What 3D printer, software and why?

[AZMSGT]

I’m considering the purchase of a 3D printer and associated software. Budget is around $500.. but can be stretched if I need to. I also need to know if my budget is realistic. Should this be something I need more money for?

It will be used for aquarium stuff as well as just goofing off. Looking for the best resolution possible for the price.

 

[Sisterlimonpot]

At that price range you can't go wrong with a hobbyist grade printer. I personally use the anycubic i3 Mega. The main reason for the choice was that it used 2 steppers for Z axis which prevents sloped parts on taller prints. It has everything that is needed for great prints.

the popular one suggested on r2r is the ender 3, it's a bit cheaper and from what I can tell, does just as good a job. Like I said though, for that price range you really can't go wrong.

 

[Schreiber]

Depending on the stretch of your stretch, the Prusa Mk3s is the unquestionable leader in affordable 3D printers, by a wide margin. The kit for it is $750 & I'd buy mine again in a heartbeat, even though it was more than I had initially planned on spending.

But, if that's too high, both the Anycubic Sisterlimonpot mentioned & the Ender 3 are very good budget printers. They don't really have any nice "bells & whistles" like auto leveling or filament run-out detection, but they'll get the job done.

If you're only planning on printing ~10 things a year or so, those two would be more than adequate for you. But if you're planning on printing a few things a week, I'd absolutely either get the Prusa, or wait until you have the budget for it. Same deal with aquariums- if you buy the cheaper stuff, it'll work, but you know you're just going to come back & get the better stuff anyway. Makes more sense to save money & get the better piece of equipment off the bat.

 

[AZMSGT]

Thanks guys for your insight on the subject.

 

[bo0ks]

I'd second the Prusa if you can stretch it. There's also the mini that Prusa released, but the backlog on those orders is quite literally months long at this point. If you can wait, and you can't stretch the budget to $750, I'd shoot for the mini.

One of the things to understand about most of 3d printing is that is it not yet a 'solved' problem in the way that say, normal paper printers are. There's a good deal of tinkering and tweaking that goes along with the hobby. I only mention this because you want to choose a printer that has a large user base (and therefore, support base). I'm not familiar with the anycubic, but the Ender 3 Pro has a large install base and I would be pretty comfortable with being able to access support for that printer.

To answer your question about software, you'll need both a design program and a 'slicer' that will turn your design into G-Code which the printer will execute to create the object. Prusa printers come with a custom slicer called PrusaSlicer. There's also several free options out there, such as Cura.

On the design side...well, thats a much tougher nut to crack. It really depends on how sophisticated you wanted to be. The high-end answer seems to be Fusion 360. You will have to dig around on the site to find the hobbiest lic. as they've buried it away behind scary looking 495$/yr subscription models, but you can find it. At the other end of the spectrum is something like tinkercad.com Its a tool that runs just in your browser, and allows for lego-like construction of objects. The issue with tinkercad is that its tough to get really sophisticated with that tool, AND once you've made an object, if you want to go back and edit some sub-part of it to adjust it, it can be very difficult to keep everything else where it belonged. Fusion has a very steep learning curve, but does allow for some extremely sophisticated creation.

 

[Kodski]

I personally have the ender 3 pro version. It was my first 3d printer and I would highly recommend it to anyone looking to get into printing. Is the ender 3 perfect? No, but spend a bit more money on a few upgrades and I'd say its dang near perfect. My local hobby shop uses the creality CR-10 which is the big brother to the ender 3 and I'd say if you're looking for an out of box experience, that would be your best bang for the buck. It comes with a BL-touch which means you don't need to mess with bed leveling to the extent that you will with the ender 3. This is probably the biggest issue most people have with the ender 3.

Slicer wise, I've been using the latest version of cura and it works great for me. On the design side, I use the hobbiest version of fusion 360. Its fairly easy to use and if you don't know or can't figure something out, there are a million youtube videos out there to help you.