What an embarrassingly inaccurate opening. They imply that because the host paid $45 for an HDMI cable at BestBuy, and that now MonoPrice sells them for $3, that prices have gone down. That's not about prices going down, that's about not buying from BestBuy, which still sells HDMI cables for $45 and more:
Yeah, HDMI cables are a really bad example. Even with the monitor example it sounds like a lot of the price difference had to do with reducing the markup. I always assumed that this was monoprice's strategy, find items being sold with huge markups (e.g. HDMI and audio cables), and reduce the markup. I would be interested in hearing/reading more about the other ways they reduce costs which they talked about briefly (re-engineering to reduce production costs).
They also sometimes reduce features. For instance, I use one of their 30" monitors, and while I think it is a good deal and it looks good, it has an inferior stand, only a Dvi input (no displayport or HDMI) and it doesn't support lower resolution inputs like the Dell and HP versions do.
I though monoprice just sells out - of - tolerance factory seconds, and covers the high failure rate which a free-replacement. The MicroUSB cables I got from them were junk.
While I'm leery of buying anything that requires a lot of "engineering" or "design" from them, I've been quite happy with the cables and simple accessories like memory card readers I've gotten from them. I've been studying cables and connectors for a long time, and have had loads of my own custom cables and connectors manufactured in China. While I haven't done an analysis on the connectors they use, I recognize that their cables are made from high quality cable stock - usually from Copartner, which I regard very highly and believe to be the top shelf of the cable stock that you can get from China. Their mains power cables are very nice too, and they stock enough variants that my spec is usually met from their stock (for instance, 14 or 16AWG, right angles, 10 feet) without having to special order.
I even have Monoprice supply some of the commodity accessory cables that I include in various bits of kit that I sell, such as plain serial cables. I thought it would reflect badly on me when they started molding their name into the cable ends, but so far it seems that nobody's been unhappy.
No they actual manufacturer a lot of what they sell. You should listen to the NPR Planet Money episode it was really enlightening. I starting buying from them after I heard it. I also just thought they bought and sold sub par parts.
The MicroUSB cables I get from them are fine, they just stop working after about a year. I stock up occasionally because I can buy a ton of them for cheap. But a friend of mine showed me these http://smile.amazon.com/Salsar-Colorful-Braided-Charger-Sams... and she says they haven't given her any trouble.
Wow that is tempting, the electronics are crap of course and the MK8 extruders are known to be subject to heat creep but the frame and case and basics are there.
In particular the power supplys are borderline in these models, they fit lower wattage 300W PSU's that are absolutly maxed out with extruders and heat beds running. The Flashforge and others have 340w Psu's fitted. I belive the controller board has a 1280 cpu fitted insted of the 2560, so it is EOL as far as further firmware upgrades.
No, that is relativly simple, you use an ssr (solidstate relay) driven from the heatbed output of your main board, and hook up the heatbed and second psu on the switched side. its common practice.
Currently I'm loving the bondtech extruder and the E3D V6 hot end combination. Lots of control an very reliable in a wide variety of filament / control issues. Building that as a 'direct drive dual extruder' on this platform might be challenging given the available space but you could probably get it to work in a bowden configuration with the hot ends on the print head and the extruders attached to the back of the case next to the spools.
For electronics there is currently a big debate over the Replicape/Smoothieboard type tradeoffs. All serious folks have dumped the AVR/Arduino stuff in favor of either ARM Cortex-M stuff or the Beaglebone Black (like a RasPi but with more I/O). Most folks prefer the higher power 8825 stepper motor drivers over the older 4498 versions. There is a challenge there however, that if you're trying to run your motors that hot you are probably over driving your printer. I've currently got a CRAMPS board with a Beaglebone Black as a controller in my 'new' build, and I continue to print parts as needed on my Replicator Dual (which was the last fully opensource printer Makerbot made).
This looks a lot like a Makerbot printer. I have heard that the dual extruder printers often get "jammed" more often. I like that they offer to replace any defective printer. For $700 this is a great deal.
There are reasons for dual extrusion, but I agree it's likely not worth it for your first printer.
Hybrid prints of ninjaflex and ABS are pretty unique and hard to achieve similar final products even with some clever assembly and forethought. It's just not possible to build certain types of rigid prints with flexible components unless you use a dual extrusion printer.
Water soluble support structures are another one that you need dual extruders for. You can make some more interesting shapes when you don't have to worry about overhangs.
My boss had some leftover budget money and decided to get some tech toys. He got a drone with a camera and a 3-D printer. I was skeptical of both.
The drone was totally awesome and I want one now. The 3-D printer took a day to print some crappy stuff... I was not impressed and didn't see the utility. Its not like we haven't had machine lathes and other methods of home manufacture forever. It's cool prices are coming down on 3-D printers. But I have a hard time seeing many good use cases right now.
I agree with this but there are a couple of caveats. 3D printing effectively takes a lot of "tuning". I joke that there are a lot of people "building" 3D printers but only a few people who are "engineering" them. You look at something like the BondTech extruder[1] or the E3D V6[2] hot end and you can see folks who have done a lot of engineering into various options and increasing reliable function in the presence of a lot of variables.
It is those variables that affect the overall output of the process and can easily lead to crappy stuff. So its hard to reliably get what you want the first time and it does take time.
That said, there are places where 3D printing makes stuff much easier, prototyping connectors is one of them. Making ways to bind together rods and board into shelves for example, or what not. But what really struck me about 3D printing has been that people who didn't try to make things before they bought a 3D printer, are no more successful or motivated to make things after they bought a 3D printer. But people who are used to using duct tape and bits of brackets and such. Those people are hugely more productive when they have a printer to build the hard to make bits.
EDIT: Disclosure I also have a Sherline Mini-Mill and Sherline mini-lathe which I converted to CNC operation before getting a 3D printer, and have done more stuff on the 3D printer than I have on either the mill or the lathe.
Especially when if you really wanted to you could put together a small home machine shop using e.g. Sherwood CNC stuff for a couple grand. The part size would be limited, no more than a couple of inches, but you could do proper metal and wood working.
You cant creat stuff with complex internal structures in one piece with a lathe and cnc, most of those end up being cast and then finished on the cnc mill, 3d printers allow that.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/11/28/366793693/episode-...