[wincy]

I got into 3D printing miniatures and statues and stuff during the pandemic. Spent one of the stimulus checks on a good resin printer, was astounded by the quality. Then realized the filament printers were a better idea for some prints and bought 3 of them.

Then I wanted painted stuff, so I bought some cheap store paints, they were okay so I bought some hobby paints which were excellent. It really wows people instead of getting them some cheap present for Christmas printing them a cool statue and painting it up.

Another thing is that 3D printers are still very hacker ish so for me another fun part was analyzing what upgrades were actually functional and helped me print faster/more accurately and only doing those upgrades. This includes software side like compiling your own open source firmware and integrating a general purpose CPU in a Raspberry Pi to do the gcode processing. It’s a good way to do low stakes configuration and compiling of software so it’s something I’m capable of as an SWE and it’s fun to tinker with since the worst that’ll happen is I’ll have to reformat my printer.