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Prusa MINI: Smart and compact 3D printer

268 points by luastoned 7y ago

ChuckMcM 7y ago
This is pretty awesome. I "upgraded" my Makerbot Replicator 2x to a Prusa MK3S and the difference was pretty amazing. Now to see if I can upgrade the controller to the Buddy.
- WhyKill 7y ago
  I hope they do a kit.
jasiek 7y ago
Does it make sense to 3D print these parts rather than injection-mould them?
- sannee 7y ago
  The fact that you can repair your printer by using your printer is a big selling point imho.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- ericb 7y ago
  One of the ways Prusa gets the quality they have is that they run a massive print-farm of their own printers to print the parts so they get to see all the issues up close. Printing the parts also makes them upgradeable and home-fixable for end-users.
monkmartinez 7y ago
I don't like it for a few reasons; 1. It looks like you are going to fight "ringing" with lack of rigidity. 2. Its a bowden extruder... which I suppose is a necessity due to the lack of structure. Still I would rather have direct drive on every machine. 3. It's very expensive. You can buy an Ender for $200 or less on sale... or around $230 normal price. Upgrade the board to a 32bit Bigtreetech for $60 with Trinamic drivers... plug and play. 4. Most people find they want a bigger printer... not smaller. This is my initial reaction. I am always looking for innovation in this space and most of it is happening in the "industrial" realm. For example, I wish they would make an SLS machine or a "beginner" industrial machine. The companies like Creality are just dominating everything. We need prosumer/industrial machines that have features you can't get with $750 dollar machine.
- debatem1 7y ago
  I had exactly the same reaction. But,I will say that my creality has been a bucket of pain, to the point where I almost exclusively use my prusa these days. So perhaps that's reason to hope this is more than just a crappy bargain basement printer warmed over.
- tigrezno 7y ago
  I've owned an Mk2s for like 2 years and I've never printed anything that required all the bed length. My next printer will be smaller, let's see how they'll price the kit version.
- Klathmon 7y ago
  Re: points 1 and 2, I think they're connected. The lack of rigidity is mitigated by the Bowden making the hotend so damn light it probably won't be as big of a deal as you might think. Also tweaking some jerk and acceleration settings will almost always fix ghosting and ringing caused by a "less stiff" frame with minimal hit to the print time. (And I'm assuming they'll do most of the legwork to have a great printing profile out of the box) >You can buy an Ender for $200 or less on sale... This is exactly why I love the idea of this printer so much more! You could get an ender for $200 (plus $60 to $100 to improve the worst parts and make it less likely to catch fire). But you're still manually leveling, you're still fighting with scraping prints off the bed, you're still missing stuff like filament run-out detection, automatic firmware updates, spring steel PEI print surface, crash detection, power panic, stealth mode, and a lot of other safety features. And at the end of the day, an ender 3 is gonna cost $260 to $300 and require the user to know what to replace fix on day 1 for a safe printer, while this is $350. And outside of commercial manufacturing, most users don't ever max out their print area with most printers (at least from what I've seen spending a lot of time on 3d printing forums). I'm super excited for this, because $800 to $1000 is just to much for the average person to spend on an easy to use printer like the MK3S. This is only slightly more expensive than other "starter" printers, and has most of the niceties, safety features, and support.
- hevi_jos 7y ago
  Yes, if you don't value your time then yes, buying an Ender and modifying it is a better deal. I am part of a Spanish 3D printer group called "clone wars", and dozens of people there have bought Enders because they are dirty cheap. It really takes a master degree in engineering to solve most of them, because they want to print professionally expending 300euros. That connects with the point 4, yes people want everything, expending nothing. But that they could get it is a completely different thing. As the print bed goes bigger, the mechanical deflections increase with the square of it. The price of things like milled precision beds or original linear rails, increments non linearly for a tolerance when the size of the bed increases.
BubRoss 7y ago
This is an advertisement and I don't think there is anything exceptional here.
- jeffk_teh_haxor 7y ago
  Prusa makes the best open source 3D printers. This makes it cheaper. No different than when RaspPi announces a new board.
- jrockway 7y ago
  Prusa is running a pretty good business. 100% of their hardware and software is open; you can print your own Prusa i3, build your own controller board from schematics, modify all their software on both the firmware and slicing side, etc. I don't think it's bad to give them a shoutout on HN, they're doing good work and you can benefit from their work without giving them a dime. (After struggling with a cheap Chinese 3D printer and learning to hate 3D printing... I switched to a Prusa i3 MK3S and am loving it. The software doesn't annoy me. The prints stick to the bed every single time without fail. And I got to assemble the whole thing myself, so I know how every component works and how to fix it in the event that something breaks. And if something breaks, I don't have to order a replacement part, I can just go to the makerspace, print it out, and be back online!)
bsamuels 7y ago
I guess switching to a bowden extruder let them cut a ton of costs. Can't wait to see how it prints compared to the mk3. The real test will be comparing it to the Ender 3, which seems to be the form factor/market the mini is trying to go after. Even if the mini is 150 bucks more than the Ender 3, if it prints even slightly as reliably as the MK3 then the Ender 3 may be done for. With low cost printers like the Ender 3/Maker Select/etc, after the first 50-200 hours of printing, you can end up spending more time on printer maintenance than printing. There's also small problems that can happen that for non-technical users would be the end of their adventure into 3D printing. That is easily the greatest pain point at the Ender 3's price point.
- WillPostForFood 7y ago
  Switching to the Bowden extruder may have been more about reducing print head mass because of the cantilevered design. I'd avoid printers like the Ender for fire risk as much as the hidden cost of maintenance and upgrades. The Prusa Mini will be a much better entry option than the cheap Chinese knockoffs.
  - shifto 7y ago
    Ender is fine and not comparable to previous chinese printers like the Anet series. Also the merlin firmware has been made more robust against risk of fire through some software mitigations (measuring extruder heat etc).
- shrubble 7y ago
  Do you have a view on the Trinamic drivers? Are they important to have?
  - panpanna 7y ago
    They are QUIET! See Toms video: https://youtu.be/sPvTB3irCxQ https://youtu.be/sPvTB3irCxQ
MrGilbert 7y ago
I think the market for this one will be difficult, just because you can get a 3D printer (read: Ender) for basically half the price... ...with this being said, though - I'm happy to see a "entry-level" Prusa. One thing that lags the cheap printers are security measurements. I guess no one is keen on burning down their house, just because this giant hotglue on rails went rogue. On their website, they state that they are: - monitoring FAN RPM - Have self diagnostic - Have a high quality PSU - and, even more important, use thermistors. Taking all this into account, this might justify the price bump, if you aren't able to add all this to, let's say, your Ender or any other printer by yourself.
- ericb 7y ago
  The Ender is a great printer if you're cool with it catching fire. In several of the 3d printing groups I'm in, the most common question is "what's the best printer around $300" I can get. The most common answer is something like "try not to scrimp and get the Prusa instead." That's a fairly tone deaf answer to someone truly budget constrained, though if the price is double their budget. But for an extra fifty bucks--that's a no brainer. Print jobs can easily go 24 hours and fires are fairly catastrophic. I think Prusa just hit the ball out of the park with this pricepoint and approach assuming they are using their usual reliable, vetted components. I have never seen a report of a fire with a Prusa.
  - MrGilbert 7y ago
    > I have never seen a report of a fire with a Prusa. Tbf, that really depends on the market share. In the interwebs, I've read a total of 3 - 5 reports of printers catching fire. Now, if 20% of the 3D printers are Prusas, then the rest are chinese ones, which come all with the same bad components. There is not much surprise here, at least for me. Despite from that, the groups I know usually go like "Yeah, get a CoreXY printer instead. Moving the printbed constantly in XY direction isn't a good idea."
    - ericb 7y ago
      I think, but cannot prove, that Prusa's got a fairly high percent of this broader segment of the market.
j-pb 7y ago
I'm glad that prusa has stayed true to his open hardware pledge all these years, while continuing to push the reprap ideals. Everybody is complaining about the price, but c'mon this thing is designed printed and assembled in Prague, the EU. It creates local jobs for people with fair wages, social security and good quality of life, we should strive to have more of our stuff produced in the west. Happy to see him design another printer, I really love my MK3.
- mk3 7y ago
  The price is going to slay all Chinese crap makers. I always wanted mk3 but never had a big enough reason to buy, now I can justify it. It's the printer I will buy :)
  - m0xte 7y ago
    It’s not. I bought an Creality Ender 3 recently for a lot less than that (152 GBP next day in UK) and the thing is perfect. It is also entirely open source. https://github.com/Creality3DPrinting/Ender-3 https://github.com/Creality3DPrinting/Ender-3 Quality is pretty top notch. It worked out of the box flawlessly and with no futzing.
    - crankylinuxuser 7y ago
      Yeah, except for the things you can't see. 1. They use crappy MOSFETs that are known to fail closed. This means you can get a runaway heat on your hotend. A 40w cartridge can melt the alu heatspreader 2. The beds are anemic for heating. Not enough power 3. Crappy steppers 4. No features for jam detection, autoleveling, skipped step protection, filament runout 5. "Chinese" quality: good luck in getting any sort of tech support. Once they have your money, you're fucked. I'm fighting right now with Pine64 over defective eMMC modules that ignore the first read, causing initrd to fail to boot. Of course, they were chatty on Twitter prior to purchase, but have ignored every way of contact AFTER purchase. But pretty much every Chinese company is like this.
      - 7y ago
alphagrep12345 7y ago
Why does everyone need a 3d printer? Maybe this statement would sound as ludicrous looking back as asking why does everyone need a PC in the 1980s. However, I still don't understand why would a regular person need a 3d printer? Mass marketed goods are always cheaper due to economies of scale. And would you really want to put in the effort to make your own chair, etc?
- detaro 7y ago
  Not everyone needs a printer - but an easy to use, reliable and relatively affordable printer is more suitable for "everyone", not just people that enjoy "fiddling with my 3D printer" as a side-hobby or can/want to afford expensive ones. I interpret the article as meaning it that way. E.g. a 3D printer can be great for all kinds of creative hobbies.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  I make a lot of stuff from scratch and a 3D printer is an excellent way to quickly test if something is going to work or not in practice. Also: musical instrument parts, prototype machinery, replacement bits for old gear that you can't buy anymore. It's the sort of thing that you use more and more the longer you have it because you see applications that you never dreamed off before getting it. You won't be using it make your own chair (or at least, you probably shouldn't) and you won't be mass marketing anything 3D printed nor will you compete in the marketplace with anything that can be injection molded or stamped. But for a quick one-off part if beats whittling out of a piece of wood by quite a distance. On another note: soldering irons and hammers are also not for everybody, some people will never get the hang of fabrication. But once you are in the group that likes to make stuff 3D printers are just one more option in the tool arsenal.
- skybrian 7y ago
  Most people won't need it, but most people don't need woodworking tools either.
- dwoozle 7y ago
  I print a lot of stuff around the house with a toddler. I printed guards to prevent him from turning on the oven, a insert for the piano that prevents him from pressing the auto play demo, a shim to get a drawer to close more smoothly, a shampoo caddy that hooks around our shower stall, a storage system for small hardware, a set of clips for the computer cords to keep them organized, a doohickey to strip leaves off of herbs, geez there must be more I’m forgetting.
johnchristopher 7y ago
Can it be used to print small figurines for role playing or board games?
- jrockway 7y ago
  Yes, but in general everyone that buys an FDM printer for things like that is unhappy. Your parts will look 3D printed. If you care about fine detail, you really want an SLA printer. (The fact that this printer is small doesn't make it any better at small parts. It just takes up less space and can't print bigger parts.) I got into 3d printing about 6 months ago and am thrilled every time I print something. But 100% of the things I design and print are practical and solve some sort of problem. My parts look 3D printed, but I don't care, because they're performing a useful task. Many people on the Internet are not interested in that, they just want to produce injection-mold quality parts from 3D models at home. If that's your use case, don't buy this. The SLA printers are much much better at that.
  - e12e 7y ago
    What you might be able to do, is print at 5x/10x size in order to verify your designs, then have them printed in final 1x form by a commercial service?
  - johnchristopher 7y ago
    Thanks, I know nothing about 3D printing. Thanks for the pointers.
tpmx 7y ago
I never really understood why they stayed with building a giant 3d printer farm to build all those 3d printer parts, except for it being "cool". Especially in .cz, I think think they could have gotten all those parts injection moulded for a lower cost. At a higher precision.
- jrockway 7y ago
  Dogfooding is valuable. If there is a fundamental flaw in their printers, they're going to find out about it firsthand. It is also nice to know that I can print replacement parts and that my replacement is pretty much identical to the original.
  - tpmx 7y ago
    Sure, but they've kept doing it for many years now. At some point it shifts into some kind of "religion". Or, judging from your response, it's a part of their brand?
    - kbob 7y ago
      Keep in mind that the printers are getting regular upgrade cycles. A 2019 i3 MK3S is nothing like a 2015 i3. Firmware upgrades are released every couple of months. So continuous testing is still valuable.
      - jrockway 7y ago
        I was going to cite this example. I think recent MK3Ss have different fan shrouds than the first batch of MK3Ss, because the community found a better design. All Prusa had to do to upgrade new customers was to send their print farm a different file; total cost $0. Meanwhile, customers with the original design could download a file and print it, getting a factory-quality part for (essentially) free. Managing a printer farm sounds like a lot work, but they did do that work and can reap the benefit that prototyping and manufacturing are the exact same process. It's like saying "why does Google have all these servers when they could just buy them from AWS?" Well, they got good at building datacenters before you could just rent a datacenter from Amazon. If you're good at something, keep it up!
mwill 7y ago
Really curious to see what the print quality ends up being like on these. Design wise they're very similar to something like a cetus, or many other Chinese printers with similar mechanics with a major difference: Smooth rods and bearings instead of linear rails. In my own designs I've pivoted away from rods in favor of rails and seen much greater quality, accuracy, repeatability, and speed, even with cheap knock off rails from China, and most of the industry is moving that way as well. What's curious is you can get a machine similar to the mini, using linear rails, and more metal or injection moulded parts over 3D printed parts, for just a little bit more than the mini. Prusa has quite a good reputation though, so I'm skeptical they would release an inferior machine at a the same price point, so like I said, really curious to see how well these works.
- dhon_ 7y ago
  What I love about Prusa is that they eat their own dog food. They use their printers in a farm producing parts for their products. This makes reliability and repeatability first class citizens. He mentions in the blog post that the motivation for this was wanting smaller & cheaper machines for the farm, as two small machines can print faster than one big one for the same cost. I'll still wait for reviews, but this looks like a great little machine and I suspect that quality will be reasonable for the above reasons. One issue will be corrosion on the rails over time though. This affected an original Ultimaker I had sitting around as I let too much dust gather on it.
neonate 7y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20191012190019/https://blog.prusaprinters.org/original-prusa-mini-is-here-smart-and-compact-3d-printer/ https://web.archive.org/web/20191012190019/https://blog.prus...
olafure 7y ago
I like Prusa, but after they stopped releasing firmware updates for my MK2S for no good reason, so did my business with them. Such a shame.
- reaperducer 7y ago
  Did your printer stop working when they stopped writing software for it? Does it no longer do what it did when you took it out of the box? (Serious question. I don't have a 3D printer, but I've been thinking about it. If they're reliant on constant firmware fixes, then I will probably wait another year.)
  - BoorishBears 7y ago
    They're not. Many people will never even update their firmware from what was in the box, and in fact, some require you to tear them down and wire up a ISP device to flash new firmware, since there's no bootloader (and even if you do all that, there's barely enough memory to hold a firmware with all it's features enabled) Having firmware upgrades without tearing down the machine is literally a differentiator at the price point this is launching at...
- dfasdfasd 7y ago
  I've literally never firmware updated my Prusa and it works totally fine. This is a bit of a bizarre nitpick. Hell, you can build your own firmware if you really care that much.
sitkack 7y ago
So much sinophobia and racism in this thread. Folks, remember that your exquisitely built Apple products are all made in China.
- ALittleLight 7y ago
  "Yes, China may be a brutal, authoritarian, oppressive regime currently trying to censor discussion of their occupation of Hong Kong - but at least they provide cheap manual labor due to lax labor laws, a disregard for the environment, and the general poverty of their people." Apple products could be built anywhere.
  - sitkack 7y ago
    This comment misses the point I made entirely. People are making gross over generalizations about "The Chinese". I made no statements about consumerism, authoritarianism, or capitalism. Apple products could come out of anywhere (but they don't, they come from China), I use that example as a counterpoint to people talking about "what The Chinese" are capable of. Your quotes around the text are supposed to be done in my voice? No thanks.
  - jdietrich 7y ago
    Chinese labour isn't particularly cheap by global standards, especially in Shenzhen and the wider PRD region. We outsource to China because they're damned good at manufacturing. Apple products could be built anywhere, but only because Apple have absolutely vast economies of scale. Most consumer electronics products couldn't be built anywhere else at a viable price, not because of labour costs but because of infrastructure. China has the supply chains and the expertise to build anything from a handful of PCBs to a couple of million units. There's just nowhere else on earth where you can set up several assembly lines in a few weeks or get a prototype built and tested in a few hours.
    - bsder 7y ago
      > We outsource to China because they're damned good at manufacturing. They are now. They were not when outsourcing began. And that amazing "supply chain" relies on the fact that the West consumes large amounts of expensive consumer goods continuously. Consequently, the parts flow continuously and are consumed without need for inventory. If manufacturers start moving out of China, the parts flow will stop, inventory will back up, and the supply chain will dry up and blow away post haste as everybody heads for the door to avoid being the one holding the bag. Many things in manufacturing rely on flywheel inertia to keep going. When the flywheel hiccups, the stuff upstream crashes to a halt.
AYBABTME 7y ago
This is pretty exciting, I'm glad that they doubled down the path of making high quality hardware and remain open source and a net positive player in the space.
cthalupa 7y ago
The mini is neat, but I'm more excited about the CoreXY based XL. I love my MK3, which I've upgraded to the MMU MK3S, but have had a bunch of projects where a larger printing area would be desirable (I print a lot of board game organizers, to reduce shelf space usage, speed up set up/tear down, improve playing ability during the game, etc., so usually this means 3-6 distinct sets of prints on the MK3S). I have a good bit of experience on the Voron 2, and was thinking I was going to build a 2.1 - the CoreXY design also has the benefit of being able to print faster without quality loss, as well as being very amenable to designs that have built in enclosures, which is a godsend for printing ABS (and building exhausts to get the fumes out of the house), but with how great my experience with my current Prusa has been, I'm going to wait and see how it shapes up. It'd also save a ton of work, as the Voron is an entirely DIY design.
- e12e 7y ago
  > I print a lot of board game organizers, to reduce shelf space usage, speed up set up/tear down, improve playing ability during the game, etc Interesing use-case-do you have some photos? (and possibly design files, although I currently don't have access to a printer)
  - cthalupa 7y ago
    I don't offhand, but boardgamegeek has a massive list where users contribute their creations. Most include a link to thingiverse with the STL files and pictures: https://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/186909/3d-prints-board-games https://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/186909/3d-prints-board-ga... I've used some fairly generic ones where existing solutions don't exist, but there are some parametric generators on thingiverse that I've started experimenting with.
- rullopat 7y ago
  Can't you avoid the fumes of ABS using ASA? I thought that ASA it's same to print without enclosure.
  - cthalupa 7y ago
deleted 7y ago
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sannee 7y ago
Too bad they don't have a proper kit version. If it was 100$ cheaper (same ratio as the MK3S), I would definitely consider buying it.

268 points by luastoned 7y ago

This is pretty awesome. I "upgraded" my Makerbot Replicator 2x to a Prusa MK3S and the difference was pretty amazing. Now to see if I can upgrade the controller to the Buddy.

WhyKill 7y ago
I hope they do a kit.

jasiek 7y ago

Does it make sense to 3D print these parts rather than injection-mould them?

sannee 7y ago
The fact that you can repair your printer by using your printer is a big selling point imho.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
ericb 7y ago
One of the ways Prusa gets the quality they have is that they run a massive print-farm of their own printers to print the parts so they get to see all the issues up close. Printing the parts also makes them upgradeable and home-fixable for end-users.

monkmartinez 7y ago

I don't like it for a few reasons; 1. It looks like you are going to fight "ringing" with lack of rigidity. 2. Its a bowden extruder... which I suppose is a necessity due to the lack of structure. Still I would rather have direct drive on every machine. 3. It's very expensive. You can buy an Ender for $200 or less on sale... or around $230 normal price. Upgrade the board to a 32bit Bigtreetech for $60 with Trinamic drivers... plug and play. 4. Most people find they want a bigger printer... not smaller. This is my initial reaction. I am always looking for innovation in this space and most of it is happening in the "industrial" realm. For example, I wish they would make an SLS machine or a "beginner" industrial machine. The companies like Creality are just dominating everything. We need prosumer/industrial machines that have features you can't get with $750 dollar machine.

debatem1 7y ago
I had exactly the same reaction. But,I will say that my creality has been a bucket of pain, to the point where I almost exclusively use my prusa these days. So perhaps that's reason to hope this is more than just a crappy bargain basement printer warmed over.
tigrezno 7y ago
I've owned an Mk2s for like 2 years and I've never printed anything that required all the bed length. My next printer will be smaller, let's see how they'll price the kit version.
Klathmon 7y ago
Re: points 1 and 2, I think they're connected. The lack of rigidity is mitigated by the Bowden making the hotend so damn light it probably won't be as big of a deal as you might think. Also tweaking some jerk and acceleration settings will almost always fix ghosting and ringing caused by a "less stiff" frame with minimal hit to the print time. (And I'm assuming they'll do most of the legwork to have a great printing profile out of the box) >You can buy an Ender for $200 or less on sale... This is exactly why I love the idea of this printer so much more! You could get an ender for $200 (plus $60 to $100 to improve the worst parts and make it less likely to catch fire). But you're still manually leveling, you're still fighting with scraping prints off the bed, you're still missing stuff like filament run-out detection, automatic firmware updates, spring steel PEI print surface, crash detection, power panic, stealth mode, and a lot of other safety features. And at the end of the day, an ender 3 is gonna cost $260 to $300 and require the user to know what to replace fix on day 1 for a safe printer, while this is $350. And outside of commercial manufacturing, most users don't ever max out their print area with most printers (at least from what I've seen spending a lot of time on 3d printing forums). I'm super excited for this, because $800 to $1000 is just to much for the average person to spend on an easy to use printer like the MK3S. This is only slightly more expensive than other "starter" printers, and has most of the niceties, safety features, and support.
hevi_jos 7y ago
Yes, if you don't value your time then yes, buying an Ender and modifying it is a better deal. I am part of a Spanish 3D printer group called "clone wars", and dozens of people there have bought Enders because they are dirty cheap. It really takes a master degree in engineering to solve most of them, because they want to print professionally expending 300euros. That connects with the point 4, yes people want everything, expending nothing. But that they could get it is a completely different thing. As the print bed goes bigger, the mechanical deflections increase with the square of it. The price of things like milled precision beds or original linear rails, increments non linearly for a tolerance when the size of the bed increases.

BubRoss 7y ago

This is an advertisement and I don't think there is anything exceptional here.

jeffk_teh_haxor 7y ago
Prusa makes the best open source 3D printers. This makes it cheaper. No different than when RaspPi announces a new board.
jrockway 7y ago
Prusa is running a pretty good business. 100% of their hardware and software is open; you can print your own Prusa i3, build your own controller board from schematics, modify all their software on both the firmware and slicing side, etc. I don't think it's bad to give them a shoutout on HN, they're doing good work and you can benefit from their work without giving them a dime. (After struggling with a cheap Chinese 3D printer and learning to hate 3D printing... I switched to a Prusa i3 MK3S and am loving it. The software doesn't annoy me. The prints stick to the bed every single time without fail. And I got to assemble the whole thing myself, so I know how every component works and how to fix it in the event that something breaks. And if something breaks, I don't have to order a replacement part, I can just go to the makerspace, print it out, and be back online!)

bsamuels 7y ago

I guess switching to a bowden extruder let them cut a ton of costs. Can't wait to see how it prints compared to the mk3. The real test will be comparing it to the Ender 3, which seems to be the form factor/market the mini is trying to go after. Even if the mini is 150 bucks more than the Ender 3, if it prints even slightly as reliably as the MK3 then the Ender 3 may be done for. With low cost printers like the Ender 3/Maker Select/etc, after the first 50-200 hours of printing, you can end up spending more time on printer maintenance than printing. There's also small problems that can happen that for non-technical users would be the end of their adventure into 3D printing. That is easily the greatest pain point at the Ender 3's price point.

WillPostForFood 7y ago
Switching to the Bowden extruder may have been more about reducing print head mass because of the cantilevered design. I'd avoid printers like the Ender for fire risk as much as the hidden cost of maintenance and upgrades. The Prusa Mini will be a much better entry option than the cheap Chinese knockoffs.
- shifto 7y ago
  Ender is fine and not comparable to previous chinese printers like the Anet series. Also the merlin firmware has been made more robust against risk of fire through some software mitigations (measuring extruder heat etc).
shrubble 7y ago
Do you have a view on the Trinamic drivers? Are they important to have?
- panpanna 7y ago
  They are QUIET! See Toms video: https://youtu.be/sPvTB3irCxQ https://youtu.be/sPvTB3irCxQ

MrGilbert 7y ago

I think the market for this one will be difficult, just because you can get a 3D printer (read: Ender) for basically half the price... ...with this being said, though - I'm happy to see a "entry-level" Prusa. One thing that lags the cheap printers are security measurements. I guess no one is keen on burning down their house, just because this giant hotglue on rails went rogue. On their website, they state that they are: - monitoring FAN RPM - Have self diagnostic - Have a high quality PSU - and, even more important, use thermistors. Taking all this into account, this might justify the price bump, if you aren't able to add all this to, let's say, your Ender or any other printer by yourself.

ericb 7y ago
The Ender is a great printer if you're cool with it catching fire. In several of the 3d printing groups I'm in, the most common question is "what's the best printer around $300" I can get. The most common answer is something like "try not to scrimp and get the Prusa instead." That's a fairly tone deaf answer to someone truly budget constrained, though if the price is double their budget. But for an extra fifty bucks--that's a no brainer. Print jobs can easily go 24 hours and fires are fairly catastrophic. I think Prusa just hit the ball out of the park with this pricepoint and approach assuming they are using their usual reliable, vetted components. I have never seen a report of a fire with a Prusa.
- MrGilbert 7y ago
  > I have never seen a report of a fire with a Prusa. Tbf, that really depends on the market share. In the interwebs, I've read a total of 3 - 5 reports of printers catching fire. Now, if 20% of the 3D printers are Prusas, then the rest are chinese ones, which come all with the same bad components. There is not much surprise here, at least for me. Despite from that, the groups I know usually go like "Yeah, get a CoreXY printer instead. Moving the printbed constantly in XY direction isn't a good idea."
  - ericb 7y ago
    I think, but cannot prove, that Prusa's got a fairly high percent of this broader segment of the market.

j-pb 7y ago

I'm glad that prusa has stayed true to his open hardware pledge all these years, while continuing to push the reprap ideals. Everybody is complaining about the price, but c'mon this thing is designed printed and assembled in Prague, the EU. It creates local jobs for people with fair wages, social security and good quality of life, we should strive to have more of our stuff produced in the west. Happy to see him design another printer, I really love my MK3.

mk3 7y ago
The price is going to slay all Chinese crap makers. I always wanted mk3 but never had a big enough reason to buy, now I can justify it. It's the printer I will buy :)
- m0xte 7y ago
  It’s not. I bought an Creality Ender 3 recently for a lot less than that (152 GBP next day in UK) and the thing is perfect. It is also entirely open source. https://github.com/Creality3DPrinting/Ender-3 https://github.com/Creality3DPrinting/Ender-3 Quality is pretty top notch. It worked out of the box flawlessly and with no futzing.
  - crankylinuxuser 7y ago
    Yeah, except for the things you can't see. 1. They use crappy MOSFETs that are known to fail closed. This means you can get a runaway heat on your hotend. A 40w cartridge can melt the alu heatspreader 2. The beds are anemic for heating. Not enough power 3. Crappy steppers 4. No features for jam detection, autoleveling, skipped step protection, filament runout 5. "Chinese" quality: good luck in getting any sort of tech support. Once they have your money, you're fucked. I'm fighting right now with Pine64 over defective eMMC modules that ignore the first read, causing initrd to fail to boot. Of course, they were chatty on Twitter prior to purchase, but have ignored every way of contact AFTER purchase. But pretty much every Chinese company is like this.
    - 7y ago

alphagrep12345 7y ago

Why does everyone need a 3d printer? Maybe this statement would sound as ludicrous looking back as asking why does everyone need a PC in the 1980s. However, I still don't understand why would a regular person need a 3d printer? Mass marketed goods are always cheaper due to economies of scale. And would you really want to put in the effort to make your own chair, etc?

detaro 7y ago
Not everyone needs a printer - but an easy to use, reliable and relatively affordable printer is more suitable for "everyone", not just people that enjoy "fiddling with my 3D printer" as a side-hobby or can/want to afford expensive ones. I interpret the article as meaning it that way. E.g. a 3D printer can be great for all kinds of creative hobbies.
jacquesm 7y ago
I make a lot of stuff from scratch and a 3D printer is an excellent way to quickly test if something is going to work or not in practice. Also: musical instrument parts, prototype machinery, replacement bits for old gear that you can't buy anymore. It's the sort of thing that you use more and more the longer you have it because you see applications that you never dreamed off before getting it. You won't be using it make your own chair (or at least, you probably shouldn't) and you won't be mass marketing anything 3D printed nor will you compete in the marketplace with anything that can be injection molded or stamped. But for a quick one-off part if beats whittling out of a piece of wood by quite a distance. On another note: soldering irons and hammers are also not for everybody, some people will never get the hang of fabrication. But once you are in the group that likes to make stuff 3D printers are just one more option in the tool arsenal.
skybrian 7y ago
Most people won't need it, but most people don't need woodworking tools either.
dwoozle 7y ago
I print a lot of stuff around the house with a toddler. I printed guards to prevent him from turning on the oven, a insert for the piano that prevents him from pressing the auto play demo, a shim to get a drawer to close more smoothly, a shampoo caddy that hooks around our shower stall, a storage system for small hardware, a set of clips for the computer cords to keep them organized, a doohickey to strip leaves off of herbs, geez there must be more I’m forgetting.

johnchristopher 7y ago

Can it be used to print small figurines for role playing or board games?

jrockway 7y ago
Yes, but in general everyone that buys an FDM printer for things like that is unhappy. Your parts will look 3D printed. If you care about fine detail, you really want an SLA printer. (The fact that this printer is small doesn't make it any better at small parts. It just takes up less space and can't print bigger parts.) I got into 3d printing about 6 months ago and am thrilled every time I print something. But 100% of the things I design and print are practical and solve some sort of problem. My parts look 3D printed, but I don't care, because they're performing a useful task. Many people on the Internet are not interested in that, they just want to produce injection-mold quality parts from 3D models at home. If that's your use case, don't buy this. The SLA printers are much much better at that.
- e12e 7y ago
  What you might be able to do, is print at 5x/10x size in order to verify your designs, then have them printed in final 1x form by a commercial service?
- johnchristopher 7y ago
  Thanks, I know nothing about 3D printing. Thanks for the pointers.

tpmx 7y ago

I never really understood why they stayed with building a giant 3d printer farm to build all those 3d printer parts, except for it being "cool". Especially in .cz, I think think they could have gotten all those parts injection moulded for a lower cost. At a higher precision.

jrockway 7y ago
Dogfooding is valuable. If there is a fundamental flaw in their printers, they're going to find out about it firsthand. It is also nice to know that I can print replacement parts and that my replacement is pretty much identical to the original.
- tpmx 7y ago
  Sure, but they've kept doing it for many years now. At some point it shifts into some kind of "religion". Or, judging from your response, it's a part of their brand?
  - kbob 7y ago
    Keep in mind that the printers are getting regular upgrade cycles. A 2019 i3 MK3S is nothing like a 2015 i3. Firmware upgrades are released every couple of months. So continuous testing is still valuable.
    - jrockway 7y ago
      I was going to cite this example. I think recent MK3Ss have different fan shrouds than the first batch of MK3Ss, because the community found a better design. All Prusa had to do to upgrade new customers was to send their print farm a different file; total cost $0. Meanwhile, customers with the original design could download a file and print it, getting a factory-quality part for (essentially) free. Managing a printer farm sounds like a lot work, but they did do that work and can reap the benefit that prototyping and manufacturing are the exact same process. It's like saying "why does Google have all these servers when they could just buy them from AWS?" Well, they got good at building datacenters before you could just rent a datacenter from Amazon. If you're good at something, keep it up!

mwill 7y ago

Really curious to see what the print quality ends up being like on these. Design wise they're very similar to something like a cetus, or many other Chinese printers with similar mechanics with a major difference: Smooth rods and bearings instead of linear rails. In my own designs I've pivoted away from rods in favor of rails and seen much greater quality, accuracy, repeatability, and speed, even with cheap knock off rails from China, and most of the industry is moving that way as well. What's curious is you can get a machine similar to the mini, using linear rails, and more metal or injection moulded parts over 3D printed parts, for just a little bit more than the mini. Prusa has quite a good reputation though, so I'm skeptical they would release an inferior machine at a the same price point, so like I said, really curious to see how well these works.

dhon_ 7y ago
What I love about Prusa is that they eat their own dog food. They use their printers in a farm producing parts for their products. This makes reliability and repeatability first class citizens. He mentions in the blog post that the motivation for this was wanting smaller & cheaper machines for the farm, as two small machines can print faster than one big one for the same cost. I'll still wait for reviews, but this looks like a great little machine and I suspect that quality will be reasonable for the above reasons. One issue will be corrosion on the rails over time though. This affected an original Ultimaker I had sitting around as I let too much dust gather on it.

neonate 7y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20191012190019/https://blog.prusaprinters.org/original-prusa-mini-is-here-smart-and-compact-3d-printer/ https://web.archive.org/web/20191012190019/https://blog.prus...

olafure 7y ago

I like Prusa, but after they stopped releasing firmware updates for my MK2S for no good reason, so did my business with them. Such a shame.

reaperducer 7y ago
Did your printer stop working when they stopped writing software for it? Does it no longer do what it did when you took it out of the box? (Serious question. I don't have a 3D printer, but I've been thinking about it. If they're reliant on constant firmware fixes, then I will probably wait another year.)
- BoorishBears 7y ago
  They're not. Many people will never even update their firmware from what was in the box, and in fact, some require you to tear them down and wire up a ISP device to flash new firmware, since there's no bootloader (and even if you do all that, there's barely enough memory to hold a firmware with all it's features enabled) Having firmware upgrades without tearing down the machine is literally a differentiator at the price point this is launching at...
dfasdfasd 7y ago
I've literally never firmware updated my Prusa and it works totally fine. This is a bit of a bizarre nitpick. Hell, you can build your own firmware if you really care that much.

sitkack 7y ago

So much sinophobia and racism in this thread. Folks, remember that your exquisitely built Apple products are all made in China.

ALittleLight 7y ago
"Yes, China may be a brutal, authoritarian, oppressive regime currently trying to censor discussion of their occupation of Hong Kong - but at least they provide cheap manual labor due to lax labor laws, a disregard for the environment, and the general poverty of their people." Apple products could be built anywhere.
- sitkack 7y ago
  This comment misses the point I made entirely. People are making gross over generalizations about "The Chinese". I made no statements about consumerism, authoritarianism, or capitalism. Apple products could come out of anywhere (but they don't, they come from China), I use that example as a counterpoint to people talking about "what The Chinese" are capable of. Your quotes around the text are supposed to be done in my voice? No thanks.
- jdietrich 7y ago
  Chinese labour isn't particularly cheap by global standards, especially in Shenzhen and the wider PRD region. We outsource to China because they're damned good at manufacturing. Apple products could be built anywhere, but only because Apple have absolutely vast economies of scale. Most consumer electronics products couldn't be built anywhere else at a viable price, not because of labour costs but because of infrastructure. China has the supply chains and the expertise to build anything from a handful of PCBs to a couple of million units. There's just nowhere else on earth where you can set up several assembly lines in a few weeks or get a prototype built and tested in a few hours.
  - bsder 7y ago
    > We outsource to China because they're damned good at manufacturing. They are now. They were not when outsourcing began. And that amazing "supply chain" relies on the fact that the West consumes large amounts of expensive consumer goods continuously. Consequently, the parts flow continuously and are consumed without need for inventory. If manufacturers start moving out of China, the parts flow will stop, inventory will back up, and the supply chain will dry up and blow away post haste as everybody heads for the door to avoid being the one holding the bag. Many things in manufacturing rely on flywheel inertia to keep going. When the flywheel hiccups, the stuff upstream crashes to a halt.

AYBABTME 7y ago

This is pretty exciting, I'm glad that they doubled down the path of making high quality hardware and remain open source and a net positive player in the space.

cthalupa 7y ago

The mini is neat, but I'm more excited about the CoreXY based XL. I love my MK3, which I've upgraded to the MMU MK3S, but have had a bunch of projects where a larger printing area would be desirable (I print a lot of board game organizers, to reduce shelf space usage, speed up set up/tear down, improve playing ability during the game, etc., so usually this means 3-6 distinct sets of prints on the MK3S). I have a good bit of experience on the Voron 2, and was thinking I was going to build a 2.1 - the CoreXY design also has the benefit of being able to print faster without quality loss, as well as being very amenable to designs that have built in enclosures, which is a godsend for printing ABS (and building exhausts to get the fumes out of the house), but with how great my experience with my current Prusa has been, I'm going to wait and see how it shapes up. It'd also save a ton of work, as the Voron is an entirely DIY design.

e12e 7y ago
> I print a lot of board game organizers, to reduce shelf space usage, speed up set up/tear down, improve playing ability during the game, etc Interesing use-case-do you have some photos? (and possibly design files, although I currently don't have access to a printer)
- cthalupa 7y ago
  I don't offhand, but boardgamegeek has a massive list where users contribute their creations. Most include a link to thingiverse with the STL files and pictures: https://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/186909/3d-prints-board-games https://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/186909/3d-prints-board-ga... I've used some fairly generic ones where existing solutions don't exist, but there are some parametric generators on thingiverse that I've started experimenting with.
rullopat 7y ago
Can't you avoid the fumes of ABS using ASA? I thought that ASA it's same to print without enclosure.
- cthalupa 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

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sannee 7y ago

Too bad they don't have a proper kit version. If it was 100$ cheaper (same ratio as the MK3S), I would definitely consider buying it.