this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2026
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3DPrinting

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Back in 2018 I bought an Ender 3 and over the years after a lot of tinkering and upgrading I got really sick of having to work on it, so I shelved it permanently a few years ago. I didn't have very much I wanted to print by then anyway, and another print failure that resulted in a giant ball of plastic covering the hotend for the umpteenth time tipped me over the edge. I could only disassemble it for service so many times before I started wanting to give it the Office Space treatment.

But now I would like to start printing again, only this time I want to actually just print things and not feel like an unpaid 3D printer mechanic. I don't need anything fancy, I'm still only going to print ~95% PLA with the occasional PETG or ASA maybe. Really all I want is the equivalent of an Ender 3 only reliable, quiet, and with auto bed levelling (also having an actually flat bed to start with would be nice). Any kind of mandatory (or pseudo-mandatory via arbitrary feature-lock) cloud connectivity is a hard no from me. I will use Octoprint to manage it.

Are there any cheap printers that fill that role these days? I'm well and truly OOTL

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[–] spongebue@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago

That's the same initials of mine! I did a PEI bed sheet though, and so far I've stuck with Cura (but you're tempting me!)

Is it the greatest? Of course not. Does it take care of a lot of issue I had with my previous Ender 3 V2? Definitely.