Send me an email and we can talk if your interested in just running the same setup. I have gt2560 rev a in stock. Online store is georges3dprinters.com 45 yeah I know the store needs work, soon… Can email me at george@georges3dprinters.com if your interested in buying and have some technical support to go with it.
Impressed with that too. Also been watching to see if/when their “MK42” board becomes cloned and available at cheaper prices. Prusa Research never seem to have it in stock by itself yet due to such a demand for the whole printer.
Interesting how their open source views are becoming more “fenced in” to help sell their printers. I’d love to buy the new addons such as the new bed and the multicolour setup as separate items and add them to my own setup, but it seems for now you need to buy into the whole “Original i3” system to benefit from all of Josef’s cool upgrades and developments with the least amount of headaches and cost.
It’s funny how that works, isn’t it? The moment a company realises they’re onto a good thing their morals shift slightly. While you’re a small company being able to open source market and even sell replicas of other open source stuff is a nice, easy and legally simple way to make some dough, then once you’ve got a good thing going you get cagey!
I am glad they still consider themselves open source though, even if they don’t publish their schematics and coding, all it needs is some mid-level genius from China to buy a product, reverse engineer it and start making cheap clones.
I completely agree, I’d like to get my hands on that bed, looks pretty decent! And the multi extruder I’d like to use for different materials more than colour. Though it should be noted you can’t easily print things with notably different temperature requirements as it means some serious temp changing during a print. Would still be fun to toy with, except for the price!
Buying a cheaper knock off hurts the open source movement. Prusa went through the work to come up with a good working product. If no one supports their work by buying it from them they will not have funds to research new designs.
Of course, the same is true for all markets. The first of a product will be more expensive because there been more R&D and work to finesse it. Later models just copy, change some stuff and sell it cheaper. That’s the way it’s been for a long time, everyone knows that.
It doesn’t hurt the open source movement though, that’s just about making ideas free and available to all. What it hurts is the innovative creators. In this way open source itself can hurt the innovators as there aren’t patent rules to protect them long enough to recuperate some money.
I have to eat my words, the Melzi board in my tronxy had a meltdown. The ground connector for the power coming into the board melted down yesterday on me rendering the board currently useless. Only had the printer up and running for 4 days!
