https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young's_High_Bridge for anyone looking for slightly more information.

Large swaths of Detroit aren’t that great. That’s probably true of any major city, but Detroit is 143 square miles. Manhattan is 23. Thar creates a lot of opportunity to be in a not-so-great part of a city whose population is roughly a third of what it was 70 years ago. The city runs a land bank you can buy decapitated houses from for $1k. Even on the retail market, large swaths of the city are very cheap.

All that said, Detroit might finally be turning around. The city experienced its first year of population growth in forever last year and more and more people I interact with are either visiting the city and spending money there or are actively considering moving there. There are also a lot of Detroit run small businesses popping up and the region has a strong “buy local” vibe to it.

/Someone who lives nearby and would love to see the city succeed.

Or random application availability and/or ease of use.

Two cases in point:

• Photo Mechanic. It makes it really easy/fast to sort through tons of photos. There are some Linux compatible alternatives, but they’re just not as good
• Fusion 360. There are a couple of things you can do to make it work, but since Linux isn’t officially supported the install process can be a bit fiddily and there’s no guarantee that an update won’t break things.

Things are certainly better now than they have been in the past, but if you’re somewhat time limited (eg your computer is more of a tool than a thing to spend time tweaking) Linux can still be a bit offputting - especially if some of the core applications you use aren’t officially supported.

You’re four forks deep now Slic3r to Prusa Slicer to Bamboo’s slicer to Orca. It also borrowed a lot of ideas from Super Slicer. Since it’s open source, and has been gaining some momentum, it seems to have a decent amount of contributors

Why Orca?

• all the features you know and love from things up the tree
• a revamped UI
• built in tuning tests (temp tower, extrusion multiplier, volumetric flow, pressure advance, etc)
• great Klipper integration if that’s your jam

Thanks for the follow up!

I don’t know about this particular model, but the brand is well liked for their higher end printers. At budget price points there’s only so far you can stretch the BOM cost so I don’t know how much more I would expect of this printer vs other budget entries.

If you want to print miniatures that are actually miniature in scale, a resin printer is probably the way to go. That said, you need to wash prints, cure prints, properly dispose of waste materials, etc. This article talks about their differences and shows somr a/b comparisons halfway through it. You can get pretty good detail with a small nozzle on a FDM printer, but resin will still blow it away.

As for a budget printer, most are generally pretty reliable but if you want good results you’re probably going to need to fiddle with them. You’ll also probably need to fiddle with them to keep them running and/or optimized (for example, better fan shrounds for your hot end, etc). I didn’t mind somewhat ugly prints from my i3 Plus, so I didn’t need to do very much fiddling beyond some basic mods over the 5 or so years I was fairly actively using it - especially after I replaced the bed springs with silicone and printed snug fitting thumb wheels.

There’s nothing wrong with an “old” printer. I bought a Monoprice branded Wanhao Duplicator i3 Plus a little over 7 years ato and from a pure feature perspective it’s not that different than the base Ender v3. The biggest advances are in quality of life things, like z-offset calibration and “auto leveling”, but it’s worth saying that most budget printers can’t adjust their extruder mechanically to be in plane with the build plate like say a Voron, so they compensate by tweaking z-height as the extruder moves between high and low spots. Geared reduced extruders on direct drive setups are also preferable over driving the extruder directly from a stepper motor like my old i3 Plus or early Ender v3 models.

Printers are generally very modifiable, so if some new whiz-bang feature comes out in a few years you’ll likely be e able to adopt it to your printer.

Another commenter in here suggested filling the gap with concrete. I don’t think it’s worth it at this power level, cheapish BOM, etc. The enclosure is also ASA (the middle) and PETG (the top and bottom), so it’s a bit more dead than PLA already.

That looks like an interesting design. If you’re linking to something like that, you’ve heard of Hoffman’s Iron Law already. I chose size and low end response over efficiency. I did model some higher order enclosures, but they either didn’t get low enough (size, efficiency) or were too big (efficiency, low end response).

It would totally be a step up, the question is which step ups are worth it given the BOM components and their cost (around $200 for all the electronics and drivers excluding plastic). At the end of the day it’s a $20 tweeter and a $45 (used) car door woofer connected to a fairly cheap class D amp using Bluetooth. It has a slight turn off pop (no turn on pop though), it hisses some at idle, you can hear the noise floor decrease (eg more noise) when a Bluetooth device pairs, Bluetooth itself isn’t a super awesome media for audio (it is a lot better than it used to be, but your actual quality will depend a lot on device to device configurations), etc etc.

I’m not sure what I would prioritize first for the next step up in SQ, but I don’t think it would be the enclosure itself.

I had prints doing exactly what you described on my CoreXY because ABS and ASA are very warp prone. For me it all came down to chamber temperature and a solid first layer. I think you should be good to go on the latter thanks to your MK3.

You’ll need active chamber heating at a minimum to pull off larger prints. This doesn’t necessarily mean an aux heater, but it does mean bedfans. I’m not sure how easy those are to implement on a MK3, but I would be amazed if no one hasn’t figured out something, especially given the size of the community. In my case, I’m using 4x bed fans with two doing double duty in a filter.

My printer is a 350mm^3 Voron, which means its acrylic panels are fairly large. More surface area means more heat loss, so I need panels that do a better job of retaining heat than simple acrylic. This might also be the case for you thanks to having to move your bed back and forth. I’m hoping that ACM+radiant insulation will get me there. This print happened in a 60 °C chamber.

Thanks! Hexibase’s builds are super cool.

If by characterize them you mean measure the driver’s t/s parameters you can do it with a multimeter, a resistor, and basically any amplifier using a computer to generate the frequency. Elliot can be a bit verbose, which makes his instructions somewhat hard to follow at times, but here’s a guide: https://sound-au.com/tsp.htm

The top and bottom are PETG. The middle section is ASA. 0.6mm nozzle, 0.3mm layer height, 150% extrusion width, two perimeters and 30% infill. I was cruising, but did limit my max flow rate to 25 mm^3. I could have gone even faster, but I was in the rate of diminishing returns for print time. I printed it in my Voron, but it did need some extra insulation to get the chamber temp high enough to avoid warping. The print completing completely successfully told me it’s possible to do big ASA prints with a 60 degree chamber temp, so I’ll be spending the time to make some nice insulated ACM panels.

Ha, thanks!

Laziness and easy BMS board compatibly, but I totally understand the sentiment. It’s not like I can’t print a new top if/when I discover an easy/drop in solution that deals with negotiating power and voltage.

Go for it! 3D printing unlocks the opportunity to easily fabricate things that would be pretty difficult to make out of only wood. I’m mulling over making a baby array of BMR drivers https://www.tectonicaudiolabs.com/audio-components/bmr-speakers/

I’ve seen that approach taken to make the enclosure more “dead”, but at these power levels it doesn’t really matter a lot. The walls are 1.8mm thick with 30% infill. The top and bottom are PETG and the middle section is ASA. These materials are more ductile than say PLA, so they’re inherently slightly deader.

You’re absolutely correct that the approach you suggested would result in a slightly better outcome for a bit more weight to lug around and a little more design effort. It just didn’t seem worth it to me for this portable and fairly low power application.

Thanks! There are two “big” details that I did think about to some extent.

The first big choice was what kind of enclosure type I wanted. This winds up running into Hoffman’s Iron Law, which means choosing two: low end bass, efficiency, and size. I chose size and low end bass, which means that I went with a traditional ported enclosure. I did consider, and spent some time modeling, a more exotic double bass reflex enclosure, but it just wound up being too large. Modeling in this sense involves acoustic modeling, which I did in WinISD for the ported enclosure and Hornresp for the double bass reflex, and physical modeling, which I did in Fusion360. I also selected drivers that would play fairly well with one another.

The second was geared more toward printing. Curved surfaces resist flexing more than flat surfaces, so most everything is curved or has a reinforced (eg the top and bottom). I wanted to minimize the need for supports, so the ports have “built in” supports. There’s also the tongue and groove thing for the top and bottom to minimize air leakage.

As far as the drivers without the enclosure, an enclosure adds two things:

• Low end extension. Woofers in free space have extremely limited bass response. In this sense an enclosure is good
• Diffraction and baffle step. This is part of the reason why the sides of the front baffle have a massive radius on them. In this sense an enclosure is bad

Thanks!

You should check out: https://github.com/MSzturc/the100

Red dead redemption 2 didn’t stop at being pretty. If it did I don’t think we would all talk about it so fondly. Totally agree that it’s a great looking game though.

Thanks for following up! I played the OG halflife when it came out, so I will be sure to check this out.