3D printing at home

2026-05-22T09:17:00+02:00

After ten years of thinking about buying a 3D printer, I finally bought one.

First time: Anet A6

Around 2016 I was playing with some 3D printer at my friend’s company office. But no one there knew how to run it and I felt weird sitting at their place.

So started checking the market and found Anet A6 printer. Reviews were mixed. I got the impression that once you build the printer you need to print half of it again and repeat until it gets acceptable quality. I decided to skip it.

Some months later, at some local event, I saw Anet A6/A8 printers. Ouch, they were terrible!

Second moment: Ender 3

A few years passed, Creality launched Ender 3 line of 3D printers. Reviews were quite positive, printers looked more like a product than DIY hobby.

And then I got a message from brother-in-law that he bought one. So I did not have to.

Over the years, I printed countless items with his help.

Third case

A few months ago I started thinking about buying a 3D printer to have one at home, eliminating the need to go ~30km each way to collect prints.

Checked the market options and started watching reviews. Some models started to appear on a list of considered ones:

Anycubic Kobra S1
Bambu Lab P1S
Creality K2
Elegoo Centauri Carbon

Crossing out models

The more reviews I watched/read, the more I started to cross out.

Bambu Lab P1S

Bambu Lab P1S went out due to lack of communication between OrcaSlicer running on AArch64 desktop system — their networking plugin is a closed binary available only for x86-64 architecture.

Also there was a lot of noise about license violations.

And sorry, but Bambu Lab users give off a vibe similar to the Apple users. You know, “there is only one god” kind.

Elegoo Centauri Carbon 1/2

Carbon 1 has enclosure but, at the time I looked, it lacked any multimaterial solution. Instead they produced Centauri Carbon 2 (CC2) printer. Which looks weird.

The Carbon 2 requires its own slicer as it looks like more and more things done by other printers are being moved to slicing software. Anyone remember the HP 710c “winprinter”?

Creality K2

This printer did not vanish from the list — I decided to buy Anycubic Kobra S1.

First day

It took almost two weeks from order to delivery but yesterday I got Anycubic Kobra S1 Combo at home. I unpacked it, set it up, and played a bit with printing some basic stuff.

Rinkhals

I would not be myself without modifying the software of a device I just bought. And a 3D printer is no different.

So I took USB thumbdrive and installed Rinkhals to gain more control over my new device.

I do not care much about what exactly this project installs on my printer. Do not have to know what Klipper, Mainsail or Moonraker are. What matters to me is the ability to print directly from the OrcaSlicer running on my AArch64 desktop.

What to print?

My list of things to print has about twenty entries. Ranging from some small home improvements or replacing missing/broken pieces, to cases for my DIY keyboards and devices.

In the beginning, it gives instant gratification. I printed a piece in 3 minutes and one thing at home works better. Another piece, and my Lenovo thin terminal no longer moves because it is secured in three places.

Trivia

As one of things I got was ability to log in via SSH I had to check what hardware is used:

root@kobra-ks1-02ab:/root# cat /proc/cpuinfo 
processor       : 0
model name      : ARMv7 Processor rev 5 (v7l)
BogoMIPS        : 48.00
Features        : half thumb fastmult vfp edsp neon vfpv3 tls vfpv4 idiva idivt vfpd32 lpae 
CPU implementer : 0x41
CPU architecture: 7
CPU variant     : 0x0
CPU part        : 0xc07
CPU revision    : 5

Yes, this is single Cortex-A7 core. Rockchip RV1106G SoC.

I was hoping to never see 32-bit Arm hardware again…

Epson Stylus DX4000

2006-11-26T14:45:00+01:00

Today I installed my brand new printer^Wmultifunction device: Epson Stylus DX4000. This is my second printer — few years ago I had Epson Stylus 200 by few weeks.

Device is nicely supported under Linux — printing via CUPS works without problems and there are lot of config parameters if someone want to tweak. Scanner works with SANE — I only had to add one line to /etc/sane.d/epson.conf to get it recognized:

usb 0x04b8 0x082f

To get it working under Debian following stuff needs to be installed:

cupsys-driver-gutenprint (driver for printer)
quiteinsane or kooka (scanning application)
escputil (utility to printer managment)

Thanks goes to LinuxPrinting team for their website — especially for article about suggested printers.

Marcin Juszkiewicz - printing