The first paragraph of the OP states this.

Perhaps you’re an AI who only hallucinated a circuit design.

Yeah the headline really leaves you with a nice surprise when you read the article.

It was pretty obvious because the calibration lines it lays down at the beginning of the print weren’t adhered to the bed, which told me that it didn’t probe the bed correctly to establish the correct height and was printing with too large of an offset.

The lesson that all consumer electronics have a limited shelf life? That’s pretty well known.

If you go this route, you’ll absolutely need mmWave sensors as regular PIR sensors only sense movement not presence and you’ll experience lights shutting off when you’re sitting too still in a room. I’ve considered setting this up a few times but want mmWave and PIR sensors with a lux sensor all-in-one and the market for this is extremely small. I think only some sketchy Tuya and the Everything Smart Home youtube channel have sensors like this but they’re expensive and I just haven’t pulled the trigger.

Not sure if you got this idea from Technology Connections but he recently didn a video using this exact premise.

I checked HA and found that A) my furnace fan is likely dying as the furnace overheats and power cycles frequently and B) despite the overheating, or furnace has only run at most 25% of the day during the coldest temps we’ve gotten this winter (which has been mild and only down into the low 30s). I think if/when we replace the furnace we can safely cut the BTU rating down while still maintaining our desired temperature.

Ban evasion. I had literally this same exact situation happen and lost my 10 year old account. I talked about piracy in /r/Movies and got banned then sitewide permabanned for accidently commenting there from a different account.

But you’re still relying on companies to produce these parts for you and they’ll only do it so long as the market is big enough to make it worth it for them.

Open source is definitely preferable, but at this point and time, their proprietary parts aren’t an issue at all as they’re cheap and readily available and with the popularity of these printers, I don’t see it being an issue for quite a long time. By then, I may have moved onto a new printer anyway since the market is constantly progressing.

Do it. I was in your shoes about a year ago and finally pulled the trigger on the X1C and haven’t regretted it once. My previous printer was like the ship of Thesius with upgrades and still failed all the time. I’ve got probably 700-800 hours on the X1C and have only had maybe half a dozen prints fail and only one repair needed which was covered under warranty. The only maintenance needed has been greasing the screws, which it kindly informs me to do when needed.

I got one with my X1C.

So pretty much like every other company in existence? I don’t think there is any danger of BambuLabs disappearing anytime soon and their parts are dirt cheap.

Something else to think about is future expandability. I’m assuming you’ll start with an HDD or two, but what about after that? You’ll either need to purge out your library or have a bunch of external drives connected. The Optiplex is a great thin client but it only has 1 or 2 SATA ports and one will likely always be used for your OS drive (SSD) which leaves only one internal slot for an HDD.

Also just some random advice, but if you want cheap drives, keep an eye out for WD Element or WD EasyStore external drives to go on sale. These are extremely easy to remove from their case and be used as an internal drive. Something else to check out would be serverpartdeals.com if you don’t mind trying some used or refurbished enterprise drives. I bought my last 14TB drive from them for something like $100 and haven’t had any issues. This is generally worth the risk since you can just download your media over again if the drive happens to crap out on you.

If they’re going to be sharing with friends, they’ll need something that can handle transcoding in order to eliminate all the complaints about “the movie isn’t working!” due to varying codecs and client compatibility. Any 7th or 8th gen or newer Intel chip (QuickSync) should work or something with a GPU.

I just had this happen too and it was caused by a bad z-offset reading. The nozzle hooked one of the parts on the bed that came loose and drug it around while forming the blob.

I just had this happen on my X1C for the same reason and was able to get it off after heating up the hotend for a minute and wiggling it loose. Zero residual damage.

They have all the parts available on their site.

I feel like an idiot because you’re absolutely correct, and I’ve even used this recently in Bambu Studio (which I believe is forked from PrusaSlicer, so it may be there as well). I haven’t used Prusa or Orca slicers, but it is somewhat limited in Studio, especially when printing “per object” instead of “per layer”

I’d still recommend OP print one benchy at a time because it’s very easy for one object to wipe out the entire print bed of parts if misconfigured.

Smart idea starting out with a cheap printer as you’ll learn quite a bit more this way (tinkering and repairing) and find out if you really actually like the hobby or that it’s not for you without spending a fortune first. This can be extremely frustrating at times but also rewarding.

I’ve been printing for several years and have never heard of a way to print with multiple profiles at once, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t possible as things are being discovered all the time and I don’t exactly stay up to date on every facet.

I’d just start out one benchy at a time and learn from experience. Challenges will come, and that’s where you’ll learn.

Also, keep your filament dry and get some cheap hygrometers to measure the filament’s moisture content (in a dry box, bag, etc) even brand new. This is one big cause of headaches.

I have an Amcrest system with all the same features (no fees, remote app, PoE, local storage) and it works well but the NVR software is complete garbage to the point that you have to use IE to properly play back files. I will probably buy my own PoE switch at some point and run BlueIris or Frigate using my server setup that I already have for Plex.