Prusa Core One with MMU or Qidi Plus 4 and the Qidi Box. The Qidi Box is at the pre-sale point now. They have been taking things slow with their AMS unit. Either printer is affordable and in the size range you want. Both are corexy, Qidi run Klipper and Prusa runs Marlin firmware. Both brands have heated enclosures to make printing fussier filaments easier. And PETG definitely benefits from that.

If I was starting over and wanted a larger printer, it would be a coin flip choice between those 2 printers.

I got caught the same way with an impulse buy of an A1 Mini/AMS Lite last fall. I’m still running the 1.04 firmware and Orca Slicer on LAN mode for several months now with little issue, (sometimes it drops the LAN connection on start up and needs to be manually reconnected). If you do upgrade to the evil firmware and don’t like it, Bambu currently does let you downgrade to an older firmware and you can go back to a safer firmware.

Most of the Bambu users I have interacted with don’t care because they want to run their printer from the Bambu Handy app. And if you want to use the Handy app, you can’t use LAN mode because you need to be logged in. But I don’t like using my phone for such things anyway.

Meh, you can get used and working benchtop electric heat treat furnaces for around $500US that would be suitable for home use.

Honestly, my second choice from the Core One would be the Qidi Plus 4. I wanted the X-Smart 3 180³ sized printer as a second machine. But it was discontinued before I got off my butt to buy something. (I ended up with a Bambu mini combo as an impulse buy). But if I was starting over with my first printer, I would seriously consider a Qidi machine.

As a bit of Prusa fan boi myself, I too would recommend the Core One over the Mk4s at this moment. It’s a matter of “Buy once. Cry once.” Cheap often costs more in the long run.

When you are facing a 30 hour print or a long project, a bit extra speed is not only nice but helpful. Plus the heated enclosure can provide access to more engineering grade filaments. While you might not need to print nylon or ABS every day, you will probably find you are going to want to at some point a bit of those types for a project or two. And I believe the Core One also has filtered exhaust air to control nasty fumes that FDM printing can cause, (yes, even PLA has particulates that won’t kill you immediately, but they ain’t good for you either long term).

Personally, I find the MMU to be a god awful design mess. A rat’s nest of loose tubes and spools of filaments, but it does work. I might consider the Box Turtle over the MMU just for the neatness of the design. I find the multi-filament units, cool for very little color printing I do, but it’s the ability to use up spools that don’t have enough left one them to complete a print by switching to a different spool that can finish the print automatically to be far more valuable. It’s cut down my clutter of mostly used spools to near zero. I paid for all that kilo, I’m bloody gonna use it all dammit.

Human drivers struggle with edge cases also. I’ve seen a lot you drive, and as an old medic who has done his share of MV accidents, I can tell you y’all ain’t that good at it.

While I have no dog in this hunt, all any self driving vehicle needs to be is just a bit better than a human one to be an improvement and a net win, (never let perfect be the enemy of good enough). And historically, as soon as any new technology becomes affordable, humans adopt it and use the snot out of it. The problem is, humans aren’t very good at projecting future harm that any new tech tends to drag along with it.

The problem with new PEI sheets everyone sells, is that they make the PEI so thin that it wears out so fast. It’s like when they go to cut a slice off the PEI tree, they damn near miss the whole tree. And the popularity of textured sheets doesn’t help either.

I have a smooth PEI sheet that came with my Prusa Mk3s 6 years ago. It has 1000’s of hours of print times on it. After about 4 years of heavy use, it just wasn’t much good anymore. And I didn’t feel like buying a new sheet, so I took the chance and very lightly hit with some 1000grit wet/dry sandpaper to renew the surface. It now holds better than when it was new. And I can probably sand it again if it ever needs it. But new PEI plates aren’t coated half as thick either. So my Bambu plates will have to be replaced at some point.

They stated 250C was for annealing to final product. That’s a temperature any bog standard toaster oven or kitchen oven can do. Sadly, they said nothing I saw about actual extrusion temps.

With out Bezo’s name recognition very, very few would have heard about Slate and their little pickup/SUV. That’s a level of advertisement that money simply can’t buy as a startup. We certainly wouldn’t be talking about them without Bezos’ name being attached to them. And they certainly wouldn’t have access to the investors and financial doors his name can easily open.

I have. Then I realize Slate doesn’t get a chance to change vehicular design without him.

The only ads I see are on a local sports podcast. The advertisers are all local businesses. From restaurants to local credit unions. And those I’m fine with.

FDM printing ABS/ASA is far easier and safer than resin printing since most CoreXY printers are enclosed these days. A simple fan and ether venting to the outside world or through activated charcoal air filters is a relatively simple procedure. Printers with all of that filtration are easily purchased these days. Even vapor smoothing can be done outdoors if it’s warm enough.

They understand just how hard it would be to comply. And that’s the point. Make it hard enough to meet the requirements to not make worth a business’ while to comply. And the politicians can say “We didn’t ban PornHub. They blocked you from access.”

It’s a common tool both the left and right use to control behaviors. Governments around the world do this all the time.

Their Plus 4 printer is supposed to have multi material box -a la AMS- some time this year. But there hasn’t been much said about it since the release of the Plus 4 model.

The only other one I know of, outside of a dual exturder Voron, is the Qidi I-Fast IDEX printer. It’s expensive, somewhat over $1000, but it has a lot of goodies too. 350C extruder, heat chamber, and a decent sized build volume to print just about any engineering filament.

I got my A1 mini just a month or two before this current unpleasantness, so I was taken unaware. But since I’ve never been interested in using much of the Bambu software ecosystem, switching to LAN mode a month ago has been no big deal for me because I was leaning that direction anyway. And my current firmware version, 1.04 works well so no need to up grade. Nor is Makers World all that important to me.

But there are so many users that just don’t care and will swallow what ever dreck Bambu feeds them.

Roll back the firmware to a version that worked. You still can do that.