I won’t buy my wife a Cricut for the same reason, it is a closed system that the company can decide to nickel and dime at will.

Surprised that they switched to Evil mode so soon, now everyone talks about this, and just a few days ago nobody cared and those who did were the loonies talking crazy.

Presumably now that the security keys are known, it is possible to jailbreak your printer and never deal with Bambu ever again.

I think everyone with a 3D printer starts like this (it is a self-replicating hobby after all!), but eventually I grew out of it. Making your own better printer out of the one you already have is awesome, I’m glad I did it! You learn so many new ways of failing, sometimes it’s a miracle these things work at all.

For me though I managed to stop after 3 printers (gotta have a backup while working on the downed printer!). I mostly use my printers for functional stuff though, complimenting my other hobbies when I need something super specific. It’s great to have the skill to troubleshoot when things go wrong, but also great to just hit Print and know it will work! I am thankful for the CAD skills I picked up with this hobby.

For the first year or two I was just constantly upgrading this or that on my lousy printer, then getting new problems due to those upgrades… I’m glad I don’t do that anymore 🤣

Thankfully my « printing trinkets » phase did not last too long. So many benchies…

I was quite amazed reading NopHead’s blog a while back because he uses OpenSCAD exclusively, even managing to design an entire printer and its upgrades in there. I didn’t think any sane person could do this.

I should have prefaced that I did not actually run this myself, but I did take a note of it, it looked promising. Sorry for the false hope!

I would expect it to work after a lot of fussing about, and then break at the slightest update. Easier to run it in a VM (which is also not easy in order to get GPU acceleration without dedicating a card to it - I never managed to get Intel GVT-g nor GVT-d to work reliably).

It looks like Fusion 360 runs fine on Linux these days, I don’t know how reliable that is in practice (I would expect not very much).

OnShape is a great option if the licensing terms are compatible with what you are doing. They used to have similar licensing terms as Fusion 360 where you could still get paid for your work with a free version (i.e. YouTube) but changed the terms to remove this loophole. Fusion still allows this with the Startup license but of course could change their mind at any time, then you’d be out of luck.

I dislike the lockdown of Fusion 360 but its mental model works with my own (I can’t “get” SolidWorks and never remember how to do anything). Speaking of SolidWorks, they added a reasonably-priced license for DIY/hobbyists, but it’s the same lockdown as Fusion 360 and still Windows only.

I’m in the same boat as you, just a hobbyist doing this for my own use, I have no interest in becoming an industrial engineer. For now I will keep using Fusion 360, and when that stops being an option I’ll move on to something else. I can whip out models for my prints easily enough and the 10 documents limit is just an annoyance, not a real limitation.

At the very least whatever you design in Fusion 360 or OnShape won’t be stuck in there, you can export it out via .step files. You lose design history (if applicable) but not the model itself.