Ender 3: An Introduction to 3d Printing.

Is it time for the 3d printer to be mainstream? For years 3d printers have been a niche product, there are some printers marketed to the mainstream but they were usually very expensive or too small. Since then the price has come down and quality gone up enough to make them possibly a practical purchase . The very basic Ender3 seems to have hit the sweet spot of good support due to the open source community, affordability, ubiquity and reliability. There are lots of open firmware that have been adapted to fit even its very basic motherboard. Additional functionality can also be added like auto bed Leveling wireless printing etc from open source hardware like the pi, Arduino and from Creality themselves. YouTube Reddit etc have lots of how to’s. Although the Ender 3 is not going to be a mainstream printer anytime soon. In my opinion it might just be the best introduction to 3d printing currently today.

I actually purchased the printer with the thought of being able to design what I wanted to create . So far, after 10 prints I have not needed to design anything. The vast online 3d warehouse website Thingiverse.com has been around for more than 10 years and the community of users there have contributed enough things that from the selections there you can print a myriad of practical items out of the 3d printer box. You may want to design something but I am in the "if it’s already designed why bother" group and so far thingiverse had what I needed. There are almost an endless list of things you can use that you can print. In fact prints you make can possibly approach the…