2012 Slicer vs 2022 Slicer! 3D Print test

Now we need an episode on if a 10 year old printer can handle gcode from a modern slicer :)

I honestly had no idea how spoiled I was unboxing a 200€ pre-built printer and producing great parts out of the box with conveniant slicer software. This video is also a fantastic resource on 3D printig history. Great job!

A man of culture - has a AoE2 shortcut on the desktop.

When I worked as an FAE, I advised customers to make an image of the drive they used to build their software and ensure it worked in a virtual machine. As you showed, having to work on something from 10 years ago benefits a lot from foresight :)

10:00 "top/bottom concentric" Concentric can give really nice top surface finishes on shallow curves, or flat surfaces. Since top and bottom are essentially 100% infill concentric is the same as dialing your walls up to infinite, which is pretty commonly accepted to be the strongest method of making solid prints, so structurally it is sound too.

Watching this process sparked some memories of my first printer in early 2016. It was a plywood kit. No heated bed, no part cooling. No display - I had to stream Gcode via Repetier Host. It wasn't until later I added a display (with SD card - gamechanger!), my own design for part cooling, and community designs for belt driven X/Y (to replace the fishing line drive) and lead screws for Z (to replace the threaded rod) that I really started to get decent prints. Oof. I'm so glad I have my Prusa with a Pi 3 running OctoPrint now.

The Internet Rule of 2016 - Things that are useful wont exist on the internet forever, and things that hurt you will never be taken off the internet unless you have enough power to do it yourself.

I started with Skeinforge. I was soooooo happy when the original Slic3r came out! It was like moving from the stone age straight into the modern age (maybe this is an exaggeration.)

Concentric infill is still useful today. Some models with thin lobes will have very short straight line infills that is a lot of jumping around. You can then use concentric to make smooth movements around.

You are a young guy but for most of us you are a 3d-printing grandpa. "When I started printing I did it up-hill, both ways! In the snow because it smelled so bad my mom wouldn't let me print inside!"

You're taking me back to my start of 3D printing, which was also ten years ago. I remember when Repetier Host was the new thing! Oh Mendel 2, you will be missed. Later on when I moved to Cura for slicing after being away from printing for about a year, I was amazed at the new pathfinding! It felt like an entirely new printer.

It's odd how visually similar some of the interfaces of that old slicer software is to Amiga software I used in the early 90s. That style actually appeals to me. Buttons - with text! No need to remember which function is activated by a small, random color smear of one of a hundred on-screen icons (07:55 in the video shows what I mean)

I love how we can see how slicers have gotten better over time, and how the ease of 3d print has gotten!

I love this. Great to see how far the tech has come and the steps of improvement we took to get here. Thank you for your time.

This was fascinating to watch. I only got into 3D printing in June 2020, so by then slicers and 3D printers were pretty much sorted. Amazing to see how far the hobby has come in 10 years!

This was very fascinating! I really liked learning about early 3D printing. Imagine how far 3D printing will come in another 10 years!

I just got back into 3d printing. I played around with it for a couple of years about 7 years ago and man oh man have things changed. I used Slic3r on a Geeetech i3 POS that failed more than it got right. But now on an Ender 3 S1 Pro using the latest Cura, bridging is a breeze and support just snaps off. And now that retraction and z hop work so well, I can print things that the old printer just couldn't handle. Thanks for the flashback, Angus. This hobby is soooo much more practical now than it used to be.

I love using a concentric bottom layer for filaments that have trouble with unsticking. Instead of anchoring to the perimeters (like rectilinear), it continues adding loops; it seems it better manages the thermal contraction, but you'll have to give it a test for yourself to confirm.

@24:50 Careful application of a scalpel is the best solution that I have found for supports...

I've been wondering this for ages now!!! I've got that same make magazine issue, and I've wanted a comparison between modern printer with old slicer vs a MakerBot cupcake printing with modern PrusaSlicer. It'd take some searching to find a still working unit, but I'd be really curious to see the results! (If this gets covered in the video, I apologize for not waiting to comment, haha)