This looks great! I’m super happy with my MK4, and have never had to do anything with it after the initial kit build and re-seating the LCD cable to fix some early screen-blanking issues.

I’ll probably skip this for my own printer since it seems like most (but not all) of the speed up comes from layer height, but $99 is not terrible for anyone who gets value from it. And anyone buying a new printer gets this stuff with no price increase, which is nice and makes the MK4/MK4S even easier to recommend.

I didn’t know how much more dimensionally accurate Prusa’s prints are compared to the competition, but it makes sense now why there are so many calibration models online if that just isn’t the way every printer works. I’ve designed some parts that need an 0.1mm first layer because I’ve never had any failures with that, but I guess if I share the STLs other people might have trouble.

I do think it’s important to be unassailable, because it’d be easy to say “the libs are making misleading claims” and then people not paying lots of attention will think there’s a “both sides” situation going on. I’m sure we all assumed it was literally on display as an exhibit; I was mislead. If you stick to transparent, honest language, the “both sides” stuff falls apart.

The MAGAs are unreachable, but the poorly-informed are out there too, and making them easier to confuse (by actually also spewing misleading-but-technically-true things) is not a good strategy.

It was sold in the gift shop, not on display. I know it’s not an enormous difference, but let’s try our best to keep the misinformation just on their side.

Do you want the printer to be a tool, or a hobby (i.e. you don’t mind fiddling with the printer itself to improve the results, you don’t mind spending more to upgrade components, etc)?

If the printer itself is a hobby you can go cheap, but if you want something reliable you don’t have to mess with or upgrade, I’d suggest getting something as nice as you can afford, maybe a Prusa mini or Bambu A1 mini if you don’t care about open source. Also consider something like a used Prusa Mk3.x.

Did they describe the types of user error that could cause this?

Or too thin (much less than one layer height)?

Sure. And you can import them too if you’d prefer.

I’ve been really happy with the MK4 kit I built months ago. While I haven’t seen a Bambu in person, I’m pretty satisfied with the print speed and picked up an 0.6 nozzle in case I really want to print something bigger, faster.

I had seriously considered building a Voron Trident, but have no regrets about my decision to go with Prusa. It’s nice having a machine that didn’t require a bunch of tweaking; it was fun to build the kit but now it’s an appliance I don’t have to mess with; it’s almost like my Brother laser. I hit print, it prints*. (Asterisk because I have to clean the bed sometimes, occasionally I make a poor choice slicing and don’t add a support I needed, etc, but these aren’t printer-specific issues).

As far as bed-slinger vs coreXY, even Bambu recently released a new bed slinger, so I suspect the tradeoff is more complex than just “coreXY is better”. The whole “model flings around” just isn’t a problem I’ve seen in practice; maaaaaybe if you’re building exceptionally tall, thin structures that can’t be oriented properly it could matter but realistically most people are going to mostly print relatively small things. Even fast printers are slow; as soon as you use a printer you’ll realize that huge build volumes are absurd because big prints just take soooooooo loooooong even on fast machines. And there’s either upcoming support or existing support for bed-axis input shaping, since the slicer does know the amount of filament it’s extruding and can tell the firmware how much more the bed weighs as the print proceeds.

I don’t think Bambu printers are an unreasonable choice for people, but I think if Prusa is affordable to someone, their products are still a good choice.

Brother laser printers are great.

It’s because of the “lift to drag ratio”. Airplanes in level flight at ordinary speeds generate about 15x as much lift as drag meaning if the engine spends 1 unit of work moving the plan forward, the wings give 15 units of work* upwards. So flying level needs about 1/15th the engine power of going straight up. (I’m using “work” very sloppily here, not in a precise physics sense.)

You can see this in sailboats too, which can travel faster than the wind when they’re sailing at an angle to the wind. Efficient boats travel faster when they’re going almost perpendicular to the wind, not straight downwind! This is because the “lift” of the sail pulling the boat forward even more strongly than the push of the wind in the downwind direction.

While I can’t give an intuitive explanation for why this is, there’s a very easy demonstration that it’s true: kites. If a kite had a lift-to-drag ratio of 1, then it would fly at 45° up. It would fly 50 meters downwind of you when it’s 50 meters up. But any decent kite can fly at a much steeper angle than that; sometimes they look like they’re right over your head! That’s because with a lift to drag ratio of e.g. 10, the 1 unit of drag gives 10 units of lift; if it’s 10 meters downwind it will be 100 meters high.

Check out paragraph 81 of the indictment. One of his co-conspirators was having a discussion with a lawyer; the lawyer said staying in office past January 20 would trigger “riots in every major city in the United States, and the co-conspirator replied, “Well, [lawyer], that’s why there’s an Insurrection Act”.

What is this list sorted by?