Thanks! I am going to keep those all in my back pocket for when the honeymoon of not having a $99 “box o’ parts” Voxelab wears off, though I feel a little guilty for never installing that BLTouch clone now.
I haven’t printed much with the Sovol yet. So far, the main things I’m running into are bed adhesion (the old standby of a washable glue stick is helping), and I’ve had a couple of vertically oriented parts get knocked off the bed, and slowing down quite a bit helped.
I know the beds are worse, apparently almost all of them. Sovol chose to change the Voron reference design to be cheaper and it’s just not held down right, so they exhibit varying degrees of “taco” inconsistency that the diagram accentuates visually. Mine has a corner that seems to be about 0.4mm too high, and the rest is a bit wavy to lesser amounts. This is the main reason I set it to redo its z offsets before every print.
The Sovol doesn’t use standard extrusion profiles so it’s less moddable, its hot end is not completely standard, and it uses injection molded parts in places the Voron uses 3d printed parts (that last may be be an advantage, lol). The Sovol also doesn’t run a completely clean version of Klipper. I think it’s set in a way to make it work a little better with their cheaper BOM.
It’s big and fast and Voron-like, but it’s just not a hand crafted super printer like a Voron can be.
I just got a Sovol SV08, which is like a Voron but changed up a bit so the teacher doesn’t get mad… and to be cheaper :-)
I’m just coming in from an Ender3 clone, but overall, other than the potential of taco bed messing up some prints, I’ve been really pleased with it. I’m still fine tuning what it likes to do, including slowing it down on some small vertical prints, letting the bed “heat soak” for a while to even out, and running the Z Offset calibration on every print, but Core XY, auto leveling, and all the other little QoL advantages are nice, and I’ve already used the big bed to print stuff that wouldn’t fit on a “normal” bed.
For your specific printer, Vorons are generally even more kit built than most printers, sometimes even completely assembled from a BOM by the builder/user. If they did it well, and if it loks to be in good shape, it should be an excellent and well supported printer. I paid USD490 for “We have Voron at home” and I feel like it was a good deal. I’m not super well versed in pricing in Europe, but EUR770 seems like a good deal on a kit, a REALLY good deal on a new 350mm, and a very solid one for a used printer in good shape.
Now, all that said, I am super glad that I kinda had some experience with more primitive printers before I got the Sovol. I’m less panicky about little inconveniences and realities of printing (especially on a budget), and I feel like I at some high level understand how it’s all supposed to be working and that I can look up how to fix things and implement what I learn. If you don’t want to deal with any of that, a Bambu, even with its potential walled garden “sword of Damocles”, might be a simpler idea.I understand they really are just super easy to live with.
Not immune, but let’s say resistant. Due to federation, they couldn’t lock down existing federated content; due to open source they couldn’t lock down the user experience; and due to those two, nobody’s going to offer them a check for a couple million dollars.
There is test-taking software that locks out all other functions during the essay-writing period. Obviously, damn near anything is hackable, but it’s non-trivial, unlike asking ChatGPT to write your essay for you in the style of a B+ high student. There is some concern about students who learn differently or compose less efficiently, but as father to such a student, I’m still getting to the point where I’m not sure what’s left to do other than sandbox “exploitable” graded work in a controlled environment.
I do sometimes think there is a bit of hand-wringing that happens where people glom onto the most visible sign of changing times and blame it for things that probably aren’t as different as the adults think, but by the same token most schools in richer countries have screens everywhere with school-related interconnectivity and even tools that are not unlike social media.
I see very little downside here, even if it may not result in some magic rebirth of older forms of social interaction. It seems like the major benefit from the French pilot programs was “improved atmosphere,” in which case it’s still better than nothing. Having a period when kids are learning to deal with small-group dynamics is not a bad thing, and neither is taking “dealing with phone bullshit” off the teachers’ plates.
I mean… fine? France always does things kind of top-down and there’s certainly no reason you have to have your phone readily available, and plenty of evidence it’s good to be away from it.
It’s not like they need to get to their phones to tell their parents there’s an active shooter on campus. 😐
Rober’s always seemed a little off to me, like one of those who enjoys being famous more than the stuff that made him famous in the first place. Seems like he’s gotten worse, though. For instance, this video declares it “was not sponsored [by Zipline] in anyway nor did they pay for any of my travel or accommodations,” despite extolling their virtues over and over again by name, and lingering lovingly on their drones and logos like Michael Bay with a car company’s badge.
Smarter Everyday is also rather polished, and he’s even more in bed with the military industrial complex, but (as of a few months ago anyway) he comes off like he’s still actually enjoying the projects themselves and the information he’s sharing. It’s hard to exactly articulate the point where a content creator loses me, but I can feel it in my nerd-bones.
We have a president who issues fascistic edicts from the toilet and then phrases them like a Karen in her first term on her HOA or Condo board.