That your company has an in-house software dev team is impressive. Does the revenue-generating business have access to that team?

Not OP, but in a similar situation. We have in-house dev for both tooling/infrastructure as well as revenue generation. For better or worse, leaders have neglected the software tooling and infrastructure that we use to build and deliver our revenue generating software for decades. Some serious cracks in the foundation showing and we might finally start fixing things.

And I’ll be the first vendor!

1 and 5: Either should be fine, especially if the seller is reputable and has reviews. Many sells will have a store on multiple sites, but in some cases people will resell other people’s work. See if you can track down the original creator to support them 2: I suspect everyone will want STLs they won’t have to do any processing on. What do I mean? Well, I could give you a STL for a piece that’s massively too large and would need to be split into pieces or a different STL that will be impossible to print well. I suspect print services won’t want to deal with this, will charge for it, and/or you might not be happy with the final outcome 3: If you’re paying someone to print the parts, they will likely have larger format printers. However, this might cost some $$ 5: It depends how thick the designs are and how strong you want them to be (more perimeters = stronger), but keep in mind that you’re also paying for machine time and potentially processing (eg surface finishing, support removal, etc). To get a feel for a quote without buying this design, find some cosplay armor on something like printables and use that for quotes

I had no idea this was even going on, so that’s a potential plus.

Stratasys filed the two lawsuits against Bambu Lab in the Eastern District of Texas, Marshall Division, in August 2024. The company claims that Bambu Lab’s X1C, X1E, P1S, P1P, A1, and A1 mini 3D printers violate ten of its patents. These patents cover common 3D printing features, including purge towers, heated build plates, tool head force detection, and networking capabilities.

I had heard that Stratasys was a bit of a patent troll, but some of those claims are news to me.

Can confirm, klipper does this too. Sincerely, someone who had a few thermistor related wire breaks.

Adding encoders to your steppers, or buying stepper motors with built in encoders, can help a lot but it’s not a cheap solution. It can also be a bit bulky, so packaging them a printer not designed for them can be tricky.

I also free hand. Every once in a while I wish they were more perfectly square, but then I realize I don’t actually care enough to print a fixture and have to deal with attaching/detaching my Weller.

I suggest checking out this post. I have quite a few replies about the voron experience.

TL;DR - agree that a Voron can be a start and walk away printer. Building it will take some time, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing but know what you’re getting into. It will take some configuration and tuning to get it printing, but the Voron initial setup guide and Ellis’s print tuning guide are very easy to follow.

From a 2.4 owner.

Nice work!

One of the interesting things about modeling and then printing replacement parts is figuring out which features matter (like shaft diameters and spacing in this design) and which you can take some liberties with to make printing easier. For example, for the part on the left you may have been able to add tapered feature to the rod insider to let you print the part standing on the flat bit on the far left without any supports. Another possibility might be trying to get the part to lie lengthwise by modifying the cylinder some as arced parts have deceivingly big overhangs. Perhaps you could give it a small flat spot.

Lead with a shower then have a clean bath?

The challenge with ASA and ABS re:warping is chamber temps, not so much bed temperature. Both shrink pretty significantly compared to PLA and if your chamber is too cool and/or your print is too big or has difficult geometry you’re going to be in for a rough time.

I’ve lived at this latitude in a couple different states. From what I’ve experienced, the climate in the mid west is similar to that of PA, NY, NJ, CT, RI, etc. Snowfall changes vary radically based on your proximity to a lake and generally speaking anything west of PA is super flat.

To me, the nice thing about SE MI is it the size of the metro and the quantity of things to do within it. The people are also a bit more friendly than the east coast, which is nice too.

The fence is about 6.5 feet tall and seems to keep deer out pretty well. Our garden is near a creek that deer like to walk along, but I’ve never caught a deer in our garden if I remember to put all the gates on.

Printing things at a 45 degree angle is a magic cheat code for tons of overhangs. It can also help give your prints more resolution as most designs tend to not care if the “tall” layers are diagonally oriented.

For context, I can run prints on my 2.4 what would take something in the neighborhood of 4 times as long on my old ender 3.

I would put the difference even higher between my 2.4 and my old i3 clone, but I’m also running a 0.6mm nozzle and print with 0.9mm extrusion width / 2 walls and 0.3mm layer heights. My limiting factor is volumetric flow, which I’ve found to vary between materials (ASA = way easier to print fast than PETG).

Only kinda sorta dangerous, I’m not leaning into chaos random. I’ll update the post with a better view of the final part. The two cylindrical recesses are the dimensionally important features and bridging would hurt that.

It looks a lot like a typical robotic arm used in manufacturing. A quick Google shows that there are a number of desk mounted versions available, but I have no idea what kind of accuracy they offer. It shouldn’t be that complicated of a design and since most approaches use encoders things like missteps should be a thing of the past.

I can’t see pulling this off at a home user price point without pretty big compromises on positioning accuracy and/or giving up on feedback.

This is pretty cool.

This is the how-they-done-it paragraph. Essentially, they printed mechanical logic gates by taking advantage of a conductive filament that grows/shrinks as it heats and cools. Cool!

The conductive filament the researchers used is Electrifi by Multi3D, which is PLA combined with copper micro-particles. A segment printed in this filament is normally very conductive due to the densely-packed particles, but as temperature increases (beginning around 40° C) the polymer begins to soften and undergoes thermal expansion. This expansion separates the copper particles, causing a dramatic increase in electrical resistance as electrical pathways are disrupted. That’s pretty neat, but what really ties it together is that this behavior is self-resetting, and reversible. As long as the PLA isn’t straight up melted (that is to say, avoids going over about 150° C) then as the material cools it contracts and restores the conductive pathways to their original low-resistance state. Neat!

I live in the Midwest. We have these all over as a weather alerting system. They test them monthly at a fixed time, but I could see this triggering someone - especially if they didn’t know it was coming.

Or doomcube, those should probably be in detached buildings. Or you like to print filaments that are high on fumes and don’t have a great way to vent.