Turn your Ender 3 into an Infinite 3D Printer

August 6, 2020

If you have been churning out face masks and other PPE for coronavirus, like us, you’ve likely started to wonder if it’s possible to turn your 3D printer into an infinite 3D printer. Pulling parts off the print bed is tedious, time consuming, and requires being home when each job finishes. In this guide we teach you how to automatically eject parts from the print bed of your Ender 3 so you can start the next print while no one is around!

Disclaimer: Follow this tutorial at your own risk. Your printer is not built to do automatic part ejection. While we’ve discovered a technique that has been fairly reliable for us, it’s possible that if you don’t tweak the GCODE commands to your specifications, you can cause your printer to smash into things and do damage. Don’t blindly copy and paste GCODE commands, make sure you understand what they will cause the printer to do first.

The Spaghetti Detective Integrates with 3D Geeks Mobile App for Better User Experience

July 24, 2020

Kenneth Jiang

The Spaghetti Detective is partnering with 3D Geeks, one of the most popular 3D printing apps, to bring mobile push notifications to our users.

What does it do

When you have 3D Geeks app integration activated, you will receive push notifications on your phone for the same failure alerts and print job notices as the ones you receive in your email. In addition, you will also receive push notifications for print job progress (25%, 50%, and 75%).

How to Get Started 3D Printing

July 11, 2020

Wade Norris

Many people who know very little about 3D printing think the barriers to entry are extremely high, but the truth is that these days it’s extremely cheap and easy to get started. In this article we’ll walk through some of the myths and misconceptions then talk about how you can get started with 3D printing as a beginner.

Myth #1: Technical Expertise Required

Many people think you need to be a programmer or engineer to learn to 3D print, but in reality you only need a few tools and almost no expertise to get started! The biggest skill that is required to 3D print is being able to Google things and follow instructions. With so many people entering this hobby, there is almost always a YouTube step by step guide for anything you want to do. This means you don’t need to be an expert, when you encounter an issue you can just Google it and follow instructions to problem solve.

3D Print Quality Guide

July 9, 2020

Wade Norris

Today we’re here to teach you about 3D print quality and some of the easy ways you can improve surface finish with minimal effort. Above are two 3D prints of the same exact GCODE done back to back on the same printer with the same filament. In this article we’ll discuss what caused surface blobs seen on the left and how you can avoid this in your prints!

Pricing adjustment for the monthly Pro plan

July 6, 2020

Kenneth Jiang

We will be making some pricing adjustments on the monthly Pro plan as of July 8th, 2020.

The monthly Pro plan for the first printer will be adjusted from $5.5 per month to $6 per month.
For each additional printer, the monthly Pro plan will be adjusted from $2.75 per month to $3 per month.
Nothing else changes.

Why these changes?

Give The Detective the Focused Feedback Because It Is More Helpful!

June 27, 2020

Kenneth Jiang

We have made some important changes to how you can help The Detective get better at her job:

We launched a new feature called the "Focused Feedback". As the name implies, you tell The Detective if she got things right in a more "focused" way - snapshot by snapshot, rather than time-lapse by time-lapse.
Every time you finish a Focused Feedback, you will earn 2 Detective Hours!
You can, and should still give feedback at the overall time-lapse level. However, you will no longer earn Detective Hours from doing so. Instead, you are highly encouraged to give the Focused Feedback to earn Detective Hours.
Similarly, you can still upload your own time-lapses to help The Detective learn but you will no longer earn Detective Hours from doing so. Of course you can also give the Focused Feedback on the time-lapses you upload (will be implemented in a couple weeks).

Why did we make these changes?

A Step-by-step Guide to Set Up Port-forwarding for OctoPrint Remote Access

June 22, 2020

Luke's Laboratory

Port-forwarding is a technique that gives you access to your OctoPrint from anywhere on the internet, not just when you are on your home network. This guide will walk you through the process step-by-step to show you how to set it up.

Important note: Port-forwarding may be a potential security risk for your home network. Please avoid it unless you know what risks you are taking by setting up port-forwarding. You may want to check other options for accessing OctoPrint from the internet.

Data Driven Best 3D Printer 2020

June 10, 2020

Wade Norris

Here at The Spaghetti Detective we are in the unique position where we have watched a lot of 3D prints on a wide variety of different 3D printers. A question we get asked frequently is “what is the best 3D printer?” While generally we try to stay agnostic to the type of printer, and catch print failures on any setup, for this series we wanted to try to provide an unbiased, data driven 3D printer review.

By publishing these statistics we hope to give everyone a better insight into the current state of the 3D printing industry and a look at some statistics of the best 3D printers at scale. The statistics generated below are aggregated from a sample size of over 1,000 unique 3D printers, over 100,000 unique print attempts, and over 10,000,000 hours of 3D print monitoring. If there are other metrics you’d like to see computed on some of the best 3D printers let us know in the comments below and we’ll try to include them in future 3D printer reviews.

Best 3D Printer Criteria #1: Popularity

How to clean up a PLA / PETG blob from a failed 3D print

May 21, 2020

Wade Norris

So you went to sleep with your 3D printer running. Excitedly, you wake up and run to go take a look at your beautiful new creation. To your dismay, something has gone horribly wrong. You’ve had a failed 3D print. It didn’t just create a fresh plate of filament spaghetti, but it has fully encased the hot end of your extruder in a PLA / PETG blob.

We’ve been there -- the racing heart, the panic, the fear your 3D printer will never run again. While it is possible you’ve damaged the 3D printer, it’s more likely you can get everything back to normal working order by following these steps. The most important part in 3D print clean up is to stay cool and don’t rush. Damage is more often caused by frustration and impatience when trying to pull off the cold hardened PLA / PETG blob with force than by the print failure itself.

The offer of 2 FREE months is now extended to anyone who prints PPEs

May 18, 2020

Kenneth Jiang

TSD users have been active in helping the world fight COVID-19 by printing crazy amount of PPEs. Their heroic effort is also supported by TSD's offer that gives each of them 2 months of Pro account for FREE!

By popular demands, this offer is now being extended to people without a pre-existing TSD account, as long as you are a member of a group dedicated to printing PPEs.

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