I started with an Ender 3 Max which was controlled by an OctoPi with numerous mods printed from Thingiverse.
The Pi was powered from the main PSU with a buck converter stepping down the voltage. This set up turned the pi on every time the printer was turned on.
The camera is a Raspberry Pi camera with a 24" cable mounted to the Z axis gantry. This allows the camera to show the most recent layer no matter what the height.
While FDM printing was great for a number of home and hobby projects, I always found it lacking in one key (for me) area - printing miniauture figures for tabletop games like D&D. I decided to take my printing game up a notch and purchased an Anycubic Photon MonoX. Working with resin is a bit more involved and messy than FDM, but the level of detail is incredible! I am currently deep in a rabbit hole of mixing flexible and standard resin, searching for the best mix for durable, detailed, figures. My blog will have a post chronicling this journey soon!
The Ender3 was a great introduction to 3D printing, but by September 2022 I was having numerous issues. It got to a point where Iwas spending more time troubleshotting and fixing it than I was printing, and it stopped being fun. I had been contemplating a few replacements, and eventually I purchased a Prusa i3 MK3S+ kit. This is the current FDM printer I am using, and I have been over the moon delighted with it - worth every penny!
Along with the upgrade, I also decommissioned the Raspberry Pi running OctoPrint. Now I've opted to run OctoPrint on one of my servers (with a loooooong USB cable). There are two primary benefits - I can upload gcode files anytime (previously, I had to turn on the printer to power the Pi), and it frees a pi up for other projects (no small deal at the time of this update in September 2022, when a Pi 3 costs over $100 new)
