Four in the morning. Just had a few tweaks to finish my upgrade...

Eventually "implemented" my upgrade! I certainly did not think it would take me so long, but once you start to sort the mess that's below a 3D printer you just can spend days on it! There is a brief list after the break.

I am sure a lot of 3D printer owners share the "two minutes into two hours" syndrome.

Why you should not buy Makerbot 3D printers!

Avoid Makerbot and its 3D printers, they are both wrong.

Really! And there are many reasons not to buy: cost, reliability, human values, innovation and so.

I endorse even less Makerbot business
than I already trusted their products !
But enough is enough, this time I say why.

Seriously, Makerbot Industries care more about money than 3D printers. They so badly want your money that they start using dirty business practices. As a client, their overall strategy is simple: you will increasingly pay more to get less. The quality of the product does not count as long as they keep selling it through marketing tricks.

Update (nov. 2014): eventually, well-known resellers of 3D printers like imakr even stopped selling them because of after sale burden and heavy customer negative feedback.

Update (april 2016): interestingly, this post still holds. Makerbot just moved its production to China. A few arguments may be outdated though, so read carefully.

Do not think this is a biased joke, neither only a maker's rant (as formerly). I really want to warn would-be customers that they should not buy. And I want to try and stay objective.

But beside this, Makerbot brutal business strategy makes all this clear beyond doubt. I cannot think of any other motive than greed, or may be also for the inflating ego of Bre Pettis, its director. By the way, 3D printing certainly never was invented by Makerbot -- this is pure usurpation. Please do not fall in the trap of old and dirty business practices.

The businessman and the maker

The Businessman and the Maker

Businessman v.s. Maker (although Dilbert is certainly not a maker!)

At Fabcon 2014 3D print fair (my feedback is here), I gave a speech entitled "Make it yourself: it can be better than what the industry sells you!".

It was insipred by this former post on the same vein, which rang a bell in Florian Horsh head (so much he very kindly invited me).

3D print fair at Fabcon 2014: feelings and people

Fabcon 2014 - was worth 2575 kilometers and 31 hours on a motorbike!

So I was kindly offered to give the closing talk of the 2014 edition of Fabcon 3.D in Erfurt, Germany.

My talk is now available online as slides, and also as a youtube video (for some unknown reason I cannot embed it here).

Note that I added a short separate post that resumes it, with a few new ideas: The businessman and the maker. This one is about the people and projects I met there.

My spoken English should definitely be improved (and I was half sick half exhausted), but it will spare you pushes on the space bar for the next slide, and more importantly, you still get details in the 25 minutes not-so-lively speech. My apologies, as it was the first time I spoke in public for years (back to my time at the long-gone Palm company, and more significantly during my PhD, huh, 14 year ago!). Please read ahead.

Quick comparison: pro versus low cost FDM 3D printers

Are so-called "professional" entry-level 3D FDM printers worth their price?

A LinkedIn user in my network asked for more data when I said that "low cost" FDM printers could compare favorably to "professional" (and expensive) printers. Sure, it is a bold statement, and it does not hold for every of the many "levels of quality", as there are just too numerous. But let me get into more details.

In my opinion, an Ultimaker rev. 2 (~2K€) compares very nicely to a Stratasys UPrint-Se (~23K€)

I certainly do not want to say the "pro" printers are crappy, nor that any brand is crappier than the other, but I had the chance to compare my Ultimaker prints with a "professional" Stratasys entry-level printer (i.e. 1200€ versus 23K€). The outcome is that I just would never swap the two even if I was offered the "pro" one for free! Huh.

Now I am a power tinkerer, I know how to print, I prototype the printer itself, and I cherish freedom, but I tried to keep this bias out of the following arguments.

Thoughts and hints around hot ends

This post finally documents ideas and hints I had during the design of two hot ends I made last year.

My extremely small "cheesy hot end" (all-metal and actively-cooled), here with an Ultimaker printed support.
This hot end was very easy to make (only used basic tools) and also because the barrel is quite short.

At the time I already had ordered an E3D hot end, but the lead time was so big that I decided to give it try myself. Actually, since I attached it with this tiny E3D support on my Ultimaker, I almost never swapped my hot ends anymore because it is just so reliable... The only drawback is that the efficient heatsink could be made almost half the size for more Z space, less vibrations and less weight (hence my smaller, low cost --and low quality-- copycat by the way, see below). And it does not mean I stop thinking ;)

Features and improvements for a would-be homemade Ultimaker 3D printer

How would I re-design the original Ultimaker?

Quite some changes on the back of
my Ultimaker Original (aka v.1)!

The Ultimaker 1 (aka Original) is a well-built printer. It is probably one of the oldest and still best designs as proved by its incredible longevity.

I bought mine two years ago and, still, I feel quite confident that it would compare favorably in many aspects against a 30K€ FDM printer that a client bought last month. Is Stratasys really serious with this beast? May be there are better properties (eg. less warp due to fully enclosed?) But it also features a smaller build volume, a ridiculously limited and exceedingly expensive printing set of material. They also solved warping ABS by printing on... ABS beds (just try to remove it now when you forgot the in-between support!). You bet they bought Makerbot: overpriced "serious business" printers ought to be past, crappy obsolete printers. Too bad they are polluting MKI with greedy business practices though, and not the opposite.

OK, back to our subject. The "UM1" is one of the few printers you can take around you and which will keep printing very reliably without the need for re-calibration. It is also the only one I still blindly recommend... once the user knows that it is not that trivial to 3D print something. The new UM version is probably better in this regard, but it loses some "hackability" that I am fond of...

Still, the Ultimaker printers are big and they sometimes do not suit all my needs. If I was to re-design a clone, there are a few cosmetic but also structural modifications I would make, especially to the original design. Actually, many of my designs are all about improving the printer. Time to summarize what I did and what I would like to do!

Fixing Cura broken linux packages (slicing fails silently)

How to build Cura's slicer "SteamEngine" from scratch

Cura releases for Linux are often broken, probably because the author better implements features than packages (which is a good thing!) and because supporting Windows and MacOS is already painful enough ;)

One of the last issues kept happening due to the linux package made only for 64 bit architectures, which is stated nowhere and not checked during installation. So slicing cannot run when your PC is running a 32 bit linux OS. The easiest fix is to rebuild the slicer, which is a piece of cake compared to 3D printing!

Update (jan, 2014): full instructions on how to build Cura from scratch (see the last chapter).

How to 3D print nylon and trimmer line reliably: do not dry it too much and glue your bed!

How to 3D print Nylon reliably, cleanly and hassle-free.

A well-printed and robust dual-head Nylon mount (check it here).

Nylon is flexible, slippery and incredibly tough when it is printed correctly.

For me, it is a cheap and very useful material to 3D print. It is my best choice whenever PLA is not possible, and the very reason I never use ABS (more about the materials in this post).

But the nice properties of Nylon are the ones that precisely make it difficult to print ! By the way, Nylon also produces toxic fumes when heated, just like ABS, so it better be used in well-ventilated rooms.

I tried many known and unknown techniques to print reliably, and it is time I share my experience because I am happy with what I found.  Read on for more!

Fixes and howto for the DIY Fabscan 3D scanner

The fabscan is cheap... but it can be made to work.

For my curiosity, I bought a DIY "Fabscan" to try scanning small objects cheaply.

Update (2016): this post is very old. Many bugs were fixed since and I was told most of the improvements I list below were made in between. So make sure to get the latest software and doc from the official website, even before reading. And better even: the project is still active!

And it proved to be cheap, in all the possible ways.
In my opinion, the most annoying thing was the totally unusuable FabScan Ubuntu Live CD software.

This post is mostly about how to get it to produce an STL with the Ubuntu Live USB distribution specifically made for the fabscan.