We’ve been talking to a lot of people about our vision for AstroPrint and 3D Printing as a whole lately. Some people are still adverse to the technology and place too many expectations on what it should do to be successful. These are some of the most commonly asked questions by this crowd:

– What can you make that’s useful with a 3D Printer?
– Why would I spend $1,000 to make things that you can buy much cheaper at the store?
– Is the quality of the printed objects ever going to improve?

Why do we insist in judging 3D Printing based on utility and force ourselves to calculate the ROI of buying these machines? I propose that we start looking at these amazing machines as entertainment devices instead.

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This post originally appeared in Kevin Weirauch’s blog.

Hardware

Printrbot Simple Maker Edition – this actually started as the original Printrbot Simple and I used the Makers Upgrade kit to get it to this version. See some of my previous posts for that process.

Custom Heated Bed – I hacked this to mount under the aluminum print bed. About 1/4 inch had to be cut from either side and of course a separate power supply had to be used.

Software

Astroprint – fresh off their successful Kickstarter campaign, I decided to run their ‘cloud slicer’ through its paces. They offer both Cura and Slic3r configurations. I can’t attest to what their settings are, but for the purposes of this test, it’s best that they are constant.

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