Please no. There’s so many alternatives out there that “just work” but aren’t locked down and indoctrinate you into a walled garden.

Qidi, Creality, Sovol, Prusa, etc.

They have their place. If you only do multicolor prints rarely, but change materials between prints a lot, that’s where they excel.

I have both an MMU (Prusa MK3S + MMU 2) and a toolchanger (very custom Voron 2.4 with Tapchanger), and the MMU gets used plenty to swap filament between prints. I look at my toolchanger as being for color prints, and I usually keep 6 colors of PETG on it. My MMU gets used more as the functional printer with all the engineering filaments on it like TPU, PC, ABS, PA. I rarely have to change filament rolls with this setup.

I am also looking at building one of these Swapper3Ds, which should prevent all the waste from printing multiple colors with the MMU.

I have self-hosted both, although admittedly Gitlab was quite a few years ago. Forgejo is faster and lighter, GitLab is slow and huge. Unless you know you need a very specific GitLab feature, I’d go Forgejo all day.

I have an Elegoo Saturn 4 Ultra. I hate that it’s proprietary, but in the resin printing world the only non-proprietary option is Prusa, and it was just too small and expensive to justify. My Elegoo doesnt get network connectivity (so no risk of unapproved updates), and I use prusa slicer to slice and then uvtools to convert to the “encrypted” chitubox format. Since the printer isn’t allowed to update, I’m not worried about ever being forced into using chitubox.

I don’t really care about network connectivity for it; the built in camera is useless for me. I just have a rpi zero with a webcam on it for monitoring, and I also have an IOT switch controlled by that pi via a lan-only http server with a toggle button to control its power. If I see a print is failing via the webcam, I just cut power to the whole printer to stop it remotely. This works even outside my LAN via VPN.

I do still have to start prints the old fashioned way using a usb stick. This doesn’t bug me much, since I have to go check on resin levels, make sure there’s no crap in the tank, etc before starting a print anyways. I have a short usb extender cable to avoid wearing out the usb port on the printer itself as well. I have mucked about with using the rpi as a dummy usb drive where I can just upload files to the rpi and then the printer reads off of it via the usb port, but I couldn’t get it working :/

I’m happy enough with the printer itself - it’s fast, reliable (so far) and produces some high quality prints. The price was very reasonable at the time (iirc $450 for the printer, $250 for wash and cure station), all things considered. If someone ever produced a mainboard that supported an open-source firmware for it, I would buy and install it in a heartbeat.

It doesnt look too hard to build from source if you want to go that route… You could just make a debug apk and install it with ADB.

That’s the size I have, so thanks a ton!

Nice! Just a tip, it would be helpful to mention the size of the pegboard, such as 1" distance with 1/4" holes. There are a few different sizes of pegboard.

Oh 3d printer resin is absolutely not UV resistant - resin printers use UV light to solidify the resin at each layer, and exposing a print to too much UV light after printing can cause UV burn, similar to a thermoplastic.

Coating the print in a UV resist clear coat should prevent UV light from reaching the print itself, and preventing the burn; think of it as sunscreen for your print 😉

Oh, another thought - you could use a UV blocking clear coat such as this on your print. I still would avoid PLA though, since it might get hot in the sun. It would be important to get a complete coat with that spray, even between layer lines. You might want to think about using a clear resin if you have access to a resin printer, since it would have a much smoother finish before being coated.

Hmmm, I would usually go for ASA for anything outside, but searching around for transparent ASA comes up empty… I guess maybe transparent ASA isn’t a thing? Too bad, since you could smooth it with acetone to make it even lower opacity. You could also look at Polycarbonate and PETG, which I know can be made transparent, but those might yellow a bit after a few years.

I’m interested in other people’s thoughts. Definitely a good question!