I bought a 3D Printer. Lets see what this thing can do

So browsing around Goodwill's auction site, I found a 3D Printer (among a number of other things).  I did some quick research on what they go for on the secondary market, tossed a low bid at it and kept an eye on it.

So I won and picked up a Monoprice Select Mini V2.

It was missing the spool holder, one bumper foot and the power supply (they didn't include it, even though it was pictured).

So I dug around in my box of cables and found a generic laptop power supply brick that met the requirements (actually provides 10A, not the 7A they started using, so it was actually a bit better than OE).  Plugged it in and powered it up.  Everything moved as expected.

I ordered some basic black PLA and a replacement spool mount.  Once those arrived, I tried to get some things printed via a MicroSD card.

So this printer is VERY sensitive on the type and size of card you use and even after partitioning and formatting the smallest card I had, I couldn't get it to complete a full print.  Annoying. 

Ordered a 2GB MicroSD and while waiting, figured I'd print from a PC via USB cable.  The first cable I grabbed was just a simple charging cable for one of my devices.  It sorted worked!  I could actually get it to print.  A little.  It would stop halfway through.  Replaced the cable with one that has a ferrite bead and communication improved, but connections would still drop.  Lots of discussion around how terrible Windows is at the virtual serial port via USB and watching the logs showed that Windows would cause the issue and the printer isn't terribly bright about recovering from communication issues.

So I grabbed a spare Raspberry Pi 3 I had laying around from another project, tossed an OctoPi image at it.  Plugged it into the printer, configured the web interface and voila!  Prints that actually complete properly!

So now the mods can begin; 

• Printed a mount for the Pi to hang it on the back of the printer.
• Printed a better air flow solution for the hot end.
• Printed a handle to move it around (and cover the exposed extruder). 
• Printed a tablet mount for the front as I have an otherwise useless tablet that I'd like to use with it. 
• Printed improved feet to raise the printer up a little to improve airflow. 
• New belt tensioners to improve accuracy. 
• New locating pieces for the Z-axis.
• New Z-axis coupler. 
• Finally a mount for a RPi camera so I can watch the print remotely since it was located in the garage.

Along the way I printed some stuff for around the house; 

• Some toys for the kids (a cat, beymax and an elephant). 
• A mount for the charge cord on the wife's Pacifica Hybrid. 
• A valve stem cap for the same rig.
• A couple of phone mounts for the cars.

Now I'm working on printing some surprise Easter eggs for the kids, so I picked up a spool of white PLA and some samples of various colors for the toys that go inside.

Also, thanks to some research and troubleshooting, I have the livestream working for the printer!

I'm going to print some ethernet cable management solutions to help when I wire the house for Cat5e and I've printed some wall mounts for my routers.

Looks like you got it running pretty easily. That should be a pretty good machine to learn on until you out grow the small build volume. Welcome to the GRM Printer Farm 

In reply to RacetruckRon :

Yeah, I've already hit a few road blocks with the print volume, but I can expand it slightly at a later date.

I bought four of those last year for my Drafting class.

It's a pretty decent printer, but you're right about the card issue - I have to format the card every so often, and they say you shouldn't save the gcode TO the card, but save to the hard drive and then COPY it to the card.  Nevertheless, it has issues at times.

I wasn't successful and printing directly FROM windows to the printer, so I just use the card.

I have not done, but apparently you can "Mega" the Mini with this:

https://www.instructables.com/id/Under-50-Monoprice-Select-Mini-to-Mega/

Recently used one to make a new window-crank-door-panel-spacer-thingie for SkinnyKid1's '04 Civic.

That's got to be the most productive I've seen a newly aquired 3d printer. Usually they futz about printing doodads for a month and then it goes in the closet. Well done! That's some cool stuff you've made.

Did you get most of the files from thingaverse ?

dculberson said:

That's got to be the most productive I've seen a newly aquired 3d printer. Usually they futz about printing doodads for a month and then it goes in the closet. Well done! That's some cool stuff you've made.

...then half the stuff breaks, and they end up giving it to Goodwill, and then...