| Followed the original RepRap project as a college student. A bunch of us students tried to do a group build of the RepRap Huxleys. It was way too much work to try off the bat in order to get a working printer. After a run-in with a RepRap Mondo (it's big but it has a lot of issues, the design ended up not being that popular) bits-for-bytes RapMan printers (purchased by the industrial engineering department) and MakerBots (some folks at a local TechShop had them), we eventually got an Ultimaker kit. It was amazing. Fast prints, cheap (compared to some), good-quality software, the assembly was straightforward and fast, instructions were thorough (compared to many other printers we've worked with), and print quality was good with almost no tuning. Now graduated, I own an Ultimaker and whole-heartedly recommend it. Not only is it a good printer by itself, it has quite a clever community of inventors around it, and 3D-printed parts and improvements to Ultimakers appear with shocking regularity. (As opposed to makerbot, which is more of a professional printer in that less folks tend to modify them). Cura, the software used to control ultimaker, has come leaps and bounds farther than what it started as. It's now easily mistaken for professional paid software, and it's easy enough that even someone with no experience can hop on and start printing. Also shout-out to octoprint, which uses a Raspberry Pi to control the printer (3-hours of printing an awesome part rock, but not having your laptop tied to the printer for that long). https://www.ultimaker.com/ |