Prusa MINI: Smart and compact 3D printer

I&#x27;m glad that prusa has stayed true to his open hardware pledge all these years, while continuing to push the reprap ideals.<p>Everybody is complaining about the price, but c&#x27;mon this thing is designed printed and assembled in Prague, the EU. It creates local jobs for people with fair wages, social security and good quality of life, we should strive to have more of our stuff produced in the west.<p>Happy to see him design another printer, I really love my MK3.

The mini is neat, but I&#x27;m more excited about the CoreXY based XL.<p>I love my MK3, which I&#x27;ve upgraded to the MMU MK3S, but have had a bunch of projects where a larger printing area would be desirable (I print a lot of board game organizers, to reduce shelf space usage, speed up set up&#x2F;tear down, improve playing ability during the game, etc., so usually this means 3-6 distinct sets of prints on the MK3S).<p>I have a good bit of experience on the Voron 2, and was thinking I was going to build a 2.1 - the CoreXY design also has the benefit of being able to print faster without quality loss, as well as being very amenable to designs that have built in enclosures, which is a godsend for printing ABS (and building exhausts to get the fumes out of the house), but with how great my experience with my current Prusa has been, I&#x27;m going to wait and see how it shapes up. It&#x27;d also save a ton of work, as the Voron is an entirely DIY design.

I guess switching to a bowden extruder let them cut a ton of costs. Can&#x27;t wait to see how it prints compared to the mk3.<p>The real test will be comparing it to the Ender 3, which seems to be the form factor&#x2F;market the mini is trying to go after. Even if the mini is 150 bucks more than the Ender 3, if it prints even slightly as reliably as the MK3 then the Ender 3 may be done for.<p>With low cost printers like the Ender 3&#x2F;Maker Select&#x2F;etc, after the first 50-200 hours of printing, you can end up spending more time on printer maintenance than printing. There&#x27;s also small problems that can happen that for non-technical users would be the end of their adventure into 3D printing. That is easily the greatest pain point at the Ender 3&#x27;s price point.

I think the market for this one will be difficult, just because you can get a 3D printer (read: Ender) for basically half the price...<p>...with this being said, though - I&#x27;m happy to see a &quot;entry-level&quot; Prusa. One thing that lags the cheap printers are security measurements. I guess no one is keen on burning down their house, just because this giant hotglue on rails went rogue.<p>On their website, they state that they are:<p>- monitoring FAN RPM<p>- Have self diagnostic<p>- Have a high quality PSU<p>- and, even more important, use thermistors.<p>Taking all this into account, this might justify the price bump, if you aren&#x27;t able to add all this to, let&#x27;s say, your Ender or any other printer by yourself.

This is pretty awesome. I &quot;upgraded&quot; my Makerbot Replicator 2x to a Prusa MK3S and the difference was pretty amazing. Now to see if I can upgrade the controller to the Buddy.

Why does everyone need a 3d printer? Maybe this statement would sound as ludicrous looking back as asking why does everyone need a PC in the 1980s. However, I still don&#x27;t understand why would a regular person need a 3d printer? Mass marketed goods are always cheaper due to economies of scale. And would you really want to put in the effort to make your own chair, etc?

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20191012190019&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.prusaprinters.org&#x2F;original-prusa-mini-is-here-smart-and-compact-3d-printer&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20191012190019&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.prus...</a>

Really curious to see what the print quality ends up being like on these.<p>Design wise they&#x27;re very similar to something like a cetus, or many other Chinese printers with similar mechanics with a major difference: Smooth rods and bearings instead of linear rails.<p>In my own designs I&#x27;ve pivoted away from rods in favor of rails and seen much greater quality, accuracy, repeatability, and speed, even with cheap knock off rails from China, and most of the industry is moving that way as well.<p>What&#x27;s curious is you can get a machine similar to the mini, using linear rails, and more metal or injection moulded parts over 3D printed parts, for just a little bit more than the mini.<p>Prusa has quite a good reputation though, so I&#x27;m skeptical they would release an inferior machine at a the same price point, so like I said, really curious to see how well these works.

So much sinophobia and racism in this thread. Folks, remember that your exquisitely built Apple products are all made in China.

I never really understood why they stayed with building a giant 3d printer farm to build all those 3d printer parts, except for it being &quot;cool&quot;. Especially in .cz, I think think they could have gotten all those parts injection moulded for a lower cost. At a higher precision.

I don&#x27;t like it for a few reasons;<p>1. It looks like you are going to fight &quot;ringing&quot; with lack of rigidity.<p>2. Its a bowden extruder... which I suppose is a necessity due to the lack of structure. Still I would rather have direct drive on every machine.<p>3. It&#x27;s very expensive. You can buy an Ender for $200 or less on sale... or around $230 normal price. Upgrade the board to a 32bit Bigtreetech for $60 with Trinamic drivers... plug and play.<p>4. Most people find they want a bigger printer... not smaller.<p>This is my initial reaction. I am always looking for innovation in this space and most of it is happening in the &quot;industrial&quot; realm. For example, I wish they would make an SLS machine or a &quot;beginner&quot; industrial machine.<p>The companies like Creality are just dominating everything.<p>We need prosumer&#x2F;industrial machines that have features you can&#x27;t get with $750 dollar machine.

Does it make sense to 3D print these parts rather than injection-mould them?

Can it be used to print small figurines for role playing or board games?

This is pretty exciting, I&#x27;m glad that they doubled down the path of making high quality hardware and remain open source and a net positive player in the space.

I like Prusa, but after they stopped releasing firmware updates for my MK2S for no good reason, so did my business with them. Such a shame.

Too bad they don&#x27;t have a proper kit version. If it was 100$ cheaper (same ratio as the MK3S), I would definitely consider buying it.

This is an advertisement and I don&#x27;t think there is anything exceptional here.