machine requires no power, and minimal maintenance — you can take it out of the attic, after years of dust/rust/siezing... "force" each typebar a few times, and then be typing in no time [obviously you need an undried ribbon].
----
One of my favorite gifts is helping intellectuals get offline (if you can't tell, typewriters can play a big part in reconnecting with your world). A recent convert is a judge that has always commented about my typewritten communications (for years, a casual relationship)... now uses a Selectric II professionally (just a brilliant machine, if you can maintain it; interchangable fonts, 10/12 spacing, re-write™). It's a distinguishing correspondence composer, if you can work without red-squigglies/AI (and afford maintenance).
This video by Benn Jordan makes the case that yes, traditional capitalism and empowerment by way of ownership are eroding in favor of a rent-seeking subscription economy. This economy requires continuous payment for participation with services that are not only merely loaned to us, but are loaned under the constant threat of banishment if we fail to contort ourselves to comply with nebulous, ever changing terms set by orgs that don't care about us. One such contortion is the agreement to be surveilled at all times.
Both apps involved email for magic link features, but then both apps genuinely insist on harvesting your email for instantdb before you can view them?. Gotta love living on the post-shame internet.
For what it's worth, we added auth so there was some way for users to edit songs. LLMs still struggle with more complicated permissions for guests. This is something we'll work on though.
Love orca, and that's a really nice example. Messed with it a bit when it came out, and one toy project I'll share in the hopes that someone does it before me: an orca GUI that uses a larger grid with representative images in place of single char glyphs. I found that writing orca is fairly straightforward — you look up the sheet, find a thing and do it. It's reading that's the hurdle. An 8 char chunk that made perfect sense when I wrote it takes just as many lookups to read later. This probably gets easier over time, but I still think it's a cool design opportunity.
* HEPA is the extreme edge of a much larger scale called MERV, which rates filtration performance.
* You'd be surprised how few contamination threat models _mandate_ HEPA. If you're doing petri dish work, contaminants you care about are probably in the 1 to 3 micron range or larger.
* This means you can get adequate results from lesser filters, which has massive implications for cost (because filters are cheaper) and ergonomics (because the same dollar buys a bigger filter, which is less cramped to work in).
* Laminar filters are only laminar under specific circumstances, which include both pressure and distance. Too much or too little force and the output will be turbulent (non-laminar). Fans need be adjusted to get this pressure right, across the entire face of the filter.
* As you get farther away from the filter, air falls back into too-low speeds and becomes turbulent again. The lids in the "clean" test for this post are farther away than I'd put them.
* As the filter traps more particles, it becomes harder to push air through, so optimal fan pressure varies for every filter across time.
* The pressures we're talking about here are very small. It's normal for correctly pressurized airflow to be undetectable to a bare hand. Easy to overshoot.
* In theory, you can test this with an anemometer. In practice, I've not found a cheap one that will so much as _turn the prop_ under such a light load.
* A cheap but inexact test of laminar flow is a vertically held lighter's flame being pushed to a flickerless ~45deg angle.
* When working in front of a hood, movement technique matters. If you put a dirty hand in between your hood and your dish, you're still blowing contaminants onto the workpiece, you're just doing it in a straight line.
* Or a turbulent line: obstacles like the end of the acrylic sheet can cause air to whip around the edge and become turbulent.
* Gordotek has a video that's probably of interest here[0], where he shows a cheap filter blowing zero PPM, as measured by a swanky lab particle meter that costs more than most people's rent. He received an enormous amount of heat from keyboard warriors that said this is BS and doesn't work. Notably, the number of haters who came with particle sensor readings of their own is also zero PPM.
* A laser PM2.5 sensor with 99%+ accuracy in the ranges we care about (1+ micron) can be had for under $50. This moves your measurement -> result interval from days to seconds, making it feasible to test more parts of the filter.
* Owning such a sensor, I've seen a duct fan taped to a trash bag taped to an unfinned MERV16 blow every bit as clean as a real-deal university lab HEPA filter in the 1+ micron range.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lInfdAVvBts
reply