The day has come - after 5 months of waiting, the package has arrived. I placed my order on October 18th - one week after the preorders started. Quite a lead time
Originally I was supposed to pick it up myself at Prusa's factory, but due to the COVID situation, they closed the reception for personal pickups. They sent the printer using a courier service to my address in Prague, but in the meantime I left Prague to my parents' house in the country, so I can spend the quarantine in a nice place with big garden and all - not in my small city apartment. Yeah, Czech Republic is now in quarantine, people should only go to work if necessary, to buy groceries and be home otherwise.
But wait, this thread is about a 3D printer, isn't it?

So yeah, my Prusa MINI has finally arrived!


Contents of the box laid out on the desk. You might notice that the gummy bears bag is missing from the picture. Somehow unpacking it attracted my girlfriend who doesn't give a damn about my toys otherwise, and she came there and ate it. I'm afraid that now the assembly will fail, as eating Haribos is an essential step in the assembly manual.


Fast forward. I wasn't taking pictures of the assembly process as there is many people around the internet, including Jo Prusa himself, covering it. Here it stands in all its beauty:


All together it took a bit over an hour to assemble the printer. Most of it is done from the factory, it's just about connecting the Y-bed assembly and the XZ assembly together and plugging a few wires. It would take significantly less time if it wasn't for my puppy helping me with the process. And by helping, I mean trying to eat the cardboard, plastic bags, filament, table, my toes, bed, door, wall, carpet... but not the toys I brought him there. Not those. I love him 
Picture for reference:


So yeah, I plugged it in (no smoke stopper this time) and hey, no magic smoke, no fire, no problem!


It was quite late by then, so I just quickly used the provided blue Prusament to do the calibration wizard and print the PRUSA logo thingy. It went smoothly and I was rewarded with a very good quality print. Happy!


So that was yesterday.

Today I put the printer to work. I quickly designed and printed (using the same blue Prusament) a holder for the Caddx Turtle V2 dvr board so it fits nicely in my ZOHD Orbit wing, printed a holder for the camera itself. I was really amazed by the quality of the print, so smooth and detailed. The little M2 screw holes were prefect, I event tried including a small cutout for the screw head to the bottom side of the mounting plate (so I guess basically a bridge? dunno), which printed out perfectly as well. Unfortunately I don't have pictures of those as I was too excited to mount it in the plane to take pictures. Also unfortunately, as I was finished mounting everything in the plane and testing, the camera died on me. Stuck on the yellow Caddx logo... damn!

Then I tried printing the same mounting plate using some other PLA filament I had from the past. Well, that didn't work. For one thing, I think that the filament is just so bad quality. It breaks easily when bent and the middle part of the filament is sort of white-ish, even though the color is orange. Using that, it printed the first two layers well but then just like stopped extruding or something, only drops of filament were coming out of the nozzle, not a steady stream. Unloading it was also a nightmare, but it worked eventually. Maybe using different slicer settings would work, I left it at the default Prusament PLA settings. I didn't try any further using this filament. Maybe later.

Next I tried explaining to my mom how does 3D printing work, but she didn't quite understand. So I decided to print something for her so she can see for herself. She likes cats, so I printed her a small model of a cat using the other provided sample, the galaxy black Prusament. It's quite beautiful!


That's it for today. Tomorrow I wanna try printing something using the Amazon Basics PETG, and also some random unbranded TPU. I'm quite sceptical about that
I'll post the results here tomorrow!

Looking really good

I'll be interested to see how you get on with the TPU. I seem to have nailed that now, but it took quite a lot of frustrating hours before I got something usable out of the i3. I've not tried PETG yet but I do have a spool of that on my shelf.

As you're in the Czech Republic, you have easy access to Prusament so I guess that will be the obvious go-to choice for decent PLA. For anyone else, I'm using Sunlu PLA+ (sourced from Amazon or direct from Sunlu themselves) and it's really good stuff. I highly recommend it for anyone who is looking for decent PLA(+). I like it so much that I now have 7 different coloured spools of the stuff

Anyway, don't want to detract from your thread so I look forward to the next instalment

This is looking great Izzy!

I am thinking i'll have to get a few Prusa's to try.... I wonder where in Australia you can get them hehe

Thanks for the pictures so far, looking forward to further developments

Snow, I've heard a lot of bad things about Sunlu, we have been trying to find a chinese supplier to supply our own brand of filament locally and Sunlu looked like the best option until I started reading reviews about prints breaking apart and not being strong (I have had this experience too). If you have actually had a very positive experience I may reconsider...

Well printing the green Amazon Basics PETG was a breeze. Default Prusa Slicer profile for Generic PETG (only changed the infill to 25% and the infill pattern to grid for the clamp, totally default for the calibration cube).

Absolutely no hiccups, printed out just fine and I think the end result and finish is quite beautiful. Only a bit of stringing, but nothing too serious, I could remove it just by wiping it away with my fingers.

Some pictures:




So I'm veeeeery happy with that. 

Right now I'm printing the calibration cube using the random unbranded quite moist TPU - and fingers crossed, so far so good. The only thing I did was to loosen the idler screw completely as per the 3D printing handbook that came with the printer. It loaded the filament fine, first layer calibration went okay and now the print is in progress. Will post results later!

So as expected, TPU is giving me somewhat hard time so far. It prints, but the results are not so great. My goal now is to print a new canopy for my toothpick as the old one is now falling apart due to all the crashing.

At the moment I'm using this one: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3578160
I wanted to try something else, so I printed this one: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3808119

It actually printed pretty okay. Not great, not terrible:


Unfortunately this canopy doesn't fit on my quad, because I'm using the iFlight Whoop FC with the VTX attached on top of it, and the VTX is too much in the way. Perhaps if I had really long mounting screws I could make it fit, but I don't.

So back to the original canopy. It appears to be significantly more difficult to print. First two attempts were a total disaster with the top part being all melted and deformed. Then I noticed that the part cooling fan is off the whole time. Enabling that in the slicer helped quite a bit, but it's still not great. There's a lot of blobs and zits, and a lot of stringing. It is usable as a part, but not very pleasing. Tomorrow I'll continue playing with the slicer settings, with the first thing to try is lowering the temperature a bit. Let's see!

(18-Mar-2020, 10:59 PM)bffigjam Wrote: This is looking great Izzy!

I am thinking i'll have to get a few Prusa's to try.... I wonder where in Australia you can get them hehe

Thanks for the pictures so far, looking forward to further developments

Snow, I've heard a lot of bad things about Sunlu, we have been trying to find a chinese supplier to supply our own brand of filament locally and Sunlu looked like the best option until I started reading reviews about prints breaking apart and not being strong (I have had this experience too). If you have actually had a very positive experience I may reconsider...

I will be doing some Filament Reviews on here once I get my Tenlog Hands 2 setup properly, Sunlu is one of the filaments I'll be taking a look at.

New update on the TPU printing: I made it work reasonably well!

Lowering the temperature by 5 deg on first layer and 15 deg on rest of the layers, reducing the speed to 20 mm/s helped a lot. Now the print came out nice enough for me to use it. There was still a bit of stringing happening and a few blobs/zits, but nothing dramatic. I'm happy now

Looking good

(21-Mar-2020, 08:23 PM)izzy26 Wrote: New update on the TPU printing: I made it work reasonably well!

Lowering the temperature by 5 deg on first layer and 15 deg on rest of the layers, reducing the speed to 20 mm/s helped a lot. Now the print came out nice enough for me to use it. There was still a bit of stringing happening and a few blobs/zits, but nothing dramatic. I'm happy now

Glad it's working better for you, TPU likes it slow, at least from what I've seen, the slower the filament has to print the easier it is on the printer to do a decent job.

Looks great!!

That TPU canopy looks great. I'll be interested to see what the stringing was like inside the void.

Out of interest, are you using PrusaSlicer or Cura? If you're using PrusaSlicer, what base filament profile and print settings profile are you using, and what are the exact settings you tweaked? I would be interested to see how they compare to the ones I'm using in case yours settings will also improve what I get with mine.

Also, what brand of TPU are you you using?

Thanks guys, I'm really happy with the machine so far!

Sorry Snow, I didn't take any pics of the inside of the canopy before I cleaned it up. Next time I print something in TPU I'll try to remember.
But there was very little stringing after I reduced the temperature and tweaked the other settings.
I'm using the PrusaSlicer-2.1.1. I'll try to list it up here for you, hope I won't miss anything.

Started with the Generic FLEX MINI filament settings + 0.15mm QUALITY MINI print settings. Changes:
Print settings:
Speed - Perimeters: 40 -> 20 mm/s
Speed - Small perimeters: 25 -> 20 mm/s
Speed - External perimeters: 30 -> 20 mm/s
Speed - First layer speed: 20 -> 15 mm/s

Filament settings:
Filament - Extruder temperature - First layer: 240 -> 235 deg
Filament - Extruder temperature - Other layers: 240 -> 225 deg
Cooling - Enable auto cooling: Off -> On
Cooling - Fan speed - Min: 50 -> 80%
Cooling - Fan speed - Max: 50 -> 100%

That should be it with the changes.

The filament I'm using was some cheap (I guess) TPU off Amazon I could buy at some point last year. It's this one: ANYCUBIC Flexibles TPU-Filament 1.75 mm.

(22-Mar-2020, 10:28 PM)izzy26 Wrote: Thanks guys, I'm really happy with the machine so far!

Sorry Snow, I didn't take any pics of the inside of the canopy before I cleaned it up. Next time I print something in TPU I'll try to remember.
But there was very little stringing after I reduced the temperature and tweaked the other settings.
I'm using the PrusaSlicer-2.1.1. I'll try to list it up here for you, hope I won't miss anything.

Started with the Generic FLEX MINI filament settings + 0.15mm QUALITY MINI print settings. Changes:
Print settings:
Speed - Perimeters: 40 -> 20 mm/s
Speed - Small perimeters: 25 -> 20 mm/s
Speed - External perimeters: 30 -> 20 mm/s
Speed - First layer speed: 20 -> 15 mm/s

Filament settings:
Filament - Extruder temperature - First layer: 240 -> 235 deg
Filament - Extruder temperature - Other layers: 240 -> 225 deg
Cooling - Enable auto cooling: Off -> On
Cooling - Fan speed - Min: 50 -> 80%
Cooling - Fan speed - Max: 50 -> 100%

That should be it with the changes.

The filament I'm using was some cheap (I guess) TPU off Amazon I could buy at some point last year. It's this one: ANYCUBIC Flexibles TPU-Filament 1.75 mm.

Your canopy came off quite nice for an early days TPU print. Keep working on it and you'll get there.

The finish in some areas looks a bit waterlogged, do you have any system setup for controlling moisture content in your filament? I personally have a few food dehydrators setup and I put TPU in there for 6 hours at 60 degrees C before a print.

@izzy - thanks for the settings. I wonder how the Generic FLEX MINI setting compares to the Generic FLEX settings on the i3. It seems like they created a specific FLEX profile just for the MINI because I don't get that one in my list. The settings I'm currently using for TPU are based on the Pretty PLA V4 profile with some tweaked settings. I don't seem to get any blobbing with that tweaked profile but I do get some stringing in voids. It's no big deal to remove the strings post-print but it would obviously be less work if they weren't there in the first place.

(22-Mar-2020, 10:39 PM)bffigjam Wrote: Your canopy came off quite nice for an early days TPU print. Keep working on it and you'll get there.

The finish in some areas looks a bit waterlogged, do you have any system setup for controlling moisture content in your filament? I personally have a few food dehydrators setup and I put TPU in there for 6 hours at 60 degrees C before a print.

Thanks! Yeah the filament is quite old and it most likely absorbed some moisture. I could hear some popping while printing, which is a sign of wet filament. Although when not printing I keep the filament in the plastic box with the silica gel pack it came with (probably no good any more anyway), it's for sure not enough. I haven't looked into any drying solutions yet, but I'll do it at some point for sure, as the difference between wet and dry filament is rather big.

@snow: almost all the default profiles I have available in the PrusaSlicer end with the MINI suffix (for example when printing the PETG clam, I used the Generic PETG MINI profile). I think it makes sense as the MINI is using bowden extruder, so I'd expect many of the settings to be somewhat tweaked. It has filament presets for a few brands of filament and materials and then the generic ones. Take a look:


This is the current version of the profiles settings file taken from my PrusaSlicer: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1_ReYbV...kCxLSyvZUa
You should be able to find the settings for the FLEX MINI from there and compare it with the i3 settings.