3D printers · Prusa
Owners keep an i3-style bed slinger around for years of practical printing: household fixes, toys, replacement parts, and steady output at modest speeds rather than the fastest results.
The longest-tenured accounts describe an i3-style printer still producing good prints close to a decade after purchase, used regularly for parts around the house, toys, and replacements for broken items. Both accounts on this theme were positive, though there are only two of them.
Owners who moved their printer to Klipper on a Raspberry Pi 3 hit random MCU disconnects that stopped prints mid-job with no recovery, and swapping USB and power cables did not fix it. Both accounts on this theme were negative, and both ended with a return to Marlin.
Pick up to three. You get a page with just those, side by side, on the subjects owners raised.
Once the novelty passes, the printer becomes a household tool. Owners describe printing tools, toys, decorations, car parts, and replacements for things that break, over many years. One owner running a custom Marlin build says it has always worked without fuss, at the cost of keeping speeds around 60mm/s. Slower speeds are also why one owner says bed slingers like this suffer less from vertical fine artifacts than faster CoreXY machines.
The adjustments are mostly around the software side. Slicing large, detailed models can take a couple of minutes even on a fast desktop, and much longer on a Pi, though an older office CPU was still found acceptable. Owners who chased Klipper's precision found the trade in stability not worth it on a Pi 3 and went back to Marlin.
What keeps working is the core machine on stock or custom Marlin firmware: two owners report regular use for close to ten years and more, still printing well. What broke, in the accounts here, was not the hardware but a Klipper setup on a Raspberry Pi 3, which produced repeated failed prints from MCU shutdowns with no repeatable trigger. The fix owners settled on was compiling Marlin and reinstalling it.
The long-term accounts are thin. No theme on this page drew more than two owners, and the accounts we have come from owners of i3-style bed slingers generally, including an Anycubic i3 Mega and Ender 3 machines, rather than from a large set of Prusa i3 owners specifically. Treat this page as early notes, not a verdict.
Nothing with a clear majority yet. Owners who raised these subjects were split, or too few to judge.
Nothing has a clear majority against it yet. Counted from the owners who raised each subject, not from everyone. A subject is judged once at least 4 owners raise it.
The same owner, asked again at each point. Fills in as owners answer.
More in 3d printers: Anycubic Kobra 3, Creality Ender 3, Creality Hi.
Public discussions we read and summarised in our own words. Nothing here was submitted to Still Kicks.
Counted from public accounts by people who said they own it, and summarised by Still Kicks in its own words. Not a manufacturer claim, a lab test or an estimate.
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