Erm, it’s proper etiquette when posting TPU benchies to upload a picture in squished form 😉

Pretty decent looking print. This printer has a Bowden tube setup yeah? Impressive. If you decide to upgrade to a direct drive you’ll probably be able to print it with retraction and help tone down the stringiness.

Can you upload a picture of your stripped screw?

I really hate that Nintendo keeps putting “new” in titles. There’s the New 3DS, a New Mario game, and I think there was a New Mario party? Could be wrong on that but I remember there was a “New Mario 2” 🤦🏾‍♂️

This is how my wood PLA+ prints used to look too. Your extruder is almost 100% the issue. These filaments are spongy and don’t extrude well. Try toying with your extruder tension and if that fails get a BMG knockoff

Instead of making the hole the exact size, make a small gap so you can use a screw and nut to clamp it down on the peg

That said, just wait until you enclose your printer. The frame will grow in z fairly significantly as it heats up. I’ve not let my printer heat soak, printed a number of sequential parts in one print, and watched the first layer squish getting worse and worse with each sequential part. Eventually filament won’t even stick to the build plate, so you need to tweak z-offset.

Jesus, is that what’s going on… I enclosed my Franken-printer (well it was already enclosed but now it’s less shitty) and my first layer kept growing, I figured it was an inconsistent BLTouch…

Changing nozzles is important as they are consumables, but all of your high quality close up shots are showing a practically unscathed nozzle under a lot of gunk (the picture of the back end of the nozzle has a big chunk of cooked plastic that will pretty easily scrape off), if you cleaned it you’d probably be just as well off as with the new nozzle

I’m sorry, a power-only USB port on a motherboard?

Depending on if the seam is concave or convex, you might be able to use a file or thin piece of fine sandpaper to remove it, but you might wind up with an ugly scratch worse than a uniform line.

Either way it still looks very nice.

Ooh, I quite like this. The design is lovely and that filament is super snazzy.

If I might offer some constructive criticism, I think a randomized Z-seam would’ve worked really well here, but I only noticed it when zooming in looking at one of the plants and if it’s facing a wall or something it’s non-existent anyways

Shit, what have i done.

You’ve added another notch to you nerd belt!

That’s the exact setup I’ve got. Let me know if you have any questions or issues getting things set up. Once you have it figured out you’ll wonder why anyone uses marlin… there’s just so much available. With marlin, literally everything is baked directly into the firmware, and unless you compiled it yourself or dug through the code you’ve got no idea what’s going on with the printer. Set up a retraction tower? Better hope it was set up right because marlin won’t tell you current retract settings. Leveled your bed? Better hope that the numbers stick and the mesh is actually applied to prints.

With Klipper, not only is all of that easily configurable by editing a text file, all of that information is available directly in the GUI. Want your printer to do something else at the start of every print? Just change your start up macro. Realize that you set the wrong retract distance in your slicer? Just change the setting in the GUI. Start a print job with 5 models and one of them starts to fail? Don’t cancel the whole print, just the part that’s failing.

These are just off the top of my head improvements and there’s literally dozens if not hundreds more. What have you done? You’ve elevated.

Oh I absolutely relate with not having that deep connection until later on. I’m probably a little younger than you so by the time I discovered Michael at the age of 4 or so his legacy had already been established, I had vol 1 and 2 of the HIStory music videos and would watch them obsessively trying to dance and sing along, as a child I loved the performance aspect of it but even then felt some sort of emotional resonance… now as an adult when I dip back into Michael I can’t help but think about just how formative his art was in my life.

Yeah it’s the same shout used in many other performances, some of which that have very different messages and intentions. From a viewer’s perspective I agree that it can be easily misinterpreted; from a performer’s perspective, I don’t think the sound was specifically chosen or planned, when you’re zoned in on your performance you’re channeling a lot of energy and some things just find their way out. That’s what makes it so powerful to me, the dance doesn’t even feel specifically choreographed, the sound and dance are just expressions of raw emotion.

The man can literally make me want to cry by moving around and shouting. It’s so incredible.

but with the utterly bizarre shouts that don’t match the feel of the visuals.

I feel it matches perfectly, like you said it’s a dance of protest and anger, to me the improvised shouts are like outbursts of passion and anguish.

Not disagreeing with your opinion, the vocalisations are a little jarring. This music video (and a ton of other Michael videos) were a huge part of my childhood so maybe I’m just used to his shouts being a part of the visual.

Yup, I got this set up when my BLTouch mount broke and I had to zip tie it to the print head resulting in less-than-perfect repeatability. Changing the default G28 command is a good way to do it, I did it by making a new macro CG28 and put that in my START_PRINT macro in place of G28.

and i didn’t know i could change the mobo to other than the original

That’s what’s great about (most) printers, you can do whatever you want with them 😁

about to figure this ABL out, but it misses the ABL option in the menu.

That’s because you’re using the stock firmware, which was not compiled with the bltouch in mind. If you want to get that working, you’d have to flash a different firmware, at which point I’d highly recommend Klipper, maybe I’m just bad at using Marlin (the other popular 3d printing firmware) but compiling firmware for it was a million times more difficult than getting klipper working

Our hobby survives on the backbone of kind internet strangers, to deny your call is to deny yourself.

I don’t know your printer’s configuration, but assuming a pretty standard setup (single extruder, single X and Y steppers, single or dual z) I can recommend the SKR MINI 3.0. It’s a gem to handle, documentation and firmware are readily available on their GitHub, and best of all, they’re cheap and easy to source (assuming you’re in the US).

While you’re looking in to changing your main board, may I suggest you take a peek at Klipper? It’s phenomenally worth the effort it takes to set up, and you’re already going to be doing a big amount of the same legwork if you’re getting a different main board than stock.

So that little board is simply connecting all the cables from the main board into one cable (the USB C cable). If you’re getting nothing from the main board, either the board itself or the mosfet for the heater is dying.

Honestly, I don’t know how you’d go about testing board vs mosfet, if it were me I’d just replace the board, but somebody else might be able to tell you if there’s a better route to take

so which board is defect? The little one in the hotend or the board on the other side of the USB-C cable?

My money is on the main board inside the printer. The “board” on your hotend (if it’s like others) doesn’t really have any computers or controllers on it, it’s more like a fancy cable connector between the main board and those components.

If you test the voltage and get nothing, it’s either the main board or the mosfet for the heater. If you test it and it gives you a stable 24v, the problem lies somewhere between the main board and the heat cartridge (cable, connector, the hotend board, cartridge itself).

Can’t say for sure without looking up your board and pin out chart but I’m pretty confident you’re probing one of these guys

What issues are you having? I’m sure we can help you get it figured out

You can get a new board for <$50 (you don’t need the same board that’s in the printer), spend an hour or two learning how to move the cables from the old to the new, and still have a pretty good deal