Once they rolled out ads on the home page (Shame. Shame. Shame.), I installed “Launcher manager” and “Wolf launcher” to give it an interface I really like. A big background picture, some large buttons for the commonly used apps, and then progressively smaller buttons as you scroll down the screen for the less commonly used features.

It broke once when an update rolled out, but since then has been running fine and I never once see the bloated monstrosity that is the default home screen.

The only qualm with my setup I have is that access to the configuration sidebar isn’t as intuitive as it was with the pre 9.0 version (which frankly I don’t remember anymore aside from the general impression). That’s a very minor price to pay to have an interface without ads.

Winner winner chicken dinner! This is EXACTLY what happened. I reprinted again after tightening belts, fixing bed wobble, and re-leveling, and kept a closer eye on it this time. The nozzle was indeed catching on that “Y” support due to the edge curling up. Wasnt enough to kill the print this time, but enough to make me nervous…

Ironically, the thing I’m printing is an all-in-one case so that I can segregate the PSU, main board, pi, and controls from the printer itself to enclose it and have better temp control!

That is awesome! Looks great!

Thanks for the insightful comment! I wasn’t aware of any big change in quality from Creatality, or those pretty shady review practices. I got my printer right near the start of the pandemic (May 2020), so maybe I got lucky with timing before everything went to shit :-/

If they’re junk these days, that’s genuinely pretty sad. Always a shame when the a product gets worse due to the manufacturer cutting quality.

I have no experience with the Prusa mini, but as a first timer, I found the Ender 3 (pro, I think) perfectly good quality. It might be due to lack of experience with anything else, so if definitely defer to folks who have experience with a few different models, but I’ve found it good for all of my printing needs (Cases, utility objects, and the occasional figurine/trinket). If that success is anything out of the ordinary, I think I’d attribute it to a few things…

• I followed a really detailed setup/assembly guide from a YouTube channel about 3d printing miniatures ( I can probably find it again if you’d like, it was highly recommended)
• I got firmer springs for the print bed (sometimes I go hog wild printing things, sometimes it sits for months, I can’t remember them last time I had to level the bed)
• I got a glass print surface.

I was generally in the same boat as you; Liked to tinker, and wanted the best quality but didn’t want to pay out the ass for it. I typically tend to “overspend” when getting into a new hobby out of the fear I won’t stick with it if I struggle with low quality gear, bit also have an aversion to parting with my cash. These upgrades seemed to be the consensus reached at the time for how to get good consistent results out of the Ender 3.

I find the Ender 3 to be occasionally too small for things I want to print, but generally a good size, and look forward to being able to tinker further with an upgraded/quieter main board.

So, all in all, I can’t help with anything specific to the Prusa mini, but can vouch for the Ender 3 as fitting my needs when I think I had the same general quality/cost criteria as you. Hope you found this helpful! Good luck in your printer search!

Thanks for the suggestions. At a quick glance, grafana looks to be perfect for the visualization aspect (at least in terms of capabilities). Glad to see there are free utilities for that and I might not have to resort to chicken scratch html/pyplot :-) I have yet to dig into influxDB still…

Deterrent is right. That graph is terrifying! I feel their frustration regarding getting data from Android apps. Part of what got me started thinking about this was when I realized that the years of data I entered into my fitness pal was suddenly locked behind a subscription service :-( Thanks for sharing!