I bought an Elegoo Centauri Carbon late last year and that's been very good so far. Had a minor issue of a sensor disconnecting after a month, but took 10 minutes to fix it (cable had come loose, probably in transit).
It was absurdly cheap for its spec (£260 is what I paid, delivered) and can be run entirely without internet access with no issues. People were a bit miffed when they announced a v2 with multi-filament support, but they just announced an addon to upgrade the first version to a similar spec and it's again really cheap - £55 delivered here in the UK.
If I was printing more professionally I'd probably go for a Prusa, but the cost/benefit isn't there for someone new to it, unless you have plenty of dosh - in which case go for it. As someone getting into it, the price of the Centauri Carbon is so reasonable that it's hard to argue against it.
I bought one a few months back when it was weirdly cheap (£260 delivered!) and it's been really very solid. I've only had a couple of issues:
1. One of the bed temperature sensors reported a fault, this was a loose connection and took about 10 minutes to open and reseat, which was nice
2. I sometimes get an error in Chinese that blocks a print and requires pressing a continue button on the touchscreen. I've tried translating this and I have no idea what it's on about, so if anyone does know what it is then lemme know. Doesn't cause me much trouble though
Overall I'm really pleased with it - it's pretty much a bargain. Mine has never been connected to the internet and very rarely has print failures (and they're nearly all my fault when I have had them). I've ordered the multi-filament addon which they've just announced, and I was pleased to see them offer that as an upgrade for purchasers of the first model.
This’ll likely make me sound like a lunatic, but when I go abroad from the UK, hedgerows are one of the top 3 things I miss (the other two being beer and tea). They’re just so ubiquitous when travelling here, and they make the world feel a bit smaller.
As a wildlife photographer I probably take 75% of my photos of birds in hedges. I don’t have to camp out for hours - I just walk along the hedgerows aimlessly.
Also, if other countries don’t have hedges, what happens to the grotty pornography magazines that dwell natively in the hedgerows? Are they in some sort of meta-state of quasi-existence? A theoretical hedgerow porn mag?
One of my earliest memories was on a road trip to the Devon with my parents. The family got out of the car and went up to a hedge to try and pet a cow, and there were porno magazines propped up along the hedge as far as the eye could see.
> Also, if other countries don’t have hedges, what happens to the grotty pornography magazines that dwell natively in the hedgerows? Are they in some sort of meta-state of quasi-existence? A theoretical hedgerow porn mag?
In other countries porn mags tend to nest in the woods. In japan i understand the endemic porn mags generally live under bridges, more rarely in small bushes.
I live in Australia, which doesn't have hedgerows but does have large areas of native forest, normally called the bush. The bush (at least used to) contain unusually large amounts of pornographic magazines
I've had a lot of success with z-wave devices in my home, hooked into Home Assistant. They seem more resilient than zigbee (and much more reliable than any of the bespoke wifi stuff) and are largely all interoperable. I've got a bunch of z-wave devices like plugs and thermostats, but it comes at a high cost.
For lights I do use zigbee ones just because they're cheaper, but my Hue and IKEA mix do have communication issues sometimes (I have them both on a Deconz stick attached to my server).
But all of this relies on Home Assistant. I honestly can't imagine trying to use smart home devices as a "normal" consumer, relying on the software of specific companies. They're all largely terrible walled gardens, and I'm constantly surprised by how bad they actually are.
Comparable here, using mostly Zigbee (Hue, IKEA, Xiaomi and others) with Deconz RaspBee, which works great, although I do see communication issues from time to time. I have Zigbee lights and door/temp/motion sensors. I added Shelly modules behind my 'normal looking' wall switches on a local MQTT. This all comes together in a local NodeRED (on a Pi that also contains the RaspBee and runs the Deconz software and MQTT server). I use a few plugins heavily for input / output (MQTT, Deconz, etc), but I've got quite a few (reusable) function nodes as well with my own code.
Like you said, I can't see a 'normal' consumer do something comparable, locally without a technical background. It's all too fragmented, closed, clouded.
It'd be interesting to see. At the moment Europe is largely dominated by the US tech industry (bar a few notable exceptions, like Spotify). One of them leaving would open a nice big gap for new/existing EU alternatives to compete in.
This website doesn't even run smoothly on my overpowered gaming desktop. Back in 2000 I'd have never thought we'd be at the point where I can run games in 4K happily but not scroll through a website without it lagging up.
I have two Topre keyboards. I love my RealForce whole-heartedly, but my HHKB is nowhere near the same typing quality. The HHKB is still nice, but I only use it as a portable alternative (I have a bluetooth model). The RealForce feels easy, fluid, and solid, somehow.
I have the RealForce R2 with variably-weighted switches and it is such a pleasant experience to type on that I don't even bother looking at other keyboards any more - there's nothing else I want from a board.
I've had this idea knocking about for a while so it's really nice to see that I wasn't the only one who thought it might work. This looks like a nice implementation - I'm excited to give it a go!
It was absurdly cheap for its spec (£260 is what I paid, delivered) and can be run entirely without internet access with no issues. People were a bit miffed when they announced a v2 with multi-filament support, but they just announced an addon to upgrade the first version to a similar spec and it's again really cheap - £55 delivered here in the UK.
If I was printing more professionally I'd probably go for a Prusa, but the cost/benefit isn't there for someone new to it, unless you have plenty of dosh - in which case go for it. As someone getting into it, the price of the Centauri Carbon is so reasonable that it's hard to argue against it.