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3D printing is a popular activity among wireless network engineers. Given that they deal with invisible, intangible radio waves all day, maybe it’s no surprise they’d enjoy making things they can touch and feel. On today’s Heavy Wireless we talk about why the wireless community enjoys 3D printing, and how engineers can make and use printed objects on the job–and at home.
My guests are Joel Crane, Technical Director at Hamina Wireless; and Robert Boardman, a Senior Systems Engineer for Juniper Mist.
We discuss:
- How Joel and Robert got started in 3D printing
- Printing items to help on the job
- How to get started with 3D printing
- Hardware, software, and training
- Finding pre-existing models
- 3D printing to solve plumbing problems
- Whether you need to be a CAD whiz
- More
Show Links:
@Potato_Fi – Joel Crane on Twitter
@Robb_404 – Robert Boardman on Twitter
Transcript:
Note: This transcript is provided as-is with no corrections or fixes.
Speaker 1 (00:00:07) – Hello again. This is Keith Parsons with Heavy wireless podcast, part of the Packet Pushers podcasting network. Today we’re talking about 3D printing. And one of the questions we’ve heard a lot, both at WPK and just in general is why? Why is there so much 3D printing in Wi-Fi? To help with this today, I’ve brought on two really good 3D printer people who’ve been involved both in wireless and 3D printing. Joel Crane and Robert Boardman. Joel, can you introduce yourself and tell us about you and where are you working? What are you doing now?
Speaker 2 (00:00:37) – Yeah, so my name is Joel and I work for a company out of Finland called Homina Wireless. We make like a network mapping and planning tools specifically for Wi-Fi and some other technologies as well. Yeah, I’m excited to be on the podcast today.
Speaker 1 (00:00:50) – Robert. Yeah, Hi, my name is Robert. I’m a senior systems engineer.
Speaker 2 (00:00:53) – For Juniper Mist covering the Europe area and primarily in wireless.
Speaker 1 (00:00:58) – Great. Well, great to have you both on today.
Speaker 1 (00:01:00) – The first question and since I already know the answer to that’s why you ask these kind of questions is how did you start in 3D printing? We’ll start with Rob. I got started many, many, many years ago. I was working as.
Speaker 2 (00:01:13) – A network admin and in a college and I was doing some work and I ended up having to go to an arts lab and they had they needed some extra wireless or wired parts and they had a lab basically had a CNC, had a laser cutter and 3D printing. And from there it just kind of you can start making things from nothing. And it just kind of blew up from there for me. Joel and I got started in 3D printing back in about 2012 or so before I was even involved in Wi-Fi. We started a local hackerspace slash makerspace, which is like a community place. You could come and build things and 3D printing was absolutely brand new at the time. And at one point we knew of basically every 3D printer in our metropolitan area. We knew exactly who had what printers.
Speaker 2 (00:01:59) – There were just so few of them. And it was just a really exciting technology and I thought it looked really neat. So that’s how I got started in it.
Speaker 1 (00:02:06) – And you were so far back you used to use a 3D printer to print a 3D printer.
Speaker 2 (00:02:13) – Yeah, yeah. Back then the movement was called Reprap, which stood for rapid prototyping, self replicating, some mixture of those words. I don’t remember. It’s been long enough ago now, but yeah, basically every single 3D printer, there were no commercial 3D printers back then. If you wanted a printer, you had to buy parts from someone else with a 3D printer. So we actually talked about doing like a family tree at our hackerspace showing whose printer had printed, whose printer. And for a while we could have fit that on one wall really, really easily. And then and then I ended up building my own. So I traded a six pack of beer for for a set of printed parts. I wanted to build a printer bot, which was a brand new printer that kind of focused on minimalism.
Speaker 2 (00:02:58) – It was very few printed parts. It was designed to be as few parts as possible. So yeah, Tray six packs a pack of beer with a friend of mine who had a printer. He had a Mendel I3 or I2 He has a Mendel. I2 So going way, way back. And he printed those parts for me and I scrounged together everything that I needed to build the printer. And that’s that’s where my first printer came from.
Speaker 1 (00:03:20) – How about yours, Rob? My first started in.
Speaker 2 (00:03:24) – MakerBot.
Speaker 1 (00:03:25) – So I went a little different because I.
Speaker 2 (00:03:27) – Was in the education space at the time, and so MakerBot was attempting to move at that point in.
Speaker 1 (00:03:35) – Time past.
Speaker 2 (00:03:37) – Make a business of it, really. They’re really kind of the first outside of printer bot was the community side of it. MakerBot wanted to hit the education and the corporate market where less printed to build to make it to use it in more. Here’s a printer they tried to start a control P basically, which turned out that wasn’t the way it was.
Speaker 2 (00:03:59) – Printing is not that way. And so you ended up doing a lot of the whole reprap stuff, get that printer to work because they shipped a product that they threw together very, very fast. They took a bunch of other people ideas, threw it in and said, Look, we’re now selling 3D printers. You get it. You have to upgrade it and print parts for it and hope to goodness it worked just enough to print the parts to get it to work better to where you could print better parts. So it was it was an evolution of printing. That was my first one.
Speaker 1 (00:04:29) – If anyone’s listening and they’re going, I don’t know if I want to go through all that. That’s a that’s a lot of pain and and touching. So hopefully by the end of this, we’ll talk about how how easy it is to get involved and do it now. But let’s let’s transition into why 3D printing and Wi-Fi. I mean, they seem like they’re pretty far apart. Rob, why do you think that the two of those two technologies have turned into having a greater relationship than you anticipate? Well well, for me.
Speaker 2 (00:04:59) – It first started when I went from Windows to Mac. And as anybody who’s done a wireless survey you have. Velcro all over the lid of your laptop. I mean, everybody’s laptop had had it littered. You almost had more Velcro in the lid of your laptop and he had metal on the laptop and I was like, I’m not putting Velcro on my brand new pretty. MacBook. And so I have a 3D printer. It’s like, why not design something that’ll hold the the USB hubs that we were using at the time? And so that was the first thing they got into it. And I was like, Wait, we wireless is for as much as wireless is used. It’s a very small tool community. There’s not a whole lot of people that are just making. And when you’re out doing surveys and things like that, it’s a lot of bespoke stuff you have to make. I mean, how many times? I mean, the whole go grabbing a painters pull in a cart from Home Depot to do a survey and then just leaving it there.
Speaker 1 (00:05:51) – We’ve never done that. Never.
Speaker 2 (00:05:52) – We’ve never done that. I mean, so yeah, it just but.
Speaker 1 (00:05:56) – I have to say, I don’t normally return them like some people do.
Speaker 2 (00:06:01) – I usually donate them to whoever I was doing the survey for. Exactly. Yeah. Look, you got a new painters pulling a cart.
Speaker 1 (00:06:07) – Have fun. Enjoy. In fact, I remember I was teaching a class in Utah. Actually, I was with Peter Mackenzie. He was teaching a class. And you shipped to my house Little brackets. And everyone in the. Everyone in the class were like, I want one, I want one. So good job.
Speaker 2 (00:06:28) – It was fun, but it can go a little too far. I printed an entire AP on a stick rig, which that’s oh, I.
Speaker 1 (00:06:38) – Remember that with.
Speaker 2 (00:06:38) – The can. Doesn’t mean you should sometimes.
Speaker 1 (00:06:41) – Yeah. Even with the tripod legs.
Speaker 2 (00:06:43) – Yeah. It was a full on. You could pack it in and carry on and.
Speaker 1 (00:06:47) – Yeah. And put it together.
Speaker 1 (00:06:48) – It was interesting. And Joel, how’d you do. How did you start taking your hobby from 3D printing and move it into your work from Wi-Fi?
Speaker 2 (00:06:56) – Yeah, that came significantly after Robert was, was already doing that for when Robert was actually making useful things for Wi-Fi. I was still, still mostly just kind of in the hobbyist world and using it as a hobby. But my introduction to it came through the pie, which is like a single board computer that at the time had these multiple pieces that you would put together and then take on site with you. And, and so I designed a case for all those parts and which kind of consolidate it down to one piece and made it feel like a handheld tool. Now, credit where credit is due. The original idea for a case was actually Robert I remember you brought me a case that Robert had had designed, and I looked at it and went, Oh, that’s that’s pretty cool. And and then went home and started thinking about it and thought maybe I could maybe I’ll spin up an idea around this as well.
Speaker 2 (00:07:45) – And so I did a little bit of a different take on it, but basically stole Robert’s idea. And then it’s now like, Yeah, that iteration. It was an iteration. Yeah. So thank you, Robert, for, for the inspiration. But now the pie. Yes, the hardware evolved and and that’s something we can talk about is kind of how, how, how that works with 3D printing. But that took the pie from being all these different pieces that you had to hack and then put together on site to now just being this one little handheld tool that you could just throw in your bag, pull out of your bag as needed.
Speaker 1 (00:08:18) – In fact, if we back up just a little bit, Robert, didn’t you make a 3D printed case for the Droid that we use even prior. Yep.
Speaker 2 (00:08:27) – We, we.
Speaker 1 (00:08:27) – Used we did the.
Speaker 2 (00:08:28) – One in Prague. We did the old Droid case. Then you moved over to the small. I think the Neo was the next. Yeah. Neo two.
Speaker 2 (00:08:37) – Yeah. We started a case with that one, and then I joined Myst at that point in time and I was like, Good luck. It’s a startup. I have no free time anymore. And then I think, Joe, you could and then you guys got rid of the neon, went to a board and it changed. I mean, you got so many adapters. I’ve ripped open my pro, by the way, and I’m not supposed to, but it’s pretty insight. I like it. Oh, you can. It’s fine. But yeah, I mean, at this point we’ve been through four iterate No, five, counting yours, six counting yours iterations of the pie case because there was your, there was your Droid one, your neo two concept, my neo two production, the pro and then now Nick Turner’s M4 and R4 variants. So yeah, we’re up to six separate cases that have been 3D printed now throughout the lifecycle of the Pi project.
Speaker 1 (00:09:25) – And your term iterative or did you get inspiration Either way works because every one of those that you just listed, Joel, has been improved upon and improved upon and just gets better and better along the way.
Speaker 1 (00:09:39) – And I think that’s part of the 3D printing process. So I’m not a I have a 3D printer and I like using it. I would rather print somebody else’s files. But both of you do design work, and I know you’ve both just in fact, on the call just a minute ago, Robert showed me a piece that he printed out just because he needed a piece. And I know, Joel, you’ve done the same thing for even little projects in your garage. How do you use that side of the 3D printing world to help your life? Not in Wi-Fi related, just other things you need.
Speaker 2 (00:10:12) – I have a specific example I can use In the first few weeks of Covid back when we we really didn’t know what was happening. And, you know, like it was very, very early days. We were at home and there was a part in my toilet tank that broke the little arm that lifts the chain, that lifts the flapper that broke. And at the time, I did not want to go to the hardware store.
Speaker 2 (00:10:33) – I didn’t want to go. So what did I do? I opened up Fusion 360 and 3D, printed a little part that would patch it back together and pushed it all. It just did little push fit things, put it back together. And that part is still in the toilet tank today. And and so many, many times 3D printing has saved me that 25 minute trip to Home Depot or a trip to the hardware store or many things like that. I mean, that’s just one very, very small example of how I use a 3D printer. If I need a special wrench or something like that, I just print one off really quick instead of starting up the car. I was going to say I also have a funny toilet 3D printing story.
Speaker 1 (00:11:11) – I needed a new chain clip.
Speaker 2 (00:11:12) – It snapped and I was like, I’m not going to go to the hardware store for this. Give me 15 minutes and I’ll pop another one out real quick. So, yeah, I don’t know why toilet parts for the first one.
Speaker 2 (00:11:24) – I’m like, Robert, I’m really glad that you also had a toilet part story because I kind of felt weird telling this guy. That makes me feel a lot better. So thank you. I was about to.
Speaker 1 (00:11:31) – Say, you know, if you want.
Speaker 2 (00:11:32) – To edit it or not interested. Excuse me if you want like, like a use case. I made a spice rack, a non toilet. One. So I. I love cooking. And keeping your spices organized can be a interesting job. So I had a cabinet and I essentially basically made a rack custom rack to that cabinet that fit all my spices in it so we could keep them organized enough.
Speaker 1 (00:11:55) – But that’s you just mentioned things that you made sound really simple. I just. And then you made something. I looked into 360. I’ve taken. Taken both of your bootcamp and your deep dive classes. Robert and I. I don’t open up 360. How is there an extra skill set? Is there. Well, okay, but I mean, a a tool to to do the design.
Speaker 1 (00:12:22) – Is that a different skill set? Is it more programming based? Is it more artistic? How would you how would you suggest someone get involved in that side of I just want to make a part, grab a.
Speaker 2 (00:12:32) – Pair of calipers and essentially all like a CAD program is is taking a two dimensional object and making it 3D. And so I always I know it’s silly and basic, but I always say tinkercad is a fun place to go play around. It is by no means once you start understanding design and you want to do chamfers and fillets and things, it is not the tool for that. But if you just want to take a block and make another block and cut a circle and cut a hole and do the whole peg and round whole thing, you can do that really quickly. And it’s like the spice rack. I took measurements, made squares with cutouts in them and stack them and printed them.
Speaker 1 (00:13:12) – So how many what was the iterative? What was the iterative process? How many how many of those racks did you print before it fit your cabinet?
Speaker 2 (00:13:21) – Well? So I took a measurement first of the cabinet space, then I took measurements of the spice bottles.
Speaker 2 (00:13:27) – They’re square. So and then I basically said, okay, I have this much space divided by this many spice bottles. And then that gave me how many I could fit. And then I had wall space left over at that point in time. So because again, when you have a spice rack, you’re going to have to have some kind of a wall around it, some kind of some kind of a container. So you have you you design that way and then you can do it trial by error. You could say, okay, I’m going to just print 15 of them and see how many fit and then make adjustments from there. Or you can be as prescribed as going down to the millimeter.
Speaker 1 (00:14:03) – Did the first print work?
Speaker 2 (00:14:05) – Yes.
Speaker 1 (00:14:06) – Well, very good.
Speaker 2 (00:14:07) – That’s because I know how to add space, because generally when I was first starting out, it would take 1 or 2. I would say probably 2 to 3 would probably be about my average till then. But like if you get down to it, Joel will tell you right now if you want to use little rubber foots at the bottom of it, it’s 13.2mm with a two millimeter insect.
Speaker 2 (00:14:29) – Yep, you know it the same.
Speaker 1 (00:14:32) – So a lot of this is experience that you just kind of practice and go through it. Yeah. So like there’s.
Speaker 2 (00:14:38) – A lot of things that I’ll keep, parts that I’ve built and I keep them in a Fusion 360 file of stuff that I may want to use that again someday. You reference them and reference and pull in. So it’s just the more you design, the easier it gets because the more you have to pull from.
Speaker 1 (00:14:55) – Well, for those people who aren’t into that, talk about how other people would get objects, one of the things you did at the deep dive at WPK was allowed people to just go pick something, a model and then print it right then right away to get that that instant gratification. I wanted something. I now have something.
Speaker 2 (00:15:16) – Yeah, There’s basically there’s one main place that I look for pre-made models, which is printables, which is a 3D model repository by, by Prussia 3D, 3D Printer company that Robert and I both are customers of.
Speaker 2 (00:15:32) – There’s also thing averse, which is MakerBot thing or versus been around for a long time. So typically check printables first and then and then think of her second. And there’s some other ones out there like thangs. It’s another one I stumbled on recently. So there’s a few different repositories out there for finding finding models that are pre-made. The one thing you have to watch out for, especially on thing of hers, is there’s a lot of unprintable stuff there, stuff with geometry that just it won’t stick to the print bed. It’s got crazy overhangs. It’s never going to print cleanly. And so that’s I tend to prefer printables because the community there seems to mostly be people that actually have a 3D printer and understand the limitations around it versus you get more people. It’s like, I just did a 3D design and threw it up there and said, Hey, have a good time with it. Um, another one you can go to for more functional things. So say you want to build a case or you want to build something around things as a site called Grad CAD, um, where it’s just a repository of pad designs.
Speaker 2 (00:16:31) – Like you say, you wanted to model something for your MacBook. Somebody has gone out and actually modeled a MacBook for you, so you can model around that so you don’t have to take the time modeling the MacBook for yourself. I’m taking notes here. Robert What was the name of that one? It’s called Grab CAD. Okay. Yeah, it’s fantastic for like, for instance, I needed a holder, so I have for a for my trimmer, I wanted some place where it would sit because it just came with a plug. And so basically I went on there and they had that already designed and I could just make the case around it so that it it’s then, then you’re, then you’re printing becomes real easy because somebody has done the hard work of measuring the the item for you.
Speaker 1 (00:17:16) – You both kind of got into this organically if someone was looking to get into it today and we’ll put out two questions and we’ll answer them sequentially. But just so you know where we’re headed, where would you go to learn how to do this if you’re starting it over again so you don’t have to go through that as much effort as you went through when you started.
Speaker 1 (00:17:36) – And then when we’re done with that, we’ll talk about some hardware and software that you could use today. So the first question up and Rob, you can answer this is where how would you learn? I mean, you did it yourself if you wanted to get into this or there courses, books, videos, how would you go about learning?
Speaker 2 (00:17:55) – There’s a lot of YouTube has a lot of good stuff. There’s a lot of bad stuff, but there’s a lot of good stuff on the on the on the subject. I think the biggest thing is to sit down and figure out what you want to do first. What is your plan? Do you want to print functional stuff? Do you want to learn the design? Do you want to go that world or do you just want to print little statues and gadgets and stuff like that? Because that’s going to kind of determine where you go. You just want to run the printables and buy things. There’s printers out there that you can just go control and have a 90% of a good time nowadays.
Speaker 2 (00:18:27) – But if you want to start getting into doing things like engineering materials, like nylons and polycarbonate, that’s a different world. So you kind of have to understand your budget and kind of where you want to kind of end up at.
Speaker 1 (00:18:41) – Well, let’s back up just for our audience. You mentioned a couple of things, and I’m just going to ask you to be a little more definitive about what you meant. You were mentioning different types of materials. And so in 3D printing, you’ll be running with a spool of material. And you’re saying that material has there’s different ones you can use and they have different characteristics. You know that. So the question was, how does someone go about learning all of those things and why would I use nylon versus, you know, pet G versus, you know.
Speaker 2 (00:19:12) – Whatever? Yeah. At that point I’d go to YouTube and research. I mean, literally type in 3D printing and just start reading as much as you can because it’s a it’s a pretty diverse thing. I don’t know.
Speaker 2 (00:19:23) – Like, again, this is kind of why we taught the class an intro class to give kind of people a direction to go into. Um, but it’s, it’s, it’s like saying unfortunately people so classes you can buy like online classes for. I don’t know some of the websites that sell glasses, but there are there are 3D printing glasses out there and local makerspaces you can go to if you have one. But I just I mean, I just I believe in YouTube and research, just type in 3D printer and start going.
Speaker 1 (00:19:53) – How about you, Joel?
Speaker 2 (00:19:53) – Yeah, it’s just kind of build on what Robert said. Some specifics that I have like for a materials guide. 3D printing. There’s a lot of different materials out there that we can print with. Most of us are sticking with pet G or pla pla, kind of the classic material. And Robert actually got me started on Pet G. I didn’t tried it until Robert said like, Hey, you need to try this material out. If you’re wondering like what kind of materials you can print.
Speaker 2 (00:20:17) – Actually Prussia 3d.com they have a material guide that is like an overview of all the different materials that are available and a big table of what kind of surfaces they can print on what their characteristics are, how easy they are to print. And so the material guide from from Prussia is a great place to start. So you can just go, just go go to help dot Prussia 3d.com. That’s Prussia. That’s just a really good resource. Another great resource, especially in regards to YouTube, is Thomas Ladder. If you go to Tom’s 3d.org, Tom’s 3d.org is his website. He publishes regular content about all kinds of different 3D printers and I’ve learned a lot of things from him and seen him test a lot of ideas, test new applications, design tools. He covers the entire thing. So that would be a great place to go. Start. You spend 2 or 3 hours just watching his videos and and that should get you on the right track and help you understand what you’re getting into. His day job as a mechanical engineer.
Speaker 2 (00:21:22) – So you’ll like that that’s basically yeah he he breaks it down. Another one is if you’re going into that is like CNC kitchen is another one. The guy just literally goes through and they do a more scientific approach to it. It’s because a lot of the stuff you’ll find on YouTube is more look at the cool thing I printed or look at the printer company who sponsored me and I printed this cool thing. Those two guys are generally more more on the technology, not so much.
Speaker 1 (00:21:52) – Well, good. Those are those are those are nice resources. People can get into 3D printing and just go buy a printer. But is it possible to also build one? And so this next question, and I know you’ve both been through both techniques. Do you recommend building over buying or buying first and a little one and try it and then build your own later? What’s your what’s your best ideas there? We’ll start with Joel on this.
Speaker 2 (00:22:15) – Yeah, I strongly recommend building it most. Most 3D printers out there. A lot of the good ones, in my opinion.
Speaker 2 (00:22:23) – You can buy as a kit and you can build it. And what I love about that is you will find out exactly how it works as it’s going together. Because even the best, most reliable printers out there, you are going to run into some kind of maintenance issue that you have to do, whether it’s just lubricating bearings or fixing a jammed nozzle or something like that. There will be something that you have to fix at some point when you build the printer, then you know exactly how it goes together and how it works 100%. I don’t think if you’re serious about doing it and you want it to be something more than just something that sits on a shelf in your office building, your first one is the best way, at least the first one. I don’t buy. I buy them built now because I know how they work, so I don’t have to. I don’t need to go through the joy of building them again.
Speaker 1 (00:23:09) – How about a would you would you buy a cheaper one in a kit to learn that and then buy a better one that’s pre-built? Just looking for some advisor.
Speaker 2 (00:23:19) – I. I personally recommend going for a good printer that you build. That’s like there’s the temptation out there. I see a lot of people. They come to me and they ask like, Hey, Robert, you’ve experienced this exact same thing. People come to me and they say, Hey, which 3D printer should I buy? And I say, This one, this is the 3D printer that you want. Do not look any further. This is what you want. And they go, okay, I decide to buy the $300 one and then they have a bad time. They struggle through it. And so, yeah, my recommendation is get get a good one, get a premium one, don’t spend one thousands. We’re talking hundreds. We’re talking, you know, around or below the $1,000 range, the $800 range. My opinion that’s kind of the sweet spot for especially for a first 3D printer. But make sure to get something of really good quality so that you’re not, you know, buy it once, buy it.
Speaker 2 (00:24:07) – Right. Is there. I do. I do love the I do love the I found this really good deal on Amazon for 150 bucks kind of get it. Sure you can get it, but you’re going to. But when you do that, you’re going to spend all your time tinkering with the 3D printer instead of printing things. So that’s how I see.
Speaker 1 (00:24:28) – Well, we have in our Wi-Fi industry, we have a lot of different vendors and they have different specialties, we’ll say, and different things they’re better at than others. And though they all try to be everything to everyone’s full stack in the 3D printing world. Do you do the same full stack as in you buy your materials and your nozzles and your printers from the same company? Are there are there different vendors people should be looking at?
Speaker 2 (00:24:56) – Some companies try to do that. As far as from the community standpoint, they’re not looked on very kindly. And most people find ways of open sourcing because the entire idea of 3D printing is for kind of being an open source, community driven thing.
Speaker 2 (00:25:11) – There’s a lot of the like a lot of the firmware advancements have been done by many different people. So yeah, you can there’s material. I suggest you find your local materials if you’re in the West Coast. I like using matter hackers. If you’re on the East Coast used to be printed solid, but they’re now owned by Prusa, so that’s probably a pretty good thing. And then in Europe, in Prusa as well, so mean you have you find and you go through and you find those different best in breed basically for what you’re trying to do.
Speaker 1 (00:25:37) – Joel. I’m going to ask you the question and you’re going to give me the answer. What 3D printer should I buy?
Speaker 2 (00:25:43) – Oh, which 3D printer? Okay. Thought we were going to talk about the full stack thing. If we weren’t doing this over the internet, then I would count to three with Robert, and we would both say it at the exact same time. But it won’t work. So we won’t. We won’t try that. But Robert and I both I think we both agree at this point that our favorite 3D printer vendor by a long shot is Prussia.
Speaker 2 (00:26:04) – They’ve been around for a long time. You remember my very first printer, my printer bought was printed on a Prussia Mendel I two and kind of surviving until today is Prussia just released the Prussia i3 Mark four. So that platform is still alive today, all these years later, over a decade later, 12 years later, actually, now that I think of it. So what I like about Prussia is there are 100% open source. Like for example, they have an application that you use to turn your 3D model into something that the printer can print. It’s called a slicer, and their slicer is called prusa slicer. It’s 100% open source. And they also support other vendors, printers. So you could go out and buy, you could go out and buy another vendor’s printer and use it with Prusa slicer. They’re also a very community minded company. Like, for example, during Covid, they they designed and 3D printed face shields for health care workers. When we weren’t sure what the demand was going to look like for health care equipment.
Speaker 2 (00:27:04) – And they’re just very, very involved in the community and very open source minded. And they just make excellent stuff that just works. Like my first purchase that I bought was a mark two that I bought used off of a friend, and that was the moment where 3D printing transformed from a hobby where I work on a printer to a hobby where I 3D print things. That was the deflection point and it really opened up the possibilities for me. That’s when I got involved with with the Pi thing. And I don’t think I could have done that without the reliability of Prusa. So if you want something low cost, I, I’m my, my recommendation is the Prusa Mini. I just finished a print on mine a few moments ago. It sits next to my computer here on my desk and I love it. And then for my my bigger projects like printing and Pi cases and production work, I have a pair of Prussia Mark three pluses, but obviously the Prussian Mark four is now the new, the new king in the in that area.
Speaker 2 (00:27:57) – So either one of those gets a big thumbs up for me. And Robert, anything to add there? If you want something bigger, get the Excel. Um, no. Interestingly enough, as you’ll go start researching, especially today, there’s a lot talk and a lot of new printer companies like you’ve got guys from DGI now making printers, you’ve got Anker now making printers, and they’re all fabulous things. But I go back to when you go back to a prusa, you want to printer, it’s a plotter. It is literally a three dimensional plotter. It goes in X and a Y and a Z. A person does that really, really, really well. Really easy to use. It’s not the prettiest, it’s not the most fancy looking machine, but it is just reliable, like the one that’s sitting behind me. If we end up showing the video of this, this started its life as a mark two. It’s now a mark three. It has been upgraded and moved and changed. It will soon be a mark four Um, and that’s the thing is the printer, you get a printer for life and I won’t say life that’s that won’t put that on him.
Speaker 2 (00:29:00) – But you have a printer for a long period of time. It’s an investment and it’s something you build on. It’s not a fad. So I mean, I’m with Joel on that is where I would go. If you want a reliable printer, there might be others out there. Frankly, I have not taken the time to investigate because the Bamboo Lab’s X1 carbon is the new. I don’t know. Seems like the the hot new thing on the block here. Like, I’ve seen that a lot lately. It looks like it prints very fast, But at this point, I’m right now I don’t see enough reason to break my tool chain and and break all the processes and things that I have. So I’m still continuing to recommend the brush. And so far, every single person ever recommended one to is loved it. So it’s it’s gone really.
Speaker 1 (00:29:46) – That’s a very strong recommendation. You mentioned between the two of you a mini three. For and XL What’s the what’s the difference between that size wise and why would you use one over another?
Speaker 2 (00:30:01) – So essentially it’s how big of an area can you print? So the mini, I think is 150 by one, 50 by one 50mm, you’re going to get into 3D printing.
Speaker 2 (00:30:10) – I hope you enjoyed the metric system because everything is done in the metric system. It’s beautiful.
Speaker 1 (00:30:15) – Describe that in something. Is that the size of a softball? American football, A soccer ball? How big of a thing can you print?
Speaker 2 (00:30:23) – Like a little salad plate? Yeah, you could. You could probably. That’s probably 2 or 3 baseballs. Okay. Yes. Easily a big coffee mug. If you were going to 3D print a coffee mug, which you wouldn’t. But actually, I can do this. I have this actually, it’s 4.5in by 4.5in by 4.5in ish. Nice. Okay, good. Then you go to the mark. Three mark four. That is a I think it’s 255 by two, 55 by two 55mm, which breaks into like nine inches in each dimension. And then when you go into the XL, you go by it’s a 12 by 12 by 12in. So it’s 300 by 300 by 300. It might be a little bigger than that, but it’s pretty volume. The technology changes a little with each iteration as well, but the same for the most part, they they relatively use the same technology.
Speaker 2 (00:31:16) – Yeah. And on the mini, I would say that the, the quality is about I would say 85 to 90% as good as the Mark three. And I’m sure Mark for and and other platforms primarily because of just how it pushes filament into the print nozzle. They had to make some concessions to keep it small, lightweight and keep the part count down. So the print quality is almost as good, But I’m actually about to downsize. I’m about to move to a smaller place and and I’m kind of spinning down the production of, of not doing wmp cases or anything right now. So the mark three is are actually about to go. I’m going to keep the mini and I’m going to be very, very happy to keep that as my hobby printer. So it’s almost as good as a mark three and it’s definitely good enough for me to be my only printer. Yeah, I agree with it. The cool thing about it being open source is you have the ability to upgrade that if you want. So like, do you have companies out there that make parts to help minimize that? And I’ve also done that to my Mini as well.
Speaker 2 (00:32:16) – So I’ve actually changed. So but you can’t it can just print out of the box though and I was very happy with it out of the box. But yeah there are some nice little upgrades if you do want to tinker and if you do want to make some small improvements, you can. You totally can.
Speaker 1 (00:32:31) – Well, I totally appreciate both of your time in helping us learn a little bit more about 3D printing. Robert, if someone wanted to track you down, where would they find you and do you have a repository of your designs?
Speaker 2 (00:32:44) – I do, but I do not make them public anymore because of I’m more than welcome to share them with anybody, but don’t put them on printables because of headaches that we have had with licensing and share stuff. So I do help people design stuff all the time, but I don’t really post them anymore. But if you’re looking for something, I’m glad to help people design. If you’re looking for me, you can find me on Twitter. That’s the usual place that we go.
Speaker 2 (00:33:10) – So it’s Rob 400 for our Rob with two BS underscore 404.
Speaker 1 (00:33:15) – And Joel where can we find you?
Speaker 2 (00:33:16) – Yeah if you want to find me. Just on the internet in general, it’s going to be Twitter. My my handle on Twitter is potato underscore five and if you want to find my my models that you can print. Unfortunately Rob I have run into some issues as well. People selling my stuff on eBay, for example, and that was cool. You can find all of my models at Printables Forward slash at Potato five, or you can just look for potato five on printables and you’ll find everything that I have posted publicly there.
Speaker 1 (00:33:46) – Well, thank you very much.
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