Hey, it's Joel we're here at the East Coast RepRap festival with a very familiar face
Jo and his team have released the Prusa MINI,
a small compact little machine that's gonna blow you away with a feature set.
Let's talk about it.
Find out more about it right here on 3D Printing Nerd.
- Okay, good Morning Jo - Good morning
- It's good to see you. Happy ERRF - Good to see you, too. Thanks for coming
Oh, I couldn't miss this. I mean you had a big box showing on Twitter and under it was this
tiny new offering. Can we talk about it?
Yes, of course we can but I mean it was a "big" announcement, right?
I think it was pretty obvious. Some people got it.
I thought maybe it was a bigger SL1.
Some people said maybe it was me under that box.
But I mean what was under it is the new Prusa MINI
competitively priced
- Awesome farm machine. - I'm not sure you'd fit under that box
Really, really?
I mean I'm a big guy too, and I tried to fit in it and I didn't.
Of course, of course you did.
Let's talk about the machine though. This is pretty incredible.
And your team's worked hard for almost a year on this right?
Yes, it's many months of work
To condense everything we do into a much smaller package
and to be able to provide it at the price we are providing it.
Which is $349
So at that price someone could acquire a MK3S, or they can get two of these new Prusa MINIs, right?
Yes, that is the point. I mean the printers
They are ticking boxes for a lot of use cases
So at this price
And with our quality it is a perfect starter printer
or if you have a MK3 and you are
putting out orders for their customers and you want to test out something before?
Or if you want to add the capacity to your farm
it is a perfect secondary printer or if you want to start a small business
and you are not doing giant prints.
This is also very efficient because again,
You have twice the output for the same price.
And I think it is also perfect for classrooms and many other use cases.
Well let's dive deep because I love this.
The idea of your customer base who this is for
and I think they're going to be interested to know some of the details.
So if we start this is now a Bowden setup, correct?
Yes I mean if you want to make a printer cheaper you are
looking at the parts you can remove. The same was with the MK3 and it turned out to be successful.
So when we set the goal for the print size.
We look at the printer and ask our selves what we can remove and still make a great product
So basically we remove the frame
and the x-axis is supported from one side.
But at this size it is more than okay.
And well the worry is that a cantilever design you could get droop in the x-axis
But you haven't found that to be the case.
No, we haven't because the axis is supported by
the aluminium extrusion and two 10 millimeter rods.
And also, that is why we have such a small extruder and we consolidated parts together.
So basically the extruder heatsink is part of the X carriage.
Yeah, I saw that. I mean the heatsink is giant and there's a fan on the side
but the filament path goes right through that heatsink.
Exactly and also, I mean if we would have to do the direct extruder
it would be quite difficult to fit in the gearing because we have two point six six six or
for ease, we say three two one gearing ratio.
Which also enables us to have a larger drive pulley diameter.
So there is some more contact with the filament and
yeah, and with such a short Bowden
It's it's not that big of a deal because we have the new technologies.
From the Marlin and from ourselves like linear advance and some other features in the firmware.
Which mitigates any any problems with the Bowden.
So I did read about this in the article you posted and one of the cool things is this
this new screen and it's running on a Board, that's 32-bit?
Yes. So this is our first printer which we have running on 32-bit.
We chose STM because ST has offices in Prague.
And they are actually doing the ARM
for STM32 support from those offices.
And we found out they have many of our printers and they are excited to work with us.
But we also use new Trinamic 2209 drivers which are the latest and greatest
- Oh, so the movements are silent on this. - Yes. I mean, it's the best best of the 2130s
and 2208.
And yeah, I think Trinamic is thinking more about 3D printers
So you can see that these drivers are very well suited for this use case
And also we have the color LCD
It's gorgeous.
Yeah, but it's not full HD
It's 320 by 240.
But basically you use it mostly for monitoring of the print.
Not viewing your family photos, right?
Well, I mean also you you talk about one click print so someone with a sliced file can insert it into the USB
- And then on the screen they just hit the button once? - Yes
I mean basically you can do that on MK3 too if you plug in the SD card
But we are using USB flash drives now, which I would say is much more convenient
It's not as fragile as the SD card. So I'm very excited about that
You can update the firmware through that but also
we forgot to mention that that the board has
standard Ethernet, which is very important if you want to put it on the farm
once we release the farm planning software.
Next year, it will be supported from this.
So you will be able to like send prints to the printers and monitor them remotely.
- So that'll be pretty cool. - That'll be really cool.
And you mentioned Ethernet and we can do wireless
I read via a separate chip, correct?
Yeah, so we will we will support ESP
- Wi-Fi chips - Oh, that's right. The ESP8266 we talked about
With the 32-bit board, though
and you talked about Marlin 2.0, is this running Marlin 2.0?
So right now there is a part of Marlin 2.0, which is just handling the movements.
But there is a real-time operating system
so Marlin is one thread, user interface is one thread
and networking is another thread.
- Ok - So this is much tighter integrated than what do you see on the Chinese printers
Because when they have
touchscreen interface it's basically
They have two separate systems and they talk
- To each other through serial - Mm-hmm
So it's basically emulating old Pronterface so you can't do much stuff
like I mean we can do self-test and you can see everything on the screen as it happens and
The real-time data can be shown on the LCD. So that is very nice
That's very nice this whole package. This whole offering is nice. Is this gonna be available soon?
We are starting shipping in late November
But you have to be fast because in first 24 hours, we sold more than a thousand.
Wow.
So it will probably get ... Not everything will be shipped in November from these first few days.
But we're still within the realm of the people pre-ordering now, they could get it before Christmas
We hope so.
One of the things though.
This is interesting because you did release a smaller machine
and you know people on the internet are never satisfied.
You know that there was a call for wait a minute a big box should have had a big machine
So
We've talked about that too. So basically we have big core XY in the works
- Around 40 by 40 by 40 centimeters. - Wow, that that's kind of that's a that's a big platform
I mean everybody wanted big right? You want big?
I would I would love a large Prusa printer core XY I think that'd be great.
Should we make bigger for you?
I wouldn't refuse it
If you can make me a 50 cm - 50 50 50, I'll show that to my audience
Okay, and the price point will be I think a between 1200-1500 something like that.
Really? That's a great price point for an entry-level machine. That's larger.
I would imagine.
I mean it won't be be entry-level.
No?
It will be feature packed as ever.
Okay. Do you have a timeframe on that?
Yeah, you will have the sheets and everything like you have on the MK3, some additions.
But yeah, we almost forget to talk that this MINI has the same
heat bed and sheet system as the bigger brother MK3.
Oh right, the sheets are removable and flexible
So you have the sheets which can stand high temperatures,
magnets which can stand a lot of high temperatures
They will know to go weak over time
Well, that's gonna... I feel like that's a standard feature of Prusa machines
The heated bed with the good magnets and the sheets
But I think this is
a first printer for a lot of users who are not familiar with our printers
So it deserves to be pointed out because some of the
What I see from some of the other vendors
where they really want to have like magnetic beds
They just use like the fridge magnet stuff, which just doesn't work.
- No, it doesn't last - And doesn't last
Right
So this is like what we use for production on our farm same system.
That's perfect. And honestly I tweeted about this machine
and a lot of people replied with this is finally what I want in a 3D printer
I want the ease of use. I want the quality and I want that price tag.
Yes, so we've had a lot of people who really wanted to join
the Prusa community, but they just couldn't justify
the $750 for the MK3, so that is I think
Making a lot of people happy.
I think so and this is great
I'm really proud of your your team and what you guys have done, and this is amazing Joe. Thank you so much.
Thank you
Have a good rest of ERRF
- Same to you - Thank you
Big thanks for everybody.
That watched it this far because if you did you are awesome a big thanks to Joe for giving us a little time.
Thanks, Joe.
- You are awesome - Oh thanks Joe. Love you, too.
Don't forget to hug each other more. Love you all as always.
High-five