3D Printing Paradise

Posted: Monday, July 1, 2024 at 08:40 PM | Categories: Project Builds

During the pandemic, I convinced (begged and pleaded with) my wife to let me buy a 3D printer "for the family!" I always wanted one, and I saw two years at home locked in with my family as a chance to actually get one. My former manager at Microsoft recommended an I3 printer and it was a great starter printer for less than $300, so I quickly ordered one. I don't think my former manager liked me very much, so perhaps that guided his recommendation, but the recommended I3 was definitely a starter printer.

I struggled for a long time to print consistently and never quite achieved it. I was able to print a lot of things, but the quality was low and manually leveling the print bed was a pain in the @ss. I eventually just stopped using the printer, mostly because air currents in my office seemed to mess up my prints.

Fast forward to Thanksgiving 2023 and Bambu Lab had a Black Friday sale on the P1S printer. I convinced my wife I needed a new printer and that the prices available today on the reported best printer on the market were the lowest they were going to be for a while (that turned out to be true). With spousal blessing, I purchased the P1S and got to work.

There are many things about the printer that I love:

• Its enclosed, so I don't have to worry about my office air conditioning messing up the print.
• It self-levels, so I'll never have to manually level a print bed again.
• It prints 256mm x 256mm x 256mm which is essentially 10 cubic inches
• Its fast as hell.

My daughter is a huge cosplayer and one of the things I'd hoped to do was get her interested in using the printer as well. That definitely happened, my daughter's printed more than I have since I purchased the printer. I can't tell you how many times she's had that printer running all day and night printing Mandalorian armor pieces (helmets, shoulder pads, thigh pads, guns, and more).

When I bought the printer, Bambu offered a discounted Filament club membership for 6 months, but they recently abandoned that and offer bulk pricing to anyone. Since November, I've easily purchased 30 or more spools of filament.

Anyway, my daughter recently started printing less frequently, so I found some time to print some stuff myself (as I wrote in Bench Power Supply Project). I desperately want to learn how to design my own models, but I'm very impressed by the amount of really high quality models out there - completely free for my use.

Years ago, I purchased the T5 e-Paper display unit. I run the weather app on it and I wanted to build a wooden enclosure for it. Yesterday, I pulled out the Rockler Router Table Box Joint Jig I purchased more than a year ago and set about creating a nice maple box for it. Building the box using the jig was amazingly simple and in no time I had what I needed.

Unfortunately, due to the design of the board/display in the T5 unit, fitting the display in the box I made wasn't going to work. For some bizarre reason, the folks at LilyGo expose buttons on the top of the board and run a USB-C connector on the bottom of the board, so making all that fit in a simple box simply wouldn't work.

So, firing up my search engine of choice, I started looking for free 3D printer plans for a case for the device. I found hundreds. I downloaded a few and I'm in the process of printing them to see which one I like the best. The quality of these prints are just amazing and handle the exposed buttons and inappropriately placed USB connector fabulously. I'll try to remember to show you when I did once I get it all mounted up in the selected enclosure.

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