Roughly 4-5 months ago I purchased a DaVinci AIO 1.0 as my gateway into 3D printing and, despite a number of quirks with the designs, I’ve been pretty happy with the purchase, as it gives me a nice distraction from working and studies. I have found my reliability of XYZPrinting’s products to be rather frustrating though, time-wise and money-wise and had decided that once I was comfortable printing on their terms (with their supported tools and products) that I would start looking into alternatives.I’m now at the point where I’m wrapping my head around CAD designing, I’ve managed to print a couple passable objects (including a little Stitch car ornament that I’m very happy with) and have reached that point where I want to start considering other means of printing with my Da Vinci. Specifically, I’m hoping to look into ways of using non-XYZ filaments and being able to slice (if not print) outside of XYZWare with as little trouble as possible.I have done some research and found that when it comes to filaments, my biggest complication is replacing or mimicking the cartridge chip that is scanned by the printer, supplying temperatures, color and spool filament lengths (specifically max and how much is remaining). I know from my research that there was FLASH devices that could be placed in the printer in order to fake this information, and that as long as the chip information is acceptable to the printer it will print any filament you feed into it. The issue is I’ve been unable to find anywhere still stocking these devices or otherwise shipping them to Australia, and haven’t found any other methods apart from flushing the printer and installing custom firmware, which I want to avoid at all costs. Specifically, I’m hoping to be printing in your typical ABS and PLA filaments, as well as NinjaFlex, transparent and PLA/metal filaments (as of this time I’ve only ever printed in ABS, couldn’t even find PLA cartridges in Australia that would fit my budgets).As for XYZWare, I don’t really have a problem with the software as a whole, but there is small things that just irk me. For example, my biggest problem is despite having an alright (yet lacking compare to other softwares I’ve read about) amount of user configuration, it seems that apart from layer height and turning rafts/supports/brims on and off, it just flat out ignored any configuration changes I make. As an example, if I attempt to change the infill type from rectangular, it stays rectangular (not really an issue for me). If I try to change the print speed from medium to slow it still prints at a faster speed (yep, that’s a problem). And my biggest hate, is if I attempt to change supports from thick to light it completely ignored it and prints as many supports as it can, making post-cleanup a complete nightmare and for prints with a fair amount of overhang (think extended arms or wings on a statue and the likes) it becomes a guessing game whether I’m going to be able to snap enough of the support off that it doesn’t damage the print or reduce detail, or if I should bite the bullet and spend 4x the amount of time sanding and vaporizing with Acetone (and I spend a long time on this already..).As mentioned I am happy with the Da Vinci and don’t intend on buying a new printer for quite a while (and it doesn’t help that I can’t afford to buy another one any time soon, and don’t have the room for a second printer to begin with), and I’ve got plenty of time to work out a game plan (cleaned out Big W’s stocks of some blue and green ABS cartridges when they were on clearance for 38$ each, currently sitting on 170M ABS + 2 fresh cartridges in storage). Any suggestions, advice or nudges in the right direction would be greatly appreciated! http://ift.tt/2b0cSCD
