This wife could care less 
I wasnāt allowed to have them with the prior wife.
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Awesome!
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Curiously, I often get that reaction just for ASSEMBLING my Prusas! I try to explain that itās a bit like Lego only with clearer instructions, but no one wants to hear that.
Congrats on reaching whatever mountain that is that youāve climbed - a little part of me has died I think, because I love it when you guys all talk dirty when you are building stuff that I donāt understand.
I donāt think printers are really at the āapplianceā stage, but they are certainly at the ātools for trained usersā, and with your knowledge and experience, enhancements down the track should be no problem.
We must be close to some sort of development plateau though?
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With the pi5, you drop in the cli image, install kiauh, which walks you through the klipper install. Find a printer.cfg template and you are off. It took longest to write the sdcard. Now sometimes a custom build has custom pins and that can be time consuming. But it tells you if there is a problem exactly where the problem is, so you iterate until it passes. Iāve now set up 3 printers, 3 cncs. And a custom device with it and each had a different board and config, but it gets easier each time.
And whats not to like about this theme?
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Kiauh really changed everything. One dell that is about 10 years old is running both of my printers!!!
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If this new one had an eddy current sensor it would be dam near perfect in my book. The time to start the first print is a bit of a bummer after running an eddy currentā¦but they are kind of a pain to set up and calibrate.
I will say I think the plateau is the limit of plastic melting and cooling. We can use injection molding as an upper limit and those things are usually liquid cooled. I was messing around and pushing the limits and I found that this non-CHT nozzle is right at its limits. If I push faster plastic will still come out but the core is not molten. From there you can increase the print/nozzle temp but that means increase the cooling, then you are fighting bridging. So maybe materials will be the next hurdle.
The machine itself is moving very fast, it defaults to 500mm/s rapidsā¦the machine it is jumping and dancing, I can not imagine it moving much faster without some serious damping being built into the frame.
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See there you go again! 
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I think at that point, lots of weight, and the understanding that perhaps an alternative methodology would be better will go a long way.
I suspect that plastic as we know it is not the best material moving forward. I canāt find a link at the moment but there were some guys printing nano scale things almost instantly in a vacuum? Itās no problem you just sort of throw a random bunch of atoms into a fire in space and stuff just comes out.
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@vicious1
So cool. You mentioned the price came down. Mind me asking, what was the price before?
I think it was $999.
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Haha, I imagine you writing a sternly worded letter to their support about that. 
The sad thing about the price is (like, in a good way) that it is now only 300ā¬ more than the upgrade to the Core Oneā¦ Ooof. Then agian, a new Core one is also āonlyā 1050ā¬ (but you have to assemble it).
Maybe Iāll update the Prusa to a Core One with the MMU and later get one of those as well for single colour prints in ABS and whatnot. Hmmā¦ The feature list is really killerā¦ Or Iāll wait for a sale? 
I also love that their MMU comes on a closed box.
I have had a Qidi Tech 1 printer for a long, long time (Itās a FlashForge Creator Pro clone, which in turn is a Makerbot Replicator clone).
Itās worked well, I have tens of thousands of hours on it, and Iāve worn out and replaced harnesses and belts already twice. The parts were half the cost of itsā contemporary clones, and itās as rugged and reliable as any of the FFCP clone machines I have.
Iāve been very happy with it.
I finally got my FlashForge A5M working well enough with 3rd party firmware and an enclosure but frankly the hands-on cost was higher than I wanted and for the value of my time it was a bad trade. I didnāt really learn anything from it aside from confirming that weird proprietary slant is the wrong direction to head in.
I might pick up used A5Ms and help other makers get them running, but Iām thinking of getting a Plus4 printer based on the exposure here.
This tread also confirms my intent that when I finish building the MP3DP V5 printer it will be large-format, specialty use.
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That is good to hear. I was wondering if maybe the parts start cheap and slowly increase or anything fishy. Really thought they could more than double and still be less then the off the shelf stuff.
I am very interested to see what the qidi box is going to be. So far all this seems to be new and well thought out. So hopefully the qidi ams is the same.
I have almost enough parts to build one more. Not sure what direction I will go with it, or if it will just be a workhorse.
Running production parts today, tested out the filament run out. I would would not mind tweaking the macros to save a few minutes but at the same timeā¦ Maybe I just leave it alone and get back to the docs, lr4, and forum posts. It is hard to leave pretty dang good alone.
I definately highly reccomend this plus 4,
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Itās interesting to see the pricing on this. In USD itās $100 cheaper than the Creality K1 Max that I bought but if I were to buy it here in NZ or Australia itād be $200-300 more expensive.
My guess is that Creality has better local distribution, which is a bizarre given that going via local distribution is more expensive the vast majority of the time.
These would be my goals too. Poop free multi material, or multi nozzle width would be nice tooā¦ Especially if hotends are getting cheaper/smaller.
Am hopeful weāre not going to see a plateau in this overall space. Am hoping advances in materials/nozzles/extrusion/software opens the path for simpler more reliable faster quality prints.
E.g. multi nozzle setup (like Prusa XL or 2 nozzle head) extruding the same filament color with 0.6mm and 1.2mm+ nozzles, with slicer changes to maximize Material Depositing Rate to help minimize time to print good enough fidelity prints. Maybe this is available in Slicers already?
I also hope we see next level innovation happening.
I was really sad to see when my former colleagues I met at the makerspace folded Diabase Engineering- the H3 was a multi-tool toolchanger that could do both additive and subtractive manufacturaing, with a multi-axis table (e.g. put a rotary attachement and both print and machine a cylindrical work piece).
This kind of stuff should be coming.
Years back I was at a manufactureās show. There were 2 large arms there at a booth printing half a full sized concept car, sliced in the middle, printing it standing up. So if it was a 4 door it was cut in half in between the doors, standing on that end print up towards the front bumper. One arm was printing the plastic, the nozzle must have been about 15mm diameter. The second arm had a ball end mill on it and it was about 30 layers under it carving it to a very smooth finish. So additive and subtractive with about 15 minutes of print in between them.
That was the first time I saw why you might want to do that. Other than adding some undercuts or something.
I think I went back the next day and took some pictures of it carving a giant chess piece or something. I swear I posted it here but am not seeing it.
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While cooling may set a floor for time between layers, it has less of an impact the larger a part (layer) gets. Hot-end volumetric capacities seem to be the limiting factor for parts that speed becomes important. Injection molding, as you know, overcomes this (well, shot size) with larger barrels.
There are some people playing with larger capacity hot-end designs to improve volumetric speeds. I think that there is lots to be gained there, and a higher likelihood of there being advances, before we need to rely on materials science to make some leap (that I would have gladly put to use in injection molding).
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I got a Qidi Q1 Pro late last year and my first big job on it was the Lowrider v4. Every part came out perfectly. The only setting changes I made were for percentage of infill as per the LR instructions. No fuss and so much faster and more reliable than my previous, much upgraded Ender 3.
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