Alright so….I decided to buy myself an Xmas present last year, a 3d printer. I’m very much an amateur and frankly not all that good at physical things like this. That was one of the selling points. I wanted to learn something new. I’m going to sorta document my progress here since I have this site and have done nothing with it.

I decided on the Robo3d R2 because it seemed to have everything an amateur would need to get started and, frankly, it had a camera on it which is just super cool to me. I’m going to do something fancy soon so every one of you (like a whole zero people) can watch my horrible creations come to life. Anyway I really like this printer, it’s a really great first one and since it’s the only one I’ve ever had I have a lot to compare to.

It sits pretty neatly on the desk I do all of my raspberry pi stuff on, it weighs about 30 pounds (50 in packaging so unless you’re a big dumb gorilla like me, get some help lifting it) and is stupid easy to assemble, even I did it in about twenty minutes. It took me longer to get it out of the packaging and all the packing material off than to get it printing.

I did some test printing with it with some of the onboard designs and had some problems right away. It ships with a filament runout sensor, basically a thing that says it has run out of print material. Problem is, it ALWAYS thought it was out. I checked their support site and it said to disable it so I did and have had no problems since except one. Apparently I need something called an adhesive pad to help the smaller parts from slipping. I ordered that from Amazon and should be back in business at the end of the week. Here are my test prints:

Clips to hold filaments in place.

Crazy looking garden gnome

Failed print of a raspberry pi camera case or the part that taught me about adhesive pads.

Anyway next up I’m going to explore the software it uses and probably the security of the thing since that’s what I do for a living. Hopefully you’ll check that out.