I have been mostly happy with my flashforge AD5X starting as a newbie. Its got a good range of material capabilities, but 95% of the time I’m printing PLA anyway. PLA is the most common filament by far.

I will say I have had two hot ends (the part the filiment comes out of) get covered in enough filament they broke during a misprint ($40 repair each).

I don’t really have experience with other makes/models but that is my loose endorsement of the AD5X. My only real complaint is how expensive the nozzles are compared to other brands.

That would make me delete it instantly and leave a bad review.

I think we can both agree tautology works because it works, and that’s good enough for me.

Well, them and the bandits, I’d imagine.

I spun it up it up in may to fool around. Today I opened a brand new air purifier and imeaditley disassembled it to flash ESPHome firmware on it. It never once ran stock.

One thing I’ve noticed: my self hosted services are rarley, if ever, hounding me to check out features. I cannot emphasise enough how much I loathe a program fighting for my attention.

Maybe? It was/is on an old win10 I keep around (and came with it).

There’s a million better options, but I was glad it was there. Good way to get some kid fooling around early the way paint did. You used to be able to scan things with your surface and import them into builder (this was a good while back).

I’m going to toss out Microsoft 3D builder, strictly to dip your toe in the water. It’s bare bones and basically MS Paint but when I was getting started I used it for very simple stuff. I still use it if I’m making dead simple modifications/combinations of existing .STL files.

Microsoft actually had some cool ideas in the early/mid 2010s. Still had all the proprietary bullshit but there was at least nifty stuff going on.

This is a great conversation because I’m one of those people who’s terrible at arithmetic, but quite good at math. As in: I can look at a function, visualize it in 3D space, see what different max, mins and surfaces are dominated by what terms etc, but don’t ask me to tally a meal check. I’d be useless at applying any math without a calculator.

Similarly, there’s a lot of engineers out there that use CAD extensively that would probably not be engineers if they had to do drafting by hand.

The oatmeal did a comic that distilled this for me where they talked about why they didn’t like AI “art”. They made the point that in making a drawing, there are a million little choices made reconciling what’s in your head with what you can do on the page. Either from the medium, what you’re good at drawing, whatever, it’s those choices that give the work “soul”. Same thing for writing. Those choices are where learning, development, and style happen, and what generative AI takes away.

That helped crystalize for me the difference between a tool and autocomplete on steroids.

Edit: to add: you’re statement “I claim to understand but don’t” hits it on the head and is similar to why you have to be careful if plagiarism in citing academic review papers. If you write YOUR paper in a way that agrees with the review but discuss the paper the review was referencing, and, even accidentally, skip over that the conclusion you’re putting forward is from the review, not the paper you’re both citing, that’s plagiarism. Notion being you misrepresented their thoughts as your own. That is basically ALL generative AI.

this makes me feel much better. I’m debating spooling it up on wifi after disconnecting it and piecing it back together.

That makes sense but also it seems like you just like adding extra round characters to the end of things.

thank you! I had looked at the documentation but was unable to find that. I think to be safe I’m going to follow what @autriyo@feddit.org said as well. There’s no reason not to label them.

Which means, sorry future people stumbling on this, I will not be providing definitive evidence one way or the other on this.

This. I’m smack in the middle of prepping for this. A friend came out and visited and helped me start boxing. I have another who’s coming out to drive the truck. I could but he’s got his CDL and is willing to do it.

Getting movers that drive the truck out of town is expensive, but in town, or just some big dudes to load/unload is much less. Everyone’s financial situation is different but I was shocked at how different the price of those two categories was.

So I have a FlashForge AD5X with the MMU. It worked amazing out of the box, including flawlessly doing some TPU. They actually mentioned the MMU was designed with TPU in mind. That being said: I have been struggling with basic PLA, even after swapping to nozzle that has run only PLA (even though I only ran <10g of TPU through it). I am still new to a lot of this, and don’t feel experienced enough to fault the hardware. What I can say though is it does seem folks are specifically improving the ability of MMUs to handle flexibles. A big reason I got it was to be able to do ABS parts with TPU gaskets. Ask me in a few months.

Same here. Printing something like say, a cow, with frequent swaps would be wasteful, but I’ll do parts with 1-2 color swaps. It’s mostly nice as you said though to have multiples “locked and loaded” to do a 1 filament print.

I cannot emphasize enough how unwilling I’d be to interact with someone that has these.

2nd gramps. I spooled it up in about 2mins on an unraid server.

So that’s what I thought… Except for similar issu s with extended drying.

I building an enclosure with a rotary dehumidifier to keep things low, but despite the tell tale signs I think something else was going on.

Me to! I was almost done with a batch of prints for a friends fundraiser (30x hat looms for knitting. Great little project, they’re knitting hats for the premies at the NICU, so they needed a custom model for the tiny babys). I think you’re right. With the oozing and whatnot that has to be it. I brought up the fundraiser because it had me making multiple prints of the same file. When I found a setting that worked (moving to the 0.20), the first few worked, but were a bit stringy, but by the 3rd/4th one they were printing flawlessly.

I guess maybe when things got screwed up at 0.16 the nozzle had some funkiness, and with enough material it worked itself through? Still doesn’t explain why that brand new nozzle screwed up in the first place at 0.16 (which suggests the flow rate issue you brought up), but I’ll take the win.

Thanks! This kind of insight is super helpful. Are you a poster here often? I was able to get decent prints again by changing the layer from 0.16 to 0.20. Still disappointed and confused as to what happened, but will probably keep the printer. Not sure if it makes sense to do a “wrap up” post for anyone else searching later.

Also: go team venture!