We are going to attempt to do here is decide what we think qualifies as a power-efficient NAS. I just want you to be able to figure out whether or not you’re already doing a good job, and whether or not it is worth spending time and effort to make your homelab setup more power efficient.
I have been using a Tasmota smart plug to measure my CWWK N100 mini PC homelab server and its Western Digital 14 TB USB hard disk in various configurations: idle, maxed out, maxed out but with various CPU frequency restrictions, with the hard disk on the meter, and just the hard disk by itself. I have been running tests in each of these configurations over 24 hours periods to get a nice, long, smooth average.
The result that surprised me was the USB hard disk. We are always telling people to assume that each hard disk will use somewhere between 6 and 8 watts, and to make sure you have about 10 watts of power-supply capacity for each disk.
My meter read 0.157 kWh while measuring the 14 terabyte hard disk for five consecutive 24-hour periods. It isn’t surprising that this works out to an average of 6.8 watts, but it did surprise me that it is hitting the exact same target over and over again!
Let’s just call that 7 watts for today’s purposes. It is fun that this is pretty close to a 60-watt equivalent LED light bulb!
This made the gears in my head start spinning. If we are going to think about how efficient our storage servers are, why not think about it in relation to the power consumption of the disks?
My N100 mini PC averages 14 watts, so my NAS’s compute uses the same amount of juice as a pair of 3.5” hard disks. I only have one hard drive plugged in, so that means my NAS requires three hard drives’ worth of electricity to provide one hard drive of storage.
In absolute terms, I think I am doing pretty well!
I don’t want to dox anyone, but a friend of ours on the Butter, What?! Discord server has a server with four 3.5” disks and a few NVMe drives built around a Ryzen 5600G. He tells us his average is a little over 50 watts. Those four hard disks are probably using 28 watts. That leaves 27 watts for everything else.
I think our friend is doing just fine there. His server is using around four disks’ worth of power for the compute, and his compute-to-disk power ratio is leaning in a better direction than my own.
Matt Gadient got his home server down to 7 watts at idle with all the disks asleep. Matt put in a ton of hard work. He tried multiple SATA chipsets. He even disabled the keyboard. I think this qualifies as extremely efficient, because his compute is only using the equivalent power of a single mechanical hard disk.
My CWWK N100 mini PC server uses twice as much power, but I measured my server with five virtual machines booted up. I did check the power draw right after Proxmox was installed, and it bounced between 6 and 7 watts, so I could potentially reach Matt’s level here, but my server’s job is to run a handful of virtual machines, so I can’t just shut those machines down!
A normal day vs. constant 100% CPU utilization
I believe that seeing my compute draw only as much power as two mechanical disks still counts as efficient. Especially since I have five important virtual machines either doing basic work or waiting to do important work!
We can also see that Brian Moses’s 2023 DIY NAS build seems to be in the same range as our friend’s Ryzen 5600G server, averaging around three disks’ worth of power for its compute.
In my opinion, if you are at or below two or three disks’ worth of power consumption on average for your compute, then I think you are doing a good job!
I am using the word compute to mean everything but the mechanical disks. This isn’t exactly accurate.
There are a lot of things in your server that use electricity besides the CPU and the disks. Every chip on the motherboard is going to be using some power. The faster or older your network ports are, the more juice they are going to use. It isn’t uncommon to find slightly older 10-gigabit Ethernet cards that eat 10 or 20 watts on their own!
Not all of these things would technically qualify as compute, but when we are specifically talking about storage servers, it feels reasonable to overload the term a bit. There’s the disks, and then there’s everything else.
I have had a Raspberry Pi 4 and a 14 terabyte USB hard disk running over at Brian Moses’s house for just over three years now. I don’t have a power meter on it, but all my recent measurements have had me curious, so I plugged my comparable Pi-KVM hardware into a smart plug, and I took some readings.
I did not let this Raspberry Pi 4 run for 24 hours, so my data here isn’t as accurate as it is for my CWWK N100 mini PC. My meter was spending most of its time reading 3 watts with occasional bounces up to 4 watts. This agrees with the 3.5 watts at idle that I kept seeing pop up for the Pi on the Internet, and I don’t need a ton of accuracy to say the the Pi uses roughly half as much juice as a single 3.5” hard disk.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there is some Raspberry Pi Zero competitor that can do a bit better. Even so, I think it is reasonable enough to say that this is just about as efficient as we are likely to get.
My new homelab server is an Intel Celeron N100 mini PC. This replaced an old AMD FX-8350 build. The bulk storage for both servers is the same exact USB hard disk—I just moved it from one machine to the other when I migrated the NAS virtual machine to the new Proxmox hardware.
My new setup uses 0.5 kWh each day, while the old setup used 1.9 kWh each day. Where I live, that 1.4 kWh difference in electricity between the two servers every day should add up to around $60 per year in savings. It is going to take four or five years before my new server pays for itself by reducing my electric bill.
The N100 and FX-8350 processors don’t have identical performance, but they’re a fairly close match in so many ways. I have been crunching these numbers for years, and this is the first time that a mini PC was available with both comparable performance to my old homelab box and that could pay for itself in less than a decade.
The best home server is almost always the one that you already own. You will have to do the math to know for sure!
How you want to use this information to determine whether you are doing a good job is up to you. You know that my NAS has a single 14-tb hard disk and averages 20 watts. Would you say that I am at 20 watts per drive? Maybe you would say that I am at 1.5 watts per terabyte!
The important thing for me is that my combined NAS and homelab server uses about as much power as a big LED light bulb, it has more CPU and RAM that I currently need, and it has enough storage to meet my needs for the next three or four years.
How is your storage server doing? Are you on the small side like I am? Do you have a giant 15-disk RAID 6 in a rack? Or are you somewhere in between? Did reading this make you feel better or worse about your power consumption? Tell me about it in the comments, or stop by the Butter, What?! Discord server to chat with me about it!
]]>The T300 is obviously designed to make you think it is every bit as amazing as the Bambu A1 or A1 Mini. It isn’t even close. Almost all of the magic that makes the A1 an amazing printer is in the toolhead: fully automatic strain-sensor bed leveling, automatic filament flow control, air-printing and tangle detection, and 30-second nozzle swaps.
Much of the rest of what makes Bambu’s printers so awesome is their attention to detail in your printing workflow. They have meticulously tuned slicing profiles. Bambu printers will give you fast, beautiful prints out of the box with zero effort. We haven’t seen anything remotely close from Sovol yet.
The linear rails are a nice upgrade, and they sure do make the Comgrow T300 superficially resemble a Bambu A1, but those rails aren’t the upgrade that made the Bambu A1 so awesome.
The T300 is using an induction bed-leveling probe. Don’t get me wrong. These work great. They were the most exciting thing that the Prusa MK2 brought to the table in 2016. The trouble is that they require you to be knowledgeable, and they require manual tuning from time to time.
I paid for the whole build plate, so I am using the whole build plate!
I haven’t used my Sovol SV06 much since my Bambu A1 Mini arrived in December. I needed to use it last week, because I had to print something that wouldn’t fit on my A1 Mini. I had adhesion issues on the SV06 because my z-offset wasn’t quite right. I wasted about 15 minutes canceling the print, cleaning the build plate, and dialing in the z-offset.
All the Bambu printers detect the height of the print surface by physically touching it with the tip of the nozzle. It doesn’t matter if the weather changes, the bed expands due to heat, or if you swap in a thicker or thinner PEI sheet. A Bambu printer will give you a perfect first layer almost every time with zero effort on your part.
If you are new, this saves a ton of time and frustration. If you already have years of 3D-printing experience, then this just becomes one less thing to ever have to think about.
You shouldn’t be looking at the Comgrow Sovol T300. You should be shopping for a Bambu A1 or A1 Mini.
Alright. I’ve said enough bad things about the Comgrow T300. Lets talk about the good things.
It takes my Sovol SV06 two and a half minutes to go from clicking the upload and print
button to actually starting to print my part. My Bambu A1 Mini takes almost six minutes to do the same thing. My tuned-up super-fast Sovol SV06 can give my Bambu a run for its money, so the Sovol can win these races when I am printing single small parts with this three-minute head start.
If the Sovol Comgrow T300 can heat the bed in 30 seconds, that would be a fantastic upgrade in certain situations! This makes no difference when you are printing a 48-hour Mandalorian helmet, but I sometimes spend a lot of time prototyping.
I might print a small part, see if the curves and dimensions match up correctly with something in the real world, make a few tweaks to the model, then hit print again. I might have to do this a dozen times.
Shaving four minutes or even two minutes off the print time could be the difference between printing a job taking 40 minutes instead of an hour. That might mean I could start and finish a project before meeting a friend for lunch instead of putting it off until next week.
This is extremely niche. Most of the time I don’t even care that the A1 Mini takes six minutes to start a print. It does a lot of work during those six minutes that the Sovol isn’t capable of doing. The A1 primes and wipes the nozzle, scrapes the nozzle super clean over the silicon brush, performs a vibration compensation process, and loads the color I selected from the AMS Lite.
Some of these things help ensure that my part is going to print successfully.
This is a cool feature of the new Sovol printer, but I would only be excited about it three days each year.
Maybe. We haven’t seen Sovol’s slicer profiles for the new printer. We haven’t seen how fast they actually are in practice, and we haven’t seen the quality of the printed parts. Let’s just assume Sovol has done a reasonably good job here, and that the T300 does what it says on the box.
The speed limit on the A1 and A1 Mini is 300 mm/s with 20,000 mm/s2 acceleration, but none of my OrcaSlicer profiles exceed 10,000 mm/s2 acceleration. You can definitely push this and still get nice prints, but the beauty of the Bambu printers is how well everything works out of the box.
I don’t know what Sovol has chosen for their print speeds, but there isn’t much reason to assume they haven’t pushed things to maybe 350 mm/s or so, and you can bet they are using 12,000 mm/s2 acceleration for infill and travel moves where the A1 is limited to 10,000 mm/s2.
More importantly, the T300 claims to have a hot end capable of melting 30 cubic mm of filament per second. The Bambu A1 Mini defaults to 20 cubic mm per second in the slicer, and my machine tops out at 25 cubic mm per second.
If you upgrade either printer to a 0.6-mm nozzle, you will be amazed at how slowly the tool moves around while maxing out the heat capacity of the hot end.
I am using Marlin’s input shaper on my Sovol SV06. It works great, but Octoprint and the Sovol’s slow serial port have become a bottleneck. I just can’t send g-code as quickly as the printer can move. I can solve this problem with a $100 Klipper screen and then a bunch of tuning, but I would much rather replace the whole thing with a Bambu A1 instead.
I believe the T300’s Klipper hardware has both WiFi and Ethernet. This is good news. You can upload g-code straight to Klipper from your slicer, and you won’t have to shuttle SD cards back and forth like a caveman.
I would expect this to be common moving forward, and that network connectivity will be showing up in cheaper and cheaper printers.
Almost no one should buy the Comgrow T300. You should almost definitely be looking at a printer from Bambu. It isn’t speed, linear rails, or the aesthetics of the machine that make the A1 and A1 Mini awesome printers.
It is the combination of Bambu’s awesome software with their bleeding-edge sensor technology. These are the things that make Bambu printers a joy to operate, and lead to successful prints right out of the gate.
But as I already said earlier, I would consider the Comgrow T300 if I really, really, REALLY needed a bigger printer than the Bambu A1 or Bambu P1S. I am excited to report that I absolutely don’t need a bigger printer. In fact, I rarely need a printer bigger than my Bambu A1 Mini.
If I did, though, I would make sure to wait and see what sort of success other people have with the Comgrow T300 before I place an order. Sovol is only just barely shipping this printer so far!
I want Sovol to succeed. On paper, they sure seem to have almost all the ingredients necessary to almost compete with Bambu here. If they can spend a little engineering time to ship good, fast slicer profiles that just work, they might be in pretty good shape.
But come on, Sovol! You need to ship a printer with strain-sensor bed leveling. That is the biggest difference between your printers and modern printers like the Prusa MK4 or any printer from Bambu Lab. Having that one feature, and having it tuned to work well eliminates half the problems we see posted to r/FixMyPrint!
This is the killer feature separating Bambu, the Prusa MK4, and the Prusa XL from everyone else. After the horribly named Creality Ender 3 V3 SE shipping with its weird strain-sensor setup, I assumed that we would start seeing every the new model of 3D printer ship with attempts at using strain sensors, but I guess that won’t be happening until the next iteration for Sovol.
What do you think? Are you going to buy a Sovol Comgrow T300? Do you need that extra build volume, or would you be better off with a Bambu A1 or A1 Mini? Are you disappointed that the T300 is missing all the most important current-generation features? Let me know in the comments, or stop by the Butter, What?! Discord server to chat with me about it!
]]>My Nexus 7 from 2013 is slow. That isn’t a big deal if I am reading a book, because I just pick it up, turn it on, and continue reading. The trouble is that Librera Reader takes one or two dozen seconds to open a book. Every time I start a new book or have to reboot the Nexus 7 I wind up thinking about ordering a modern tablet, but I never find anything that makes me want to pull the trigger.
I think I lucked out this time. I got annoyed with the Nexus 7, searched Amazon, and happened to see the right combination of price and features in the Alldocube iPlay 50 Mini. I have been using it for about a week, and there isn’t much to complain about, considering the iPlay 50 Mini’s $80 price point.
If you miss your Nexus 7 and you want a faster, newer, updated replacement with the same form factor at a low price, this is probably the tablet for you.
I was going to start listing off all the things that this Alldocube tablet can do well, but I think it might be better to first explain what I use my tablet for and what I expected from it.
I prefer reading ebooks on a tablet. I almost always read in a dim or dark room, and I like to set my reading app’s colors to match the Solarized Dark theme. This works exactly as well as I expected.
I like to consume social media and news on my tablet. Until this week, I was flipping through Reddit, Hacker News, and Mastodon on my phone. It is nice to be doing this on a larger screen again.
Anything that the Alldocube manages to do well beyond these tasks is a bonus for me.
This isn’t a $469 iPad Mini from Apple. This is an $80 tablet from a company nobody has ever heard of in China. It won’t be the nicest tablet. It won’t be the fastest. It won’t be the sturdiest.
My hope was that it would work, have a nice display, and at least be zippy enough to not feel like I am always waiting for the tablet. I feel like the Alldocube tablet I received has surpassed my expectations.
Amazon marks the Alldocube tablet as one that is frequently returned. Is that because people have unrealistic expectations? Or is it because Alldocube has terrible quality control, and they wind up shipping out more than a few tablets that should have never made it out of the factory?
My tablet is a sample size of only one. I don’t know enough to answer these questions.
There just aren’t a lot of nice tablets from any of the big manufacturers in the 7” and 8” range.
Amazon’s 7” and 8” tablets have 1024x600 or 1280x800 displays. We have one of their 7” tablets knocking around the house. It was only $30 one year on Prime Day, and it is a handy screen to keep near my Shapeoko CNC machine, but the ridiculously low pixels per inch makes these horrible for reading books. I tried it. I hated it.
Just about the only other name-brand tablet I came across was the Lenovo M8, but it is another 1280x800 tablet, so I didn’t even consider it. Same problem with the Samsung Galaxy Tab A.
The Alldocube quickly bubbled to the top of my list because of its 1920x1200 screen, the reasonably nice things I was reading about it on the Internet, its form factor, and its $80 price tag.
Would I spend $300 or more on an 8” Pixel Tablet if Google offered me one? I think that is a good question, and I may have said yes before I unboxed the Alldocube tablet.
The Alldocube iPlay 50 Mini is so close to the size of my old Nexus 7. Their weights are within a gram of each other, and the new 8.4” tablet is only a couple of millimeters taller and maybe five millimeters wider than the 7” Nexus 7.
The 1920x1200 works out to around 270 pixels per inch. I feel that is more than sufficient for use as an ebook reader. The viewing angles on the IPS screen are good, I haven’t had to turn the brightness past half-way to the max around the house, and the colors are vibrant and clean.
The tablet has enough battery for somewhere around nine hours of screen time, and it seems to charge in a couple of hours. I ought to verify the charge one of these days!
The Alldocube tablet is most definitely not as fast as my Pixel 6A, especially with regards to the GPU, but I wouldn’t call the iPlay Mini 50 slow. The best way I can quantify this is probably with my first impression.
When hopping between apps and scrolling around in a web browser, I actually wondered if this tablet is almost as fast as my Pixel 6A. I picked up my phone and noticed immediately that the Pixel feels a good bit more responsive. An $80 tablet should be slower than a $300 phone, but I think the fact that it had me wondering says that the tablet isn’t slow.
I am not well versed on which levels of Widevine DRM are required for different resolutions on each streaming service, and I didn’t buy my tablet for watching movies. I still figured I should test it.
A random DRM-checking app I found in the Play store claims my tablet has Widevine L1, but Netflix says I only have Widevine L3 support. Netflix playback is very low bitrate, so there are a lot of blocking artifacts. YouTube is limited to 720p, but it looks fine. Hulu seems low resolution, but Disney+ looks fantastic.
If the problem was that Netflix would only play at standard definition, I wouldn’t have any complaints. Watching a good stream at 480p on an 8” screen wouldn’t look bad. The trouble here is that Netflix is sending a pretty crummy 480p my way.
My understanding is that there is a new version of the iPlay Mini 50 that may have proper Widevine L1 support, and that the faster, nicer, more expensive iPlay Mini 50 Pro supposedly has correct support for Widevine L1.
If perfect video streaming is important to you, you may want to spend a bit more cash!
I was sitting here with my PlayStation 4 DualShock4 controller, wondering how well the Steam Link app would work on my new tablet. I don’t know when I would ever need to use it, but I had to try!
I made the mistake of trying to play Dead Cells. The game looked great, but the latency felt absolutely awful. Dead Cells is an extremely twitchy game with extremely low latency. The extra couple of dozen milliseconds added by the WiFi was bad.
Then I tried Red Dead Redemption 2. The game looked great, and it felt great. Red Dead Redemption 2 is a slower, more deliberate game. It hides the extra latency quite well.
Then I tried connecting my tablet to my phone’s WiFi hotspot to stream the game over T-Mobile and my gigabit FiOS connection! The game looked great, and the latency was higher at around 70 milliseconds. I could feel the latency in RDR2 now, but it would definitely be playable if I were stuck in an airport.
This success encouraged me to install Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, since it was free with Netflix. It ran like garbage. Even if you turn all the sliders to the minimum. The CPU in the Alldocube iPlay Mini 50 is reasonably capable. This GPU is definitely less than stellar.
UPDATE: I noticed when cropping a screenshot that the photo editor chugs quite a bit. I wouldn’t say that it is unresponsive, but the position of the cropped area sure lags behind my finger.
I have played a bit of my favorite game, Into The Breach, and it runs great. Vampire Survivors runs smoothly and plays well with the controller. It should also be a surprise to no one that Gubbins is as smooth as butter.
I am looking at which games I have installed, and most of them are quite simple. Dead Cells seems to play well enough locally, but it felt like the frame rate was dipping sometimes. Dead Cells can’t maintain 60 frames per second on the Nintendo Switch either, but my recollection is that it only gets really bad on the Switch when there are a lot of fire effects on the screen.
I think the bottom line here is that if you are planning to play strategy games like Into the Breach or Wordfued, then the $80 Alldocube tablet will work out just fine. If your goal is to emulate a Nintendo Switch, you’d better shop for something else.
Nothing serious. The single speaker sounds pretty hollow, but it does have a headphone jack!
Speaking of the headphone jack, I noticed at least one Amazon review complaining about Alldocube putting the USB-C charging port on top of the tablet. The headphone jack is hiding in the corner, and it is pointing in the same direction.
I don’t think this is a bug. If you ever need to charge the tablet or use your headphones, neither cable is going to get in your way in either portrait or landscape mode. That seems pretty smart.
The thin screen protector film that ships preinstalled is awful. Your finger won’t glide as smooth, it picks up fingerprints like crazy, and it makes the screen look a bit hazy. It took about three seconds to peel that thing off, and I am glad I did. The glass isn’t as fingerprint resistant as all my Google Pixel phones have been. This tablet stays about as clean as the basic glass on my Nexus 7.
Don’t expect much from Alldocube’s cameras. They would have been mediocre on an Android phone almost ten years ago. There are two cameras. They function. They will get you through a video call.
It looks like a good upgrade. Double the RAM can’t hurt, but I haven’t felt like RAM was an issue on any of my Android phones since my first phone with 2 gigabytes of RAM. The 4 gigabytes in the $80 model is enough to keep quite a lot of apps in RAM, so you won’t be waiting much of anything to fire up from scratch when switching between apps.
The Helio G99 in the Pro model is a newer, faster chip than the T606 chip in my cheaper tablet. How much faster? I have no idea. I didn’t find a reliable source for a benchmark of either one, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the Pro model would play Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas just fine.
When I started writing this blog post, I would have said no. There was no way I would pay $160 for the iPlay Mini 50 Pro. Every day that has gone by, I have used my phone less and my tablet more. Maybe I should have spent more and got something a little faster?
I don’t expect we will ever see any firmware updates for any random tablets from manufacturers in China, and that includes our Alldocube iPlay Mini 50.
I could probably write another 2,000 words about which ways this is both a huge problem but also might not be that big of a deal at all.
This is probably the best reason to buy the $80 tablet instead of the $160 Pro model. If you spend less, you can upgrade your hardware sooner, and you’ll get a free software upgrade at the same time.
I am sure I could find more to tell you about the Alldocube iPlay 50 Mini, but you shouldn’t have to read more than 2,000 words about an $80 tablet, so this seems like a good place to stop and summarize things. It is a fast enough tablet with a nice, high-resolution screen that has exactly the right form factor for me, and it is inexpensive. It felt like a no-brainer before I ordered mine, and that feels even more true now that I have been using it.
It is nice having a small tablet again. It fills the void between my pocket-sized phone and my 14” 2-in-1 laptop really well. I have already had days where my phone hasn’t even left the charger, so it is looking like the Alldocube tablet will be my new loafing-on-the-couch companion device!
I managed to get through migrating all but one virtual machine before I got half-way through writing this. I am procrastinating on that last one, because it will involve plugging my NAS virtual machine’s big storage drive into my mini PC server. There is a little extra work involved in moving the drive and mapping the disk to the correct machine, and I can’t just boot the old machine back up if things go wrong. I figure I should finish my latte before attempting this!
It is probably the correct choice for you, but I had to work hard to get things situated the way I wanted. I have a lot of unique requirements for my build:
lvmcache
the slow USB HDDI have been deleting, recreating, and juggling partitions like a madman. Tearing things down to put a RAID and encryption underneath the Thin LVM pool was easy, and I left behind around 200 GB for setting up lvmcache
down the road while I was doing it.
I was slightly bummed out that the Proxmox installed set aside 96 GB for itself. That is 10% of my little Teamgroup NVMe, but storage is cheap. I got more bummed out when I learned that this is where it was going to store my LXC containers and any qcow2
files I might still want to use.
This was a bummer because I can’t resize the root filesystem live. I wound up biting the bullet, booting a Debian live image, and resizing the root volume. That left me room for some encrypted space for containers and qcow2
files.
This would have been easier if I just installed Debian myself, set up my file systems, RAID, and encryption, then installed Proxmox. If I did that, I would have for sure also mirrored the Proxmox root partition to the USB hard disk as well!
I almost thought I painted myself into a corner that would be difficult to weasel out of on at least two occasions while playing musical chairs with these volumes.
The important thing is that I got things set up how I wanted.
qcow2
virtual machines into ProxmoxI have always had the option of using LVM volumes for my virtual machine disk images. I am not sure if we had thin volumes when I set up my KVM host with my AMD 5350 build in 2015, but I could have used LVM. I chose not to.
LVM has less overhead than qcow2
files, but qcow2
files are extremely convenient. You can copy them around the network with scp
, you can duplicate them locally, and virt-manager
could only snapshot your machines live with qcow2
images and not with LVM-backed disks in 2015. The first two are handy. The last one was important to me!
Pulling those qcow2
files into Proxmox was easy. I would set up a fresh virtual machine with no ISO image mounted and a tiny virtual SCSI disk, and I would immediately delete the disk. I mounted my qcow2
storage on the Proxmox server using sshfs
, and I just had to run commands like this to import a disk:
1
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|
The sshfs
connection had me bottlenecked at around 30 megabytes per second, but I wasn’t in a rush, and I only had 100 gigabytes of disk images to move this way. Mounting a directory using sshfs
took a fraction of the time it would have taken me to set up NFS or Samba on both ends, and I only had 100 gigabytes in disk images to move around.
I just shut down one machine at a time, imported their disks, and fired them up on the Promox host.
A few of my machines have very old versions of Debian installed, and they were renaming the network devices to ens18
instead of ens3
, so they needed their /etc/network/interfaces
files updates. No big deal.
One of the disk images I pulled in has 2 terabytes allocated, was using 400 gigabytes of actual storage on the host, but the file system in the virtual machine was now empty. It took almost no time at all to import that disk, and it is taking up nearly zero space on the thin LVM volume, so I would say that the tooling did a good job!
Proxmox and my old homelab box running virt-manager
are running the same stuff deep under the hood. They are both running my virtual machines using QEMU and KVM on the Linux kernel. So far, I have only encountered two things that I wanted to do that couldn’t be done inside the Proxmox GUI.
The one that surprised me is that Proxmox doesn’t have a simple host-only NAT network interface configured for you by default. This is the sort of thing I have had easily available to me since using VMware Workstation 1.1 more than two decades ago, and everything I have used since has supported this as a simple-to-configure option.
I understand why someone would be much less likely to need this on a server. You’re not going to bring a short stack of interconnected machines to a sales demo on a Proxmox server. You’re going to do that on your laptop.
I have been hiding any server that doesn’t need to be on my LAN behind virt-manager
’s firewalled NAT because I only need to access them via Tailscale. Why expose something to the network when you don’t have to?
I quickly learned that Proxmox’s user interface is reading the actual state of things as configured by Debian. This is different than something like TrueNAS Scale, where the settings in the GUI are usually pushed to the real configuration. I am not a TrueNAS Scale expert. I am just aware that when you manually make changes to a virtual machine outside of Scale’s GUI, those changes can be wiped out later.
This is awesome. I can set up my own NAT-only bridge device, and it will be available and at least partially reflected in the web UI. I haven’t done this yet. I wasn’t patient enough to wait to start migrating!
There was also no way to add a plain block device as a disk for a virtual machine inside the Proxmox GUI. It was easy enough to do with this command:
1
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The qm
tool has been fantastic so far, and much friendlier than anything I ever had to do with virsh
. Once the disk was added by qm
, it immediately showed up as a disk in the Proxmox GUI.
Can you tell that I got impatient and migrated the last of my virtual machines to the new box before I got done writing this?!
I never set up any sort of backup automation for my virt-manager
homelab server. I would just be sure to save an extra copy of my qcow2
disks or take a snapshot right before doing anything major like an apt-get dist-upgrade
.
The server had already been running for seven or eight years before I had any big disks off-site to push any sort of backups to, and the idea never even occurred to me! If any of the virtual machines had important data, it was already being pushed to a location where it would be backed up. The risk of losing a virtual server was never that high. Having to spend an evening loading Debian and Octoprint or something similar on a new server isn’t exactly the end of the world, and would probably even be an excuse for an upgrade.
When I noticed the backup tab in Proxmox, I figured I should give it a try. I fired up ssh
, connected to my off-site Seafile Raspberry Pi at Brian Moses’s house, and I spent a few minutes installing and configuring nfs-kernel-server
. I put the details of the new NFS server into Proxmox, set it up as a location that could accept backups, and immediately hit the backup button on a couple of virtual machines. It only took a few minutes, and I had backed up two of my servers off site.
Then I hit the backup scheduler tab, clicked a very small number of buttons to schedule a monthly backup of all my virtual machines, then hit the button to run the job immediately.
I should mention here that before I hit that button, I put in some effort to make sure that the big storage volume on my NAS virtual machine wouldn’t be a part of the backup. Files are synced from my laptop or desktop up to my Seafile Pi, then my NAS virtual machine syncs a copy down. It would be silly to push that data in a less-usable form BACK to the same disk on the Seafile Pi, and even more importantly, there wouldn’t be enough room!
In the settings for each disk attached to a virtual machine in Proxmox, there is a checkbox labeled backup
. If you uncheck this, that disk will not be included in backup jobs. I was paranoid. I watched my backups like a hawk until I verified that the job wasn’t filling up my remote storage.
I am not sure how long it took, but my 65 gigabytes of in-use virtual disk space compressed down to 35 gigabytes and are currently sitting on an encrypted hard disk at Brian’s house.
I replaced my very old AMD FX-8350 homelab server with a CWWK mini PC with a Celeron N100 processor. The CWWK is an interesting little box. I already wrote a lot of words about why I chose this over several other mini PCs, so I won’t walk about the other choices here.
The neat things for me are the FIVE NVMe slots, the four 2.5 gigabit Ethernet ports, and that power-sipping but quite speedy Celeron N100 CPU. I did some power testing with a smart outlet, and the entire CWWK box with a single NVMe uses 9 watts at idle and never more than 26 watts when running hard. That worked out to 0.21 kWh per day on the low end and a maximum of 0.57 kWh on the high end.
I need to take readings that include the 14 TB USB hard disk, but it is obvious that this is such a huge power savings for me. The FX-8350 server idles at just over 70 watts, uses 1.9 kWh of electricity every single day, and can pull over 250 watts from the wall when the CPU really gets cranking.
It is looking like the new hardware will pay for itself in electricity savings in a little over five years. I would be pretty excited if I knew how to account for the removal of that constant 70 watts of heat the FX-8350 was putting out. We run the air conditioning nine months of the year here, so I imagine the slight reduction in AC use must be reducing that payback time by at least two years, right?
So far, I am only using one of the five m.2 NVMe slots, but I feel like I am prepared for the day when NVMe drives get large enough and inexpensive enough that I can replace my 14 TB mechanical disk with solid-state storage. Flash prices have been increasing a bit lately, though, so it is entirely possible that I have gotten optimistic a little too soon!
My old homelab box had 32 GB of RAM, and my virtual machines were configured to use a little over 17 GB of that. I am usually a little conservative when I assign RAM to a virtual machine, but I was sure I could steal a bit of memory here and there to bring the total under 16 GB so I could get everything migrated over.
After dialing things back, I am only asking for 7.5 GB of RAM, and I am clawing back over 1 GB of extra RAM via kernel same-page merging (KSM). I managed to wind up having more than half the memory free on my new tiny homelab server.
I was bummed out that my CWWK Intel N100 server only has a single DDR5 SO-DIMM slot, and the biggest SO-DIMMs you can buy are 48 GB. I was always expecting to double the available RAM when I upgraded my homelab server. Now I am learning that I may as well save a bit of cash and upgrade using a much cheaper 32 GB SO-DIMM, assuming I even upgrade the memory at all!
It is nice that the meter is there, and it is a handy readout for at least half of the virtual machines on my homelab. It is a terrible meter on my NAS virtual machine, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this would wind up causing a novice to buy more RAM that they don’t need.
My NAS virtual machine isn’t REALLY a proper NAS any longer. It is just a virtual machine with a big disk running a Seafile client. It is the third pillar of my backup strategy. Its workload mostly involves writes now, and it doesn’t need much cache. I only allocated 2 GB of RAM to this machine, and that is more than double what it actually needs.
The Proxmox summary screen is giving my NAS a red bar graph, and says it is at 91.68% memory usage. This makes the red bar graph seem a little scary!
If you ssh
into the NAS, you will see that it is using 327 megabytes of RAM for processes and 1.5 gigabytes for cache. No matter how much RAM I allocate to this VM, it will always fill that RAM up with cache.
If I didn’t know better, I would be doubling the RAM allocation over and over again, hoping to see the red or yellow bar graph turn green.
It is a bummer that the QEMU agent doesn’t report buffers and cache up to the host. If these memory readings on the summary page indicated how much cache was in use, or even subtracted the buffers and cache from the total, this summary would be more useful.
This isn’t a huge problem.
host
As long as you can get away with it, this can be either a substantial or massive boost to your AES performance compared to the default of x86-64-v2-AES
. If you are going to be live migrating virtual machines between processors with different feature sets, this won’t be a good plan for you. If you are migrating and can get away with shutting down the virtual machine before the move, then you can set the processor type to whatever you like.
The first thing I ran was cryptsetup benchmark
. With the processor type set to x86-64-v2-AES
, AES-XTS was reaching about 2,000 megabytes per second. With processor type set to host, I was getting over 2,750 megabytes per second. That is nearly a 40% improvement!
My network relies very heavily on Tailscale. I don’t have a good way to test Tailscale’s raw encryption performance, but I hope and expect I am getting a similar boost there as well. I don’t need Tailscale to push data at two or three gigabytes per second, but I will be excited if Tailscale gets to spend 30% less CPU grunt on encryption.
I noticed a much bigger difference when I was running Geekbench. Single-core Geekbench AES encryption was stuck at 170 megabytes per second with the default processor type, but it opened all the way up to 3,400 megabytes per second when set to host
. That made me wonder if any other software is as severely limited by the v2
instruction set!
It takes time to collect good data. I currently have the CWWK N100 and the Western Digital 14 terabyte drive plugging into a Tasmota smart plug. These two devices spend the whole day bouncing between 19 and 24 watts, and averaging out the relatively small number of samples that arrive in Home Assistant won’t be super accurate.
Tasmota measures way more often than it sends data to Home Assistant over WiFi, and it keeps a running kilowatt hour (kWh) total for every 24-hour period. That means I have to set things up a particular way for a test, wait 24 hours for the results, then set up the next test. That also means I will wind up only being able to test every other day if I want to get a full 24 hours with each setup.
I am testing the CWWK N100 and hard disk running under their usual light load now. I want to test both pieces of hardware under load for 24 hours, then I want to measure each device separately. It will take about a week to collect all the numbers, and that is assuming I don’t miss out on starting too many tests on time.
I think it is time to replace my extremely minimal off-site storage setup at Brian Moses’s house with a Proxmox node. I have had a Raspberry Pi with a 14 terabyte USB hard disk at Brian’s house doing Dropbox-style sync and storage duties for the last three years, and it is currently saving me around $500 every single year on my Dropbox bill.
This seems like a good time to upgrade to an Intel N100 mini PC. I can put a few off-site virtual machines on my Tailnet, take the Pi’s 150-megabit cap off my Tailscale file-transfer speeds, and maybe sell the Raspberry Pi 4 for a profit.
I am also shopping for 2.5 gigabit Ethernet switches for my network cupboard and my home office, but I am also more than a little tempted to attempt to run 10 gigabit Ethernet across the house. This is either a project for farther down the road, or I will just get excited one day and order some gear. We will see what happens.
Somewhere along the line there needs to be some cable management and tidying happening below my network cupboard. Now that all the servers are being replaced with mini PCs, I can eliminate that big rolling cart and replace it with a simple wall-mounted shelf. I may wind up going bananas and designing a shelf that gives me room inside to hide power outlets and cables.
What do you think? Have I made a good sideways upgrade to save myself $60 per year in electricity and maybe almost as much in air conditioning bills? Would an Intel N100 be a good fit for your homelab or other home server uses? Do you think I will manage to make use of all these 2.5 gigabit Ethernet ports and extra NVMe slots? Let me know in the comments, or stop by the Butter, What?! Discord server and chat with me about it!
]]>Now there is a $400 Bambu A1. It has every single feature of the Bambu A1 Mini, except it is bigger. Bigger than the Sovol SV06, but not quite as big as the Sovol SV06 Plus. Bigger than a Prusa MK4. The big Bambu A1 is half the price of a Prusa MK4 kit that you will spend most of the weekend putting together. These new Bambu printers are priced extremely aggressively.
What does this mean for Sovol, Creality, and Prusa Research?
You don’t have to read my essay here that is attempting to justify what I think, and you don’t have to read a story about some cold winter night on a farm. I don’t want to artificially keep you here longer to make Google think you were happy with clicking here.
12-mm tall Benchy printed with stock settings on a Bambu A1 Mini with a 0.2-mm nozzle
I think almost every printer that Bambu makes is priced well, and I think the Bambu A1 and Bambu A1 Mini are worth the extra $100 or so compared to the budget options from Sovol or Creality. Bambu has features that can easily save you $100 in frustration. Bambu’s printers are significantly faster, higher quality, and more reliable than anything else in their price range. Their output is also much higher quality.
If you can justify paying for a Bambu A1 with an AMS Lite, it is time to stop reading. Go make your purchase. If you are considering skipping the AMS Lite, then maybe read on, especially toward the end.
If $299 for the Bambu A1 Mini is stretching your budget thin, then you should definitely read on. There are plenty of good reasons to spend a little more on the Bambu A1 Mini. Some of them will only save you time, but some of them might save you some money.
Buying a budget printer from Sovol or Creality involves rolling some dice. I don’t know the weight of those dice, but I do know some small percentage of people, not exactly an inconsequential number, wind up having a lot of problems with their cheap printers.
If you are buying your first 3D printer, and you have enough wiggle room in your budget, you should buy a printer from Bambu. It doesn’t matter which one. They are all fantastic.
I feel like a broken record when I say this, but it is absolutely worth repeating. The strain-sensor bed leveling used on the Prusa MK4, Prusa XL, and every single Bambu printer is a game changer.
You don’t have to learn how to dial in your printer’s first layer. It does it for you. This is by far the most common problem that you will see posted on /r/FixMyPrint. Bambu printers do this for you. This feature alone is likely to save you a ton of time and frustration.
The Bambu A1 can detect tangled filament, and it will give you the opportunity to untie those knots and resume the print. It can also detect when you run out of filament, and if you are using the AMS, it can continue printing from another spool of filament with zero intervention.
This is all nifty stuff that helps a beginner tremendously. It is also enough to make a veteran rarely turn on his old printers.
When I bought my Sovol SV06, it was such an amazing value! It ticks all the same boxes as the venerable Prusa MK3, but instead of paying $1,111 for a Prusa MK3 or paying $750 for a Prusa MK3 kit and spending a weekend putting it together, you could buy a Sovol SV06 for $260 and be ready to go in 20 minutes.
When you can buy three or four printers for the price of one, it makes it easy to ignore the potential problems with a Sovol SV06. Sovol’s quality control doesn’t seem to be the best, so there was a chance you’d get a dud from the factory, and you would have to wait for Sovol to ship you replacement parts. Not a big deal when you save $500 or more.
Pushing the limits of the Sovol SV06 extruder a few cubic mm/s too hard resulted in a slightly imperfect but very usable Gridfinity bin
Sovol’s printers are made using the lowest quality parts they can get away with. I don’t mean for this to be a condemnation of Sovol. This was just the reality if you wanted to save $500.
If you got a Sovol SV06 that worked out of the box, you were golden. Once you replaced a bad part or two, you would also be doing well, and you’d probably be printing for years without significant trouble.
You were trading some of your effort to avoid paying Prusa Research an extra $500 for a somewhat comparable printer.
So much of what I am writing in this blog is attempting to figure out just what sort of value you are getting for your money. Let’s ignore money for now. Let’s just talk about the two printers I am currently using. For what it is worth, my Prusa MK3S isn’t even plugged in anymore; it is just too slow to bother using!
My Sovol SV06 is bigger and, after a TON of effort, somewhat faster than my Bambu A1 Mini. That effort is definitely a cost. Not technically money, but time is money, so we aren’t going to go into that yet.
UPDATE: I have since acquired the Bambu A1 nozzle assortment, and I am able to push the Bambu A1 Mini’s extruder to 24 or 25 cubic mm/s, while the Sovol SV06 peters out somewhere around 20 cubic mm/s. My Sovol SV06 is no longer my fastest printer!
My Bambu A1 Mini is obviously smaller, and it is marginally slower, but it is also more reliable, more accurate, and prints cleaner. It also has a handy automatic filament changer that we haven’t even mentioned yet.
I have turned on my Sovol SV06 twice since buying the Bambu A1 Mini. The Sovol has become my ABS printer, and I don’t print ABS all that often.
Paying one quarter the price of one of the best 3D printers on the market was awesome, but Bambu changed the rules. Now you can get an amazing, reliable little 3D printer for $299, and you can super-size it for an extra $100.
Bambu isn’t competing with Sovol. Their pricing makes it obvious that they are competing with Prusa Research. The Bambu A1 Mini with the AMS Lite costs as much as a Prusa Mini+, and the Bambu A1 is a bigger printer than the Prusa MK4 at about half the price of Prusa’s kit. The point here is that Bambu matches or beats the specs of Prusa’s printers.
Left: 0.48-mm layers, 0.6-mm nozzle, 22 cubic mm/s Sovol SV06; Center: 0.56-mm layers, 0.8-mm nozzle, 24 cubic mm/s Bambu A1 Mini; Right: Default 0.4-mm nozzle settings Bambu A1 Mini
The Bambu printers don’t line up with anything in Sovol’s or Creality’s lineups. This makes the comparisons more complicated.
The Bambu A1 Mini costs 50% more than a Sovol SV06. That sounds like a lot, but the difference is only $100. For a lot of people, it was worth putting up with a slower, less polished printing experience when the Sovol SV06’s better competition was the $750 Prusa MK3S or the $700 Bambu P1S.
Everything feels different when you only have to pay an extra $100 for a premium experience.
I am so pleased that I bought the Bambu A1 Mini Combo that included the AMS Lite. It almost seems like a gimmick. The AMS lets you spend five or ten times longer printing the same trinkets, except those trinkets can be printed with four different colors.
I didn’t think I would use it that often, but I figured it would be neat to play with once in a while, and I definitely didn’t think I would really get $170’s worth of value out of it. I am beginning to think it will be worth every penny.
I tend to either be lazy, or I am in a hurry. Most of the time, I will just print using whatever filament happens to be loaded. If I have red PLA loaded, but a part would look better in black, I would probably just use red. It takes five or ten minutes of standing around by the printer to change filament on the Prusa MK3S or Sovol SV06. That is a lot of loafing around, for something that is often of such little consequence.
I always have a handful of colors loaded in the AMS Lite. When I send a job to the printer, I can choose which color I want to use. I don’t have to stand around waiting for the printer to heat up to unload filament. I just pick a color, and it loads it for me.
Not only that, but I can swap any of the other three spools while the Bambu A1 Mini is printing. I can just pull the lever, wind up the filament, and take it off the AMS Lite. Zero waiting.
If I save five minutes every time I need to swap filament, and I would have swapped filament once a week, then that adds up to four hours a year that I am not loafing around waiting for the printer. That alone is awesome!
I have yet to use the AMS Lite for a truly fancy multicolor print, but I have already used it a handful of times to add labels to Gridfinity bins. Changing filament for a handful of layers like that doesn’t add much time to the print, and it really spiffs things up.
I have also used the AMS Lite to print PETG support-interface layers, and that seems to work extremely well. Those have only been test prints so far, so they haven’t added any real value to my workflow. It will be surprising if I don’t run into a print this year where those stupidly easy-to-remove PETG supports won’t save me a ton of time and frustration.
This is the question that I have been struggling with. If you are in a position where you just can’t spend the extra $100 to buy a Bambu A1 Mini instead of a Sovol SV06, then there is a very good chance that you are in exactly the position where you can’t afford to roll the dice on a printer from Sovol or Creality.
You are maxing out your budget. You are spending every dollar you feel comfortable spending. You absolutely need your printer to work, and it needs to work well.
I replied to a post in r/Sovol this week to try to help someone out with a problem printing silk PLA on their Sovol SV07. They were frustrated. They have been frustrated. They are still frustrated. We were asking for any sort of information that might help us help them out, but they just wouldn’t offer us any useful information. All they would do is gripe, swear, and complain.
I understand. They are at their wit’s end. They spent $300 on what was, at the time, one of the cheapest printers that could print a 20-minute Benchy out of the box.
If the Bambu A1 Mini had been available at the time, they could be printing 18-minute Benchies on a reliable printer.
For everyone fighting their Sovol, there are dozens or maybe hundreds of people just enjoying their Sovol printers. Maybe you will save $100 and be happily printing. Maybe you won’t.
I have disagreed with that statement for a long time. I used to very much enjoy driving a little car with way too much turbocharger, so I know there are replacements for displacement, but I couldn’t help myself. I had to use that heading.
If Bambu’s 256x256x256 build volume isn’t big enough for you, it just doesn’t matter how much it costs. When you need a bigger printer, you just need a bigger printer. The Sovol SV06 Plus has a build volume of 300x300x300, and it costs $150 less than a Bambu A1.
You know the caveats of the Sovol SV06 Plus by now, but if you just can’t print a helmet that fits your big ol’ noggin with a Bambu, then maybe you just need to print that helmet more slowly and more carefully on a Sovol.
Size, if you absolutely can’t live without it, is a good reason to buy a Sovol SV06 Plus.
This is a challenging conclusion to write because I don’t feel like I have come to an exciting conclusion. In fact, it is sort of disappointing. I don’t think anyone should buy a Sovol SV06, SV06 Plus, or SV07 in 2024. Bambu is bringing way too much to the table at a really nice price point now. Why buy a printer based on seven-year-old technology when you can spend just a little more and get a reliable, cutting-edge printer?
I hope Sovol and Creality find a way to compete. They need good, working strain-sensor bed leveling with perfect first layers. They need built-in WiFi connectivity. They need to ship a well-tuned slicer that lets you hit the “upload and print” button and not worry about anything. The bummer is that they also need to do it at a low enough price to choose them instead of Bambu, and that is going to be a tall order.
I believe they can do it. I am confident that it is possible to cut just the right corners to keep the prices low, but it will be tough. I wish Sovol the best of luck! I expect 2024 will be an interesting year for 3D printing!
My current homelab server is using the old AMD FX-8350 hardware from my old workstation. It is power hungry, averaging 70 watts of power consumption, or about 2 kWh per day. When it runs full tilt, it can pull well over 250 watts from the wall. I don’t need more horsepower, but I would like my new homelab server to take up less space and hopefully have more than 32 gigabytes of RAM.
This server runs an Octoprint server for my Sovol SV06, a Home Assistant server, a NAS that syncs an extra copy of my data from my off-site Seafile server, the staging and publishing server for our blogs, and a handful of less critical virtual machines.
What kind of mini-pc hardware have I been looking at to replace this old behemoth?
Maybe even more importantly, why do I have a Ryzen 5500U and a Celeron N5095 on my list?!
I feel like the Celeron N100 is right near the sweet spot. On paper, it has that awesome 6-watt TDP. It is noticeably faster than its predecessor, the N5095, and it beats the N5095’s TDP by 4 watts.
The Intel N100 won’t be winning any serious performance competitions, but it packs a ton of performance into an inexpensive and low-power package. I rely quite heavily on Tailscale for connectivity between my servers at different sites, and my N100 box here can very nearly saturate my gigabit Ethernet ports via Tailscale while using around 40% of its CPU capacity, so I expect I will be able to utilize a significant percentage of those 2.5 gigabit Ethernet ports if I ever have to!
This is an extremely interesting piece of hardware. It has extremely direct overlap with two other mini servers on this list with its Intel N100 CPU and pair of 2.5 gigabit Ethernet ports. Where this machine steers in a different direction is the pair of bays for 3.5” SATA hard drives.
If your mini server needs to store a lot of data, that is a compelling feature. You could install a cheap pair of 12-terabyte hard disks and put them in a mirror, or you could skip the redundancy and install a pair of 22-terabyte hard disks to have yourself a dense little 44-terabyte monster.
I got to hold one of these in my hands, and it is really nifty! If you want to build a NAS to back up your important data at a friend’s house, this would be a fantastic option. Especially if your friend lives far enough away that rebuilding after a drive failure would be a challenge.
I have been using a 14-TB USB hard disk attached to a Raspberry Pi for my off-site backup at Brian Moses’s house for around three years now, and the bulk data storage on my home NAS virtual machine has been [a 14-TB USB hard disk][en] for the last year.
I have had enough success with external USB hard disks that I am confident about continuing to do it in the future. Being able to install a pair of beefy hard disks is a neat feature, but it is one that I don’t need at this time.
This particular Beelink mini PC has been at the top of my list the entire time I have been contemplating this. It would be a fantastic choice, and at this point in time, it would have been a better choice for my own homelab.
These go on sale for not much more than $200. They have double the single-core performance and nearly twice as much multi-core performance as my FX-8350, and best of all, you can upgrade them to 64 GB of RAM for around $100.
The only bummer to me is that they are a little older now, so they only ship with gigabit Ethernet, while many newer mini PCs ship with 2.5 gigabit ports. This is also one of their advantages, though, because the DDR4 SO-DIMMs are still a good bit cheaper than newer RAM.
The Beelink with the Ryzen 5500U has been at the top of my list just because it can be upgraded to 64 GB of RAM, and it can be upgraded quite inexpensively. I don’t need to double the RAM in my homelab server, but I would like to, even though I am only running at about 50% capacity today.
The Beelink with the Intel N5095 is delightful. It goes on sale all the time, and it was discounted to $125 while I was writing this, and it ships with 8 GB of RAM and a 256 GB m.2 SSD.
This tiny CPU with a 10-watt TDP still packs a pretty good punch. It has the same single-core performance and 2/3 as much multi-core performance as my old AMD FX-8350, but being such a modern processor, the N5095 can manage to push AES encryption almost twice as fast. For reference here, my 12-year-old FX-8350 build pulls over 200-watts from the wall when it maxes out Tailscale speeds.
Brian’s Beelink N5095 and its USB hard disk vs. my APC 800 and aging FX-8350 homelab server
This Beelink would have been a pretty lateral move, but it would probably save me $60 per year. It would wind up paying for itself in three years even after buying a RAM upgrade, but it wouldn’t be fun or exciting.
My friend Brian Moses has an N5095 Beelink in my server room. It is the NAS he pushes his off-site backups to.
The Intel N100 family of processors is quite interesting. It can be wired up to use either DDR4 or DDR5 RAM, and you can get a Beelink box with an N100 in both flavors!
The DDR4 version costs less and is limited to gigabit Ethernet. The DDR5 model has two 2.5 gigabit Ethernet ports. DDR4 SO-DIMMs are still a good bit cheaper than DDR5, but DDR4 sticks are only available up to 32 GB, while 48 GB DDR5 SO-DIMMs are available. I don’t believe we have yet verified that any of these N100 mini PCs can actually use a 48 GB SO-DIMM, but finding out for sure is on my list of things to try!
The Celeron N100 is roughly 50% faster than the N5095. When the DDR4 N100 Beelink goes on sale, it is priced competitively in relation to the performance of the N5095 Beelink, and if you have a use for 2.5 gigabit Ethernet, paying a bit more for that is a good value.
Especially when you compare the prices when they go on sale, and they go on sale all the time!
I put all of these into a horrible spreadsheet a while back. It is very wide, and you definitely don’t want to see it. The N5095, N100, and 5500U Beelink boxes, along with a few others, all work out to nearly the same value when doing the math. When you compare dollars for benchmark scores or dollars per gigabyte of RAM, they are all nearly identical when you upgrade the RAM to the maximum. The N100 with DDR5 and 2.5 gigabit Ethernet does cost a bit more than the others, but you do get something extra for the money, and I believe a stack of N5095 boxes with 32 GB of RAM becomes a somewhat better value.
This is neat because you can decide just how simple or complicated you want your homelab to be. You could load all your virtual machines up on a single Ryzen 5500U box with 64 GB of RAM. You could build a little cluster of three Celeron N5095 boxes each with 32 GB of RAM.
You could even mix and match exactly the combination of machines you need and build an interesting homelab cluster than fits in a lunchbox.
There are a huge number of companies selling mini PCs. Many seem to be rebranded versions of the same hardware coming out of the same factory. Some have been found to ship sketchy malware along with their Windows installation.
Beelink is the brand we have mostly landed on over in the Butter, What?! community. Several of our friends own and operate Beelink mini PCs in their homelabs.
First-hand experience is my favorite kind of experience, and the experiences of people I trust come in at a close second. Everyone’s success and the reasonable prices of Beelink’s hardware on Amazon have made Beelink our go-to brand.
This has been an option for a little while already, but my friend Brian Moses added the Topton N100 mini-ITX motherboard to his eBay shop this week, so I figured I ought to throw a mention of it in here.
The N100 motherboard is very similar to the N5105/N6005 motherboard Brian used in his 2023 DIY NAS build. The N100 has a lower TDP and somewhere around 40% more performance, which are both nice features. The N100 uses DDR5, which is faster but costs more.
Brian’s Topton N100 motherboard costs more than my entire CWW N100 mini PC, and then you will still have to buy a case and power supply to put that motherboard in. If you need five or six 20-terabyte SATA hard disks, then that would almost definitely be money well spent.
I still prefer the N5105/N6005 motherboard. While it is slower, it is more than fast enough for my own needs, and I can buy a pair of 32-gigabyte DDR4 SO-DIMMs for less than a single 48-gigabyte DDR5 SO-DIMM, and all you can fit in any of the N100 boards is a single SO-DIMM. We don’t even know for sure that the Topton board will work with an SO-DIMM that large.
This is a weird little box, and that is half the reason that I am excited to be trying it out. The other reason is that the box was chosen for me. I got my CWWK N100 mini PC for free.
I didn’t get it from a vendor, or from the manufacturer. I don’t know how much of the story I am allowed to tell in public, but I got it from a friend. There won’t be any loyalty to any company that paid me for my opinion here. The only thing that really happened, other than receiving a fun toy from a friend, is that I got knocked out of my analysis paralysis and had a choice made for me.
Did I mention that this is a weird little box? It is bigger and heavier than any of the Beelink mini PCs. The CWWK doesn’t have a fan. Instead, almost the entire enclosure is a big hunk of aluminum heat sink that is bolted directly to the CPU.
The other weird thing about the CWWK mini PC is that it has FIVE NVMe slots! They are only 1x PCIe slots, but that means that each drive can still push around one entire gigabyte per second.
I don’t have the spare cash or need to fill those slots with NVMe drives, but the former owner of this box told me that his five drives were getting hot enough to throttle themselves down. That looks like an easy problem to solve, but I won’t be tackling it any time soon. This will be a problem for future Pat when NVMe drives get one or two notches bigger and less costly.
The CWWK N100 box doesn’t ship with any RAM or storage, and it is priced higher than an N100 Beelink box, even thought the Beelink ships with an NVMe and RAM. If you need more than a pair of 2.5 gigabit Ethernet ports, maybe the CWWK N100 is worth it for you. If you want a mini PC that runs without a fan, maybe that is worth a bit of extra cash.
I feel that the interesting feature here is the storage. You can squeeze 20 terabytes of NVMe in this sucker. You will have to figure out how to keep those drives cool, and you’ll have to spend at least $1,250 or so on drives, but you can do it.
In my own box, I wouldn’t have five NVMe drives in there for the performance. I would have them because they are so much more reliable than mechanical disks.
You can use the nvme
command on Linux to force most NVMe drives into one of usually several power-saving levels. I don’t have the hardware here to test this, but I wouldn’t be surprised if one of the lower levels would keep temperatures well below the NVMe drive’s warning level.
If that isn’t enough, or if performance of the drives is important, it would be trivial to design a 3D-printed part to bolt on in place of the CWWK’s bottom plate. There is even a 4-pin fan header on the board, so the model could include mounting points for a fan and enough clearance for some airflow.
There is already a bottom extender for a different CWWK server with the same case up on Printables. This is different than what I would have designed, but it sure looks like it would make room to mount a fan to the bottom plate!
I loaded Proxmox 8.1 on my mini PC. I installed a test virtual machine. I did some power and thermal testing, though the thermal testing isn’t quite as thorough as it should have been.
My spare Tasmota smart plug tells me that my CWWK box sips between 8 and 9 watts at idle, and it maxes out between 25 and 27 watts with the CPU and NVMe running hard. If I could fill it with NVMe drives, it would definitely go a little higher. This works out to between 0.21 and 0.57 kWh per day.
I set up a loop to keep four openssl speed
benchmarks running. On a desk in my office, the CPU stays up at 2.9 gHz nearly the entire time with a few dips to 2.7 gHz for a few seconds out of every minute. My infrared thermometer saw the top of the heatsink reach 138F. The case is aluminum, so you can still comfortably grab it and pick it up at that temperature.
Then I put it in my literal network cupboard, closed the door, and ran the same benchmark overnight. The heatsink didn’t get that much warmer at 142F, but it was throttling down to 2.5 gHz several times each minute.
This is a literal cupboard. Maybe three feet high, three feet wide, and a foot deep. It has zero air flow, and there are two switches, a router, and a UPS sharing the space. I think it did very well, and I am wouldn’t be surprised if the N100 would still have 90% of its performance at 2.5 gHz.
I didn’t think to log or test any of this. How much performance does that last 400 mHz actually provide? Wouldn’t it have been nice if I graphed the times, temperatures, CPU clock speeds, and openssl speed
performance results the entire time? In my defense, I didn’t think it would be this interesting!
First of all, I should say again that I don’t feel the CWWK N100 box was the correct choice for me today. I don’t need 2.5 gigabit Ethernet at all, and I don’t need five NVMe drives. That said, I think it will be a neat box to grow into. It will be a good excuse to buy a pair of 2.5 gigabit switches and run 2.5 gigabit to my office, and I think those NVMe slots will start to be useful within the year, and really start to shine in two or three years.
I think my basic Proxmox install is burned in and working. Now I need to tear down some logical volumes and resize the physical volume so I can encrypt my virtual-machine storage. I also want to mirror that storage volume to my external USB drive with the write-mostly
flag. I have never done that, so I want to see how it works out!
What do you think? Am I on the right track? Am I using the correct mini PC for my homelab server? Should I use a different box here at home and send this one away as my off-site Proxmox homelab server? Are you embracing mini PCs for your own home-server needs? Tell me about it in the comments, or stop by the Butter, What?! Discord server to chat with me about it!
]]>First of all, I do not think you should buy a Bambu A1 Mini as some sort of an investment. Any 3D printer is a fun toy and a useful tool. Sometimes I use mine to solve little problems. Sometimes I solve complicated problems. Sometimes I just print fun things.
This is my Bambu A1 Mini and AMS Lite using up some old filament samples and nearly depleted spools of filament to print randomly colored Gridfinity bins.
I have owned several 3D printers over the years, but I have only owned my Bambu A1 Mini for about a month. I thought it might be fun to look back over the things I printed in 2023 to see which things would fit on the A1 Mini’s smaller bed, and see how much value I am getting out of owning a 3D printer.
Maybe you are eyeballing the $299 A1 Mini. Maybe you’re wondering what you might be able to use it for. I am hoping that my last twelve months of 3D printing might help you figure out how much value you might get out of your $299.
I am focusing on the A1 Mini, because that is the model I bought. I feel that all of the printers from Bambu Lab are a good value. Each one brings along upgrades that might be valuable to you, but even the smallest and least costly model is a fantastic machine.
Most of these things weren’t even printed on my Bambu A1 Mini, because the printer wasn’t even available when I printed most of these things. Some of these things were printing on my aging Prusa MK3S, but the majority were printed on my souped-up $169 Sovol SV06.
Between things I have designed myself and things I have downloaded, I have a collection of around 150 models from the last year. Some I have printed many times. Some I didn’t use at all. Others I tried and threw away. I am just going to touch on the most useful or awesome things I printed over the last year.
This print is amazing. There is a $475 espresso distribution tool called the MOONRAKER. It is made of brass and glass, and giving the tool around ten quick rotations will touch every millimeter of your portafilter. It is quite cool!
The Umikot tool works the same way. The heart of the devices is a set of interlocking print-in-place planetary gears. You print the parts, add some accupuncture needles, and you have something that works just like the $475 tool!
I use mine twice every single day. It does a fantastic job, and it has definitely improved the consistency of my espresso shots.
It would be fun if I could tell you that this tool alone will pay for your Bambu A1 printer, but I can’t do that. The Umikot tool may do the job just as well as a MOONRAKER, but a printed part made from fifty cents in filament isn’t truly worth $475. It is worth more than fifty cents, for sure, but I have no idea what value to assign to it!
That said, it is a fantastic tool, and you aren’t getting anything quite like it for less than $100.
These were a new idea last year, but at the time, I was only 3D printing the test parts. All the real parts I was using were made from carbon fiber plates cut on my Shapeoko CNC. Late this year, though, I have had some ideas that didn’t fit in the limits of two dimensions, so I did some testing to make sure 3D-printed parts would hold a good bit of weight. The prints are stronger than I will ever need!
No-sew carabiner hook on one of my old backpacks
These no-sew bits and bobs are my newly updates product in my Tindie store, and they are also available for free on Printables. I didn’t think these were going to go anywhere until I discovered 3-mm leather punches. Now I can send you a leather punch with a template, and it is extremely easy to poke holes exactly where you need them in your bookbag.
I have been attaching extra hooks and straps to all my bags just because it is fun, but there are a few places where these have come in extremely handy. I added a strap to my smallest laptop bag so I can carry a bottle of water when I ride my electric unicycle to the park with my laptop on a warm day. I would be carrying a much bigger and heavier backpack without this modification!
I put myself into a difficult situation when I rearranged the furniture in my home office. My desk wound up over on the wall with the TV, so it made sense for me to move my monitor a little bit off-center from the corner so that the big TV could be used sort of like a second monitor. This also let me move my podcasting camera a little farther to the right, which was also a nice win!
Now I didn’t know what to do with my speakers. There is no longer anywhere symmetrical for me to sit them behind or under my monitor. The TV is low enough to be in the way on my right, and I really didn’t want to waste five inches of depth on my desk on the narrowest side of my corner desk. What on Earth could I do about this?
I wound up designing some screw-clamp brackets for the speakers. My first attempt had fancy compound angles, but I needed different angles for each speaker to keep both pointed at my head, and it wound up looking weird with the speakers not being parallel to the surface of the desk.
The speakers are positioned nearly equidistant from each other. The new bracket has a 20-degree angle pointing the speakers up towards my ears, but not so far up that the speaker will prevent the TV from pulling out on its articulated mount. The brackets are clamped to the desk with 3D-printed screws.
The speakers are ever so slightly above the surface of the desk, but more importantly, the backs of the speakers are hanging a little over three inches behind the desk. This is saving me a nice amount of space, especially where the desk isn’t as deep on my right!
These simple speaker mounts have a lot of value to me, and I am extremely pleased with how they worked out. I couldn’t just order something from Amazon that could solve this problem so perfectly for me, but I easily put a dollar figure on these mounts.
I feel like these brackets are the prelude to some custom CNC waveguide speakers, but I am in no rush to start working on that project. These aren’t even the speakers I meant to use on my desk. I had them lying around, and I wondered if they would sound right if I wired them in place of my ancient Altec Lansing speakers. I figured they might be a reasonable set of drivers to transplant into an eventual waveguide speaker set, but who knows what I will really wind up using!
These are some parts that I designed for myself, and they aren’t quite fully baked, so I haven’t uploaded them to Printables. My parts are just functional enough to get the job done. There are similar enough things available, though, so you might be able to find something similar to fit your needs.
I have an awesome PGYTECH MantisPod with its fanstasic quick-release ballhead and quick-release plate. I have real, authentic PGYTECH plates on all my cameras, and real, authentic PGYTECH quick-release adapters on my important tripods and my cameras.
The plates are about $15, and the combos with a plate and an adapter are $40. I don’t need a super secure and extremely sturdy adapter to hold my small lights or a GoPro to a tripod. I figured I could either spend $200 to $300 on real adapters, or I could design something compatible to stick on all my small gizmos. I think you already know what I did.
My adapters are sturdier and more effective than I expected. I don’t think I would want to trust a Sony A7S3 with a big lens hanging upside-down from a tripod on one with dozens of people walking around who might bang into it, but I am using the 3D-printed adapters in my vlogging and top-down recording setups, and they are doing a fantastic job.
The real PGYTECH plates and my own plates are also compatible with fake Arca-Swiss style clamp on two of my older tripods, too, which is nice.
This is probably the single most important 3D-printed doodad I am using around the house, and I think it is genius, even if it isn’t something that most people would need. I have my 34” ultrawide monitor attached to a dual monitor mount, and I have some custom 3D-printed parts that let me mount my Sony ZV-1 in place of the second monitor.
The Sony ZV-1 is hooked up like a webcam, so I can use it when recording podcast interviews. I also record on the camera during those interviews so that I have a high-quality copy of the footage.
My monitor mount’s arms are articulated on only one axis, but I can also muscle the VESA bracket to tilt on two axes. This means I can push the camera out of the way to hide it behind my monitor, but when I swing it out to record, I don’t have to worry about getting the camera at the correct height, pitch, or roll angles. I only have to worry about aiming it left and right. Everything else is ready to go.
This takes so much work out of podcasting, and it means I can show up at least 15 minutes later for every interview!
Zack Freedman’s open-source Gridfinity system is fantastic. The concept is great, it is open source, and there is a huge community making all sorts of custom bins to fit pretty much anything you can imagine.
I have a few drawers organized with Gridfinity, and I am constantly improving the organization of my electronics workbench.
One of my favorite features of Gridfinity is how it lets me make use of the third dimension. I have a bin in my camera drawer that holds my Sony ZV-1 and its Ulanzi wide-angle lens. That bin sits on top of another bit that holds spare ZV-1 batteries and memory cards. I like that I can keep important things quickly accessible while still keeping their other accessories hiding underneath.
Whenever I need to test a new printer, a new slicer profile, or a fresh spool of filament I will print off a small Gridfinity bin. More bins will eventually come in handy, and I won’t wind up throwing them away like I would a calibration cube or a Benchy.
This is the only project where I printed things that wouldn’t fit on the Bambu A1 Mini, but the parts I really wanted to print also didn’t fit on my Prusa MK3S. I printed several 4x5 Gridfinity base plates that I had to glue together to fill up my workbench. If I didn’t have the Prusa MK3S, I would have just had to print lots of 4x4 Gridfinity base plates and glue those together instead! Not exactly a huge problem.
There’s no shortage of fun, cool, and useful parts you can 3D print for your computer. There are adapters to that let you slot 4 3.5” hard disks in three 5.25” drive bays, or fit two 2.5” SSDs in a single 3.5” drive bay.
I used a 3D printed Wraite Spire adapter to upgrade to a 120-mm fan to quiet my CPU cooler a bit. It didn’t get me where I wanted to go after upgrading from a Ryzen 1600 to a Ryzen 5700X, but it did get a little quieter, and the CPU did benchmark higher!
I also printed a screw-jack for my slightly sagging GPU. I can’t even find the one I printed on Printables, but there are a ton of them! Mine is two simple pieces that thread together allowing you to adjust the length, but there are all sorts of whimsical prints to help prevent a sagging GPU. My little Radeon 6700 XT wasn’t sagging all that much, but I own a 3D printer, so it seemed like a problem I should solve.
You shouldn’t buy a 3D printer to solve either of these problems. You can get a screw jack on Amazon for $9.99, and I bought a pretty awesome CPU cooler with a pair of rather quiet 120-mm fans for $20. Even so, those two purchases would be nearly enough to buy three kilograms of filament.
I have to say that I am bummed out, because the excellent clips I am using are no longer available on Printables or anywhere else. The ones I am using are sort of like this set of curtain clips, except that the ones I chose are staggered so that the curtains overlap by half an inch to make sure no light peeks through.
Almost the entire length of the wall behind our couch is either window or a glass door. This is trouble, because if the curtains aren’t just right, then there is a sliver of light cast on the TV during the day.
These little clips are fantastic. We just have to pull the curtains close to the correct position, and the magnets pull them right into place. There were three models available for different size magnets, and I stupidly chose the biggest magnets. You really want just enough magnet to hold the curtains shut. I have strong enough magnets that the friction holding the clips on the curtains just isn’t strong enough!
There are 4-packs of similar doodads on Amazon for $12. I am using nine clips. I bet we could have gotten away with six, so it seems safe to say that I saved $24. I did wind up spending half that savings buying a 100-pack of 10-mm magnets, but I have used up more than half of those magnets on another project. There is always a use for more magnets!
This isn’t quite a new 3D-printing project, but I did revise my setup this year, so I feel like that counts! I originally uploaded my IKEA Tertial arm lamp C920 webcam mount to Thingiverse in 2015. It has evolved a lot since then, but I am still using parts that I designed in 2015 today.
At some point after 2015, I upgraded the mount to use ball joints. Last year, I added a clip to hold my Deity D4 Mini shotgun mic under the webcam. Not long after, I popped the webcam out, but I still had the mount up there. I also upgraded the ball joints with a couple of CNC-cut carbon-fiber plates, because they can be thinner, and I think they look cooler!
I eventually need to get around to deleting the webcam mount that I no longer use! That would make it look even cooler, right?!
This shock mount was the first thing I designed using the BOSL2 OpenSCAD library
Now that I am down to just a microphone, this is something one could just go out and buy. You can get an Amazon Basics mic arm for $22. You can also get something much nicer like the Elgato Wave Mic Arm for $80.
I was at IKEA one day back in 2015, and I snagged a handful of Tertial lamps for $9.50 each. They are handy lights, they are inexpensive, and I have used two or three as mic or webcam arms.
I upgraded my espresso setup to a Turin DF64P coffee grinder during the summer. This was a huge upgrade, and I absolutely love this grinder. It has one minor problem that was bugging me: the dial doesn’t give you a good indication of which number it is actually pointing at!
I need to re-print this on the Bambu A1 Mini. The tiny bump at the tip printed a little fuzzy with the 0.6-mm nozzle on my Sovol SV06, and it is collecting brown coffee bits that won’t brush away!
This isn’t a huge inconvenience. I don’t actually count tick marks when dialing in a shot of espresso. It is a bit of a nuisance when I roast another batch of the same beans a month later and want to start tuning from where I left off. If I write 23 on the bag, it would be nice to be able to get back to 23 next time, right?
Some on Printables designed a tiny indicator arrow that hangs onto the adjustment doohickey. Mine wobbled around a little, so I cut myself a tiny piece of double-sided tape to keep it in place.
This is another model that doesn’t seem to be available on Printables or anywhere else any longer!
This solved another problem I caused by my rearranging of my home office. I used to have a floor lamp a few feet from me, and it was reflecting 2,000 lumens down onto my desk from the ceiling. There isn’t anywhere near my desk now for that lamp, so it is on the opposite side of the room having most of its light absorbed by the dark curtain, and I can’t run my video lights. They are quite bright, but they are also pointed almost directly at my face! I have been in sitting here in the dark for a couple of months.
I was shopping around for lighting ideas when I discovered these 3’ 1800-lumen tube lights. I was able to get an 8-pack for $55. That length is just short enough to hide behind my TV, and they come with all sorts of cables and adapters to string lights together in series. You can get them in lengths from 2’ up to 8’. Different brands and models come with different quantities of connectors and switched plugs, so you may have to shop around to be able to meet your needs.
Every one of these style of work light on Amazon claims to be high CRI, but that is definitely not the case. People in my office look a little ill now, because the lights lean towards green and definitely don’t have enough red. The difference is so obvious when I fire up my video lights, but that is fine. I have a bright light from a source that you’ll never see on my video camera, so I am quite pleased.
I designed a simple triangular brackets that bolts onto my TV’s VESA mounts. The brackets each have screw holes to attach the supplied clips for three of the tube lights.
I had an even more exciting year of 3D-printed solutions to problems around the house than I expected, and if you are new to 3D printing I hope you have as much success this year as I had last year. Not every print needs to solve a problem. Not every print needs to provide monetary value.
Even so, it is nice when they do! Being able to repair a broken appliance without waiting a week for parts is nice. Being able to repair something when no one sells replacement parts is even better. My 3D printers have definitely saved the day on more than one occasion.
]]>Using the Bambu A1 Mini AMS Lite to use the remains of three old spools of filament
Is the A1 Mini’s bigger brother worth an extra $100? Of course it is! The bed on the A1 can heat up 20C hotter, and I would love that for small ABS prints. It has twice as much surface area. Even better, you can save some space by mounting the AMS Lite on top of the printer. Any of that is worth an extra $100.
I may not regret my purchase, but I would definitely spend the extra $100 if I were placing my order for a Bambu A1 today.
Why am I saying this?!
The full-size A1 is a better printer than the A1 Mini in every way except for its size. If you want a little printer to tuck into the corner of your home office, the A1 Mini is amazing, but once you sit an AMS Lite next to it, the footprint becomes quite large.
If you are willing to mount your AMS Lite on top of your full-size A1, then it takes up less space on the workbench than the A1 Mini with an AMS. It’ll get pretty tall, but most people seem to have empty space above their printers anyway.
The full-size A1 has a smaller footprint, double the print surface, triple the print volume, and a more rigid construction than the A1 Mini. If you’re already willing to spend an extra $160 on the AMS Lite, then stretching your budget another $100 for all these upgrades isn’t a bad idea.
Just about the only reason I can think of to buy the A1 Mini today is to save money. It is an amazing printer for $299, and I think you should buy one. You will get a ton of mileage out of the A1 Mini. It is fast. The prints are high quality. It does a great job holding your hand. It is an amazing first 3D printer.
I have been watching all the A1 leaks, rumors, and spoilers. I expected that I would want to buy an A1 without the AMS Lite to sit next to my A1 Mini, and I expected I would want to keep the AMS Lite on the smaller printer.
Most things I want to print in multiple colors will be small, and any print that changes filament every layer takes all day. Something that takes 40 minutes to print in a single color can easily take 12 hours if you use all four colors. Why tie up the big printer all day with jobs like that?
Tweaking Arachne settings for cleaner small text
But look at how much space it would save putting the AMS Lite on top of the printer! And it has been ABSOLUTELY DELIGHTFUL having the AMS switch filament for me for single-color prints. Want to print in blue so I don’t mix up my black PLA prototypes with black ABS production parts for my Tindie store? No problem! Want to print some PETG? No problem! It is already loaded in slot 4. Want to put some white text on a blue print? Fantastic! Both colors are already loaded.
I am new to having a Bambu AMS. I just learned a few days ago that as soon as the red light shows up on the AMS Lite indicating that it has run out of filament, I can wander over there and load a fresh spool. Once the extruder detects that it is out of filament, it will automatically advance the fresh spool and prime the nozzle. I didn’t even have to wait for it to holler at me!
I kind of want the AMS Lite on the printer I use the most. In fact, I kind of want an AMS on every printer I own.
I don’t think I have quite decided how I feel about this just yet. I expect that I will want to write an entire blog post dedicated to these sorts of thoughts, but here’s what I think so far.
The smaller Sovol SV06 is a solid printer for $195, assuming Sovol’s quality control manages to get you a good printer. It seems that they do way more often than not. It is a little bigger at 220x220 mm than the $299 Bambu A1 Mini, but those are the only two measurements where the Sovol comes out ahead. Bambu has excellent quality control, their printers are three or four times faster than the Sovol SV06, and Bambu has all sorts of advanced features that mean you are more likely to succeed.
K2 Filament Clips
Half of the posts on r/FixMyPrint are from people who can’t figure out how to calibrate their printer’s z-offset. This is something you will have to do with every Sovol printer, but Bambu does it for you. This provides a ton of value, and if you happen to be one of those people that would have been struggling, this is a huge deal.
The exact same logic applies when comparing the Sovol SV06 Plus and the new Bambu A1.
There are only two reasons I can think of to buy a Sovol SV06 or SV06 Plus today: either the Bambu printers just aren’t big enough for the things you need to print, or you can’t afford to pay more for one of the better printers.
The last one makes me nervous. A big part of how companies like Sovol save money is by using less premium components. Their printers sometimes fail early or don’t work. I don’t know how often this is, but I will feel bed if you are pinching pennies to buy your first 3D printer and it doesn’t work at all. This applies to a similar degree to Elegoo, Creality, and everyone else that isn’t Bambu Lab or Prusa Research.
Both the Bambu A1 and A1 Mini are fantastic printers that are priced quite aggressively. At $399, you can buy two Bambu A1 printers that are bigger, faster, and more advanced for the price of a Prusa MK4 kit, and you will have to spend a weekend putting that kit from Prusa Research together yourself. That is an amazing value.
Any of Bambu’s printers would be an amazing first 3D printer or a printer for someone with lots of experience. I love not having to worry about my z-offset or dialing in flow rates for new spools of filament anymore, and those same features would be amazing for someone who has never used a 3D printer before.
Do you agree that both the Bambu A1 and A1 Mini are amazing printers at their price points? Would you want to save $100 if everything you wanted to print would fit on the A1, or would you be tempted to splurge on the bigger Bambu A1? Let me know in the comments, or stop by the Butter, What?! Discord server to chat with me about it!
I feel like I found a good solution for both problems. I cut two small pieces out of carbon fiber, poked some tiny holes in my laptop bag with a razor, and bolted those pieces of carbon fiber to the laptop bag. Now I can use a Velcro strap to tie my PlayStation 4 controller and a water bottle to my laptop bag!
I think this is a cool little product, but I have two serious problems with it. I have no idea how to market it. What would you type into Google if you needed to attach something to your bookbag? Even more importantly, how would you even know that this is an option?
The other major problem is that poking the holes in the bag was a fiddly process. People won’t have the right tools, and the tools I was using myself weren’t even the right tools. This is the problem I solved this week!
This will all be open-source. The STL files no-sew doodads are on Printables. The OpenSCAD source will be on GitLab and Printables. I will also stock the non-printable pieces separately in my Tindie store just in case you want to print your own, but you don’t want to source bits and pieces of hardware from all over Amazon or Aliexpress.
The OpenSCAD source has gotten ugly. My intention is always to make a clean, parametric design. Then I start using magic numbers. Then I copy and paste modules so I can work on two different ideas at the same time. Then stuff gets left over, and stuff gets ugly.
The source will get out there, but cleaning it up is pretty low on my list. I need to get this listed on Tindie. I need to get the STL files exported and uploaded to Printables. I really, really need a video to embed in this blog to show you exactly how well this all works.
All of these things should be happening at the same time, but I can’t do everything at once. I will get there soon.
I figured there must be some sort of punch tool that would work on thick fabric. Where I wound up here is definitely not quite where I expected to be.
I was betting there would be a tiny punch that I could embed in a 3D-printed part. I hoped I could embed two of them at the correct spacing. I was picturing a tool that you could insert the fabric into and squeeze like a red Swingline stapler.
What I found were three-inch leather punches. I couldn’t put those inside a small tool. They are also rather dull. I don’t think you can punch through fabric unless you tap the punch pretty solidly with a hammer. Even if you could, my original idea was terrible, because you might want to poke your holes miles away from the edge of the bag.
What I settled on is a two-piece alignment tool with two holes spaced to match all the accessories. You put one half of the tool inside your bookbag, then connect the other half of the tool outside the bag. They stick together, because they have a pair of strong magnets!
Then you just put the leather punch in each hole and give it a little tap with a hammer. You have to use a bit of authority when hammering, but not nearly as hard as you would when driving in a nail. It only takes a few seconds to punch two holes in exactly the right spots to bolt on one of my hooks or straps.
NOTE: I had one bag that really didn’t want to punch! I had to give it quite a hit with the hammer! My testing sample size is still pretty small here.
At least for now. I did some testing with a chain of various 3D-printed parts. I tied my 42-pound electric unicycle to a 3D-printed camera plate, and that camera plate was bolted to an old backpack using a 3D-printed piece with heat-set inserts. I was able to lift the 42 pounds without anything showing any signs of wear, though I was really worried that my terrifying set of zip ties and carabiners would slip off the tripod screw!
I am not saying that you should hang 42 pounds off your backpack, but I do feel very confident in the strength of the 3D-printed parts.
More importantly, the 3D-printed parts do a good job keeping any steel screws from scratching anything inside your bookbag. The old carbon-fiber pieces left exposed nuts and bolts, while the 3D prints cover those up for you.
I used to joke and say that the carbon fiber could probably hold my weight, and that the bookbag fabric would break first. I suspect I was more correct than I thought. It might be fun to rig up a real test someday!
The carbon-fiber parts could only take advantage of two dimensions. I couldn’t do much besides letting you strap a water bottle, a game controller, or a baseball bat to your bag. That’s pretty handy, and it is cool having it made out of such a sturdy and exotic material, but that was nearly as far as the idea would ever go.
I almost immediately printed some hooks to match the carbon-fiber plates. I use an old headphone case to hold all the parts of my Raspberry Pi KVM kit. Adding the hook to that case meant that I could clip the kit to my small laptop bag with a carabiner. I don’t need to take it with me often, but it is nice to know that I don’t need to pack a bigger bag when I do need it.
This week, I have been contemplating ways to quickly stow a DJI Pocket 3 while riding my electric unicycle. I am not allowed to buy a Pocket 3 unless I can find some good uses for my Osmo Pocket 1, so I figured I better put some thought into this.
My favorite solution so far involves printing a PGYTECH-compatible quick-release plate for my Osmo Pocket 1. I have 3D-printed receivers that are compatible with these plates, but they don’t lock nearly well enough for me to trust them in motion, so I designed a no-sew camera adapter.
I can bolt the no-sew adapter to my backpack strap. Then I can attach a real PGYTECH quick-release doodad to my backpack, and I can quickly and easily clip my Osmo Pocket to my backpack. How cool is that?
I figure that if the no-sew camera adapter can lift my 42-pound unicycle, then it should be safe to attach any of my cameras to it.
I am doing my best not to go too bananas. I just want to get some simple parts into the collection that work well together. I accidentally went down the wrong, more complicated path when first attempting to design the camera bracket.
I knew that having the tripod screw between the bracket and your bookbag would be problematic because you would never be able to tighten the camera in place without removing the bracket from your bag. I wound up designing and abandoning a fairly convoluted dovetail system to get around this problem before realizing that fabric is flexible, so I just had to make sure the camera bracket was wide enough to allow you to fold it out of the way to get to the screw. This simple solution is so much better.
The dovetail that I designed was convoluted because it needed extra screw holes to make sure it never accidentally let go of your $2,000 camera. It was thick, and the need for the extra screw made it cumbersome to install or remove.
I think I could simplify things for situations where you aren’t carrying something expensive. Maybe we can design some sort of quick-release mechanism using magnets for quickly stowing an inexpensive water bottle or something as light as a PlayStation controller.
I have been running off most of the test parts in PLA on my Bambu A1 Mini because I am lazy, and I always have PLA loaded up and ready to go. The parts on Tindie are all ABS plastic printed on [my Sovol SV06][sv06is2].
Why ABS? PLA is definitely strong enough, and if you print your own, I wouldn’t be afraid to use it. The trouble is that PLA can get soft if you leave it in direct sunlight in your car here in Texas. I don’t want parts breaking on anyone just because they left their bookbag in the car, and ABS doesn’t have this problem.
If you want to 3D-print your own, I have a bundle with the punch tool, magnets, and rubber bumpers. If you can’t or don’t wish to print your own, that is fine. I am stocking all the various parts.
This is fine! It is better than fine! I don’t want to take your money. I will be just as excited if you print your own no-sew accessories. I think I have made a neat thing. I find it useful. I think a lot of people could get some use out of them. I will be excited to see other people using them!
You can even source your own magnets and punch tools. You don’t have to buy them from me. In fact, you can even skip these things. They aren’t necessary to make the system work, but they do make things much easier and cleaner!
I have some other ideas since installing the first no-sew carbon-fiber doodad last summer. I haven’t fleshed those ideas out, and I haven’t put any design work into them. I felt like this idea was pretty much dead because cutting the holes was a pain in the butt. The template and punch tool have corrected that problem! I wouldn’t be surprised if I could install a hook on a backpack in the same amount of time it takes you to thread a needle.
I have some half-baked parts that attach to the bag using dovetails. I almost used them for the camera mount, but I realized that it wasn’t necessary. Even so, I think the dovetails are a neat idea, and I have some other uses where they might work well. I hope!
What do you think? Do you need to add a heavy-duty attachment to your backpack, but you don’t know how to sew? Maybe you just don’t know how to sew well enough to hold 42 pounds securely. Do you just need to hang one more water bottle on your bag? Is this a good idea? Let me know in the comments, or stop by the Butter, What?! Discord server to chat with me about it!
]]>The Bambu A1 Mini is a little slower than my souped-up Sovol SV06; sometimes by a big margin, but usually only by a little. The Bambu dials in a perfect first layer and flow rate every time, so the prints all come out cleaner than my Sovol.
I can’t decide whether I am disappointed or relieved that the A1 Mini didn’t immediately make my Sovol SV06 obsolete. Maybe we will figure that out together!
The A1 Mini is tiny. I wasn’t sure if the A1 Mini sitting next to the AMS Lite seemed to take up more space or less space than I expected, so I got out the tape measure. The combo is about 23” wide and 17” deep. I think that is interesting, because that is precisely the footprint my Sovol SV06 requires, except the Sovol is 17” wide and 23” deep!
The A1 Mini ships with a sliced SpeedBoatRace Benchy already on the printer. I didn’t print that. That file is specially tweaked to print super fast. I wanted a realistic test, so I sliced my own Benchy with the 0.16-mm profile. It took a little over 40 minutes to print, so my Sovol SV06’s 21-minute Benchy printed in half the time. I even used the same filament just to be fair.
These Benchy’s are apples and oranges. My Sovol SV06’s Benchy breaks the SpeedBoatRace rules by using 0.24-mm layers, and those thick layers are noticeable in the final product. Bambu definitely dials in the first layer better than I ever did on the Sovol, and almost every fine detail of the Benchy came out better on the A1 Mini.
The hull came out cleaner on the Sovol, but to be completely fair here, the clean Benchy on my Sovol had a huge external fan blowing across the printer.
I expect having the option to print in four colors will be fun, but that isn’t the reason why I was excited about buying the A1 Mini Combo. I keep hearing and seeing that PETG supports don’t stick well to PLA, so you can pop the supports right off! And you only have to print the interface layers in PETG, so the printer doesn’t have to change filament for every single layer of the support structure. Isn’t that neat?!
I didn’t have a handy part to test. I wound up printing one of the camera adapter plates for my no-sew backpack hooks. The part is designed to print without supports, so I just flipped it so the wrong side was up, and I made some tweaks to the slicer settings to use PETG for the supports.
NOTE: Believe it or not, that is the smoothest surface of the print as far as my finger can tell! If I used black PLA with black PETG, I don’t think we’d ever know there was support material in that hole!
I was surprised how many clicks it took to set this up well in OrcaSlicer. I had to pick the material, change the number of interface layers, change the interface layer distance to zero, and increase the density of the interface layer. I kind of expected there to be a single button to hit to make all this happen!
I wanted to make sure it would be easy to see what was going on, so I used white PLA for the part and black PETG for the supports. This was probably the worse possible combination, because you can see lots of leftover bits of black PETG on my PLA part.
The supports didn’t completely pull away quite as cleanly as I was led to believe, but most of it did pop out easily and cleanly. I just had to clean up one extra layer of PETG.
Even though the layer looks behind rough due to the black bits, the bottom of the supported part of the print feels smoother than the top of the print. It is quite impressive!
I suspect that I could have gotten an easier separation here if I changed the pattern of the interface layer. I am sure I will be experimenting with this more in the future.
And it worked really well! OrcaSlicer was being a pain about letting me add an ABS filament profile, so I just copied a PETG profile and adjusted the temperature a bit.
I don’t print large parts using ABS. I print small structural parts, and they are usually parts that I need to survive in the sun here in Texas. Small parts print perfectly well on my Prusa MK3S and my Sovol SV06, but I was worried that the Bambu A1 Mini’s bed-temperature limit of 80C would be too low.
Left to right: ABS on my A1 Mini, ABS on my Sovol SV06, PETG on my A1 Mini.
I printed a set of my no-sew backpack pieces. I kept an eye on things just in case something came loose from the bed during the print, but I learned afterwards that if anything, the ABS adhered too well to the textured PEI sheet.
I don’t expect to have any problems printing batches of these parts on the A1 Mini.
UPDATE: My test prints with ABS were with three or four small parts. My next print had about twice as may parts, and one of them had about three times the footprint of the others. The big part came loose on me during the print. Your mileage may vary if you try to print ABS, because so far, my own mileage is definitely varying!
I had a slightly worrisome moment while unboxing the new printer. The textured PEI sheet is right on top of everything along with the quick-start guide. I was out in our cavernous living room when I was unpacking everything, and I have to say that the print surface looked absolutely minuscule out there!
Once I got it into my office, though, it looked like a much more reasonable size. Yes. It is much smaller than the Prusa MK3 or the Sovol SV06, but the Bambu A1 Mini has quite a reasonable print volume.
If you want to be able to print a Scout Trooper helmet, then the A1 Mini isn’t the right printer for you. For that matter, neither are the Prusa MK3S, Prusa MK4, or the Sovol SV06. You need something at least as big as the Bambu P1S or the Sovol SV06 Plus!
This tiny printer will be fine for nearly everything I print. You can tell by the wear on the grid printed on my Sovol SV06 that I mostly only use a 2” square in the center of the bed.
I mostly send one or two small parts to the printer for testing, and they rarely take more than 20 minutes to print. Then I check that the parts will fit, make any necessary tweaks, and send another small 20-minute job to the printer. Then I repeat that until I get it right.
If you work like I do, you will be fine.
An answer to this question will need to be a whole blog post on its own, but I had some good thoughts long before the printer arrived, and most of them have already been confirmed in the first day of ownership. It seems worth writing a few paragraphs here.
These printers are not directly comparable. The small, fast, much more user-friendly machine costs $100 more, and Bambu has much better quality control than Sovol. The bigger, still capable machine costs $100 less, but Sovol has pretty poor customer service.
The Sovol SV06 is $195 now. The design and technology is very comparable to the Prusa MK3S, and that design is a proven workhorse. If you get a good machine from Sovol, it ought to be a tank, and you’ll have no trouble finding parts to repair it. The bummer is that this is outdated tech that was extremely exciting in 2016.
The Bambu A1 Mini is modern and friendly, but it costs $299. You don’t have to learn how to calibrate your own z-offset. You don’t have to learn to dial in your flow rate for your filament. These are the two most common problems over on /r/FixMyPrint, and Bambu does it for you. You also get a camera, WiFi printing, and remote print monitoring.
You are paying an extra $104 to save yourself hours of potential aggravation, to receive a more modern and higher quality product, and for a much faster printer that you can send prints to from your phone or computer. The Bambu may be smaller, but you get a lot for the extra money.
If you want to try 3D printing for the first time, I feel like the Bambu A1 Mini is one of the best options.
So far, this does seem to be true. The trouble is that I put in a lot of work to get it to that point.
If I paid myself minimum wage, I don’t believe it would have cost me the entire $104 to get the Sovol to where it is today, but I’ve been upgrading and configuring Marlin on 3D printers for eight years. I suspect it will take you longer, and I hope both of us value our time more than that.
If you think it will be fun, then by all means, grab a Sovol SV06 or SV06 Plus and have fun! Just remember, the performance isn’t the only difference.
I need to do a legit and ridiculous multicolor print. I poked through my filament collection, and I decided to paint agepbiz’s awesome print-in-place F14 to look like Skywarp from The Transformers. I have black for the body, purple silk for some highlights, gray for the scoops, and coextrusion gold and silver to use for the canopy. I think it’ll be fun, but it will be a 12-hour print and take 20 times more filament than just printing a single-color jet, so I am going to put that off for at least a few days!
I want to see how well the A1 Mini switches to the next spool when a spool runs dry. I have quite a few nearly depleted spools. I figure I can drop a whole mess of Gridfinity bins on the plate to eat through those leftovers to see how well it does!
Other than that, it will mostly just be printing as usual. Except on a different printer!
What do you think? Is the Bambu A1 Mini at $299 cheap enough to be an impulse purchase? Is it worth paying the extra $100 and compromising on size for the modern conveniences and high speeds out of the box? Do you think I am correct when I say that everyone should have Bambu’s first-layer compensation and flow rate tuning on their first printer, or do you think new people should struggle to figure out how to set a z-offset? Let me know what you think in the comments, or stop by the Butter, What?! Discord server to chat with me about it!
The Bambu A1 Mini is different. It isn’t my first, second, or third 3D printer. I also can’t decide if I chose the A1 Mini because I know what I am doing, or in spite of the fact that I know what I am doing. That is assuming I really do know what I am doing!
At this point, I have only placed my order for a Bambu A1 Mini. It says my printer is supposed to ship before December 8. That is just over a month from now.
It wasn’t that many months ago where a beginner had to either pick a good printer than would do most of the calibration work for them, like a Bambu X1C for $1,200, or a decent but inexpensive printer with a bit of a learning curve, like the Sovol SV06 for $250.
It is true that Bambu won’t yet sell you the A1 Mini without the AMS filament changer unit, but Bambu says that when they do, the A1 Mini will be priced at $299. That gets you all of the awesome hand-holding of the Bambu X1C for only a little more cash out of your pocket compared to the Sovol SV06.
NOTE: I am aware that this is a Sovol SV06 Benchy video and not a Bambu A1 Mini. I don’t yet have an A1 Mini to record a video.
It may not be obvious to you if you have never owned a 3D printer, but r/fixmyprint and r/Sovol over on Reddit are both overflowing with new users who don’t know how to correctly dial in their first layer. A significant portion of those posts explain how frustrated they have been spending hours trying to figure things out without success.
In my opinion, almost the entire price of the Bambu A1 Mini is worth it for a new user not having to spend the time learning how to calibrate your z-offset.
I stand behind everything I have ever written about the printers from Sovol. They were an amazing deal, and if you need a larger printer, they are still a good value. Bambu has really shaken things up six months after I picked up my refurbished Sovol SV06 for $159.
Let’s move on to talking about me. I know how to calibrate my z-offset. I had my Sovol SV06 printing a nice first layer in less than 15 minutes. I have done this hundreds of times. Once you get that first layer dialed in, you may not have to touch it again for months.
Every now and then, though, my first layer on the Sovol SV06 or Prusa MK3S will be a little extra squished if I run two prints back-to-back. Things expand and contract as the temperatures change, and the longer the bed is heated, the more parts in the bed take on that additional temperature. The Bambu A1 Mini’s perfect first-layer calibration will mean this won’t happen to me ever again. Any small improvement in the reliability of print jobs will encourage me to waste less time keeping an eye on the printer, and I consider my time to be valuable. You should value your time as well!
I bought the Sovol SV06 because friends were asking me which 3D printer to buy, and the Sovol SV06 seemed like the printer to recommend. I didn’t feel great having to explain that it looks like an amazing printer, but I haven’t used it myself, so I have to make the recommendation based on what I have heard from others.
The same is true of the Bambu A1 Mini. It is so obviously the 3D printer for people new to the hobby, but I haven’t used one, and I don’t own one. I feel like I need to correct that problem.
Some people buy a Bambu X1C, open the box, and immediately print a Mandalorian helmet to stick on their own head. If that is you, then maybe the A1 Mini is the wrong printer for you.
The vast majority of the parts I print are much smaller than my hand. I could count on one hand the number of things I couldn’t print because they wouldn’t fit on my Prusa MK3S. I am sure that number would be even larger with the 180-mm bed of the A1 Mini, but it still wouldn’t be all that large!
I am much more excited about iterating on my own designs quickly. So many things that I print on my Sovol SV06 are finished 10 to 20 minutes after hitting the upload and print
button in PrusaSlicer. It helps that I have set up Marlin’s input shaper on the Sovol and upgraded to a 0.6-mm nozzle.
The Bambu A1 Mini is large enough to print the biggest Gridfinity bin I have ever printed. There is enough room for a 4x4 bin or grid.
My SV06 is about three times faster than my Prusa MK3S. That means I can print three or four iterations on my hot-rodded Sovol SV06 in an hour to test fit a part, whereas it would take all afternoon to do the same on the Prusa MK3S.
The Bambu A1 Mini may be up to twice as fast right out of the box as my Sovol SV06, and I have put a lot of hours and work into dialing up the speed on the Sovol. Being able to iterate on a part five or six times in a single hour is going to be fantastic!
NOTE: I imported my Sovol SV06 input-shaping profile into Orcaslicer. I figured it would be easier in the long run to use one slicer for both printers, and Orcaslicer supports the Bambu A1 Mini. My aggressively tuned SV06 with its 0.6-mm nozzle printed my Orcaslicer test part in 8:46. The fastest profile for the A1 Mini with its 0.4-mm nozzle estimated just over 13 minutes for the same part.
The AMS module for the A1 Mini is interesting. It looks fairly small. I have been guessing that it looks to be about three spools of filament wide, and maybe about two spools deep. That’s pretty compact, especially compared to the huge AMS for the Bambu P1S and X1C.
The trouble is that the new AMS won’t just stack on top of your brick of a printer. My setup with the A1 Mini won’t be as tall as a Bambu X1C combo, and it will probably take up less depth on the shelf, but I expect my setup will be wider than a Bambu X1C. I will understand this better when I see it in person.
Printing multiple colors will be a neat trick. I am sure I will print some fun toys and trinkets in four colors, but that isn’t what I am excited about.
I am excited about printing support material interface layers for PLA prints using PETG. You can dial down the separation between supports and the print so that they are touching, and the PETG won’t stick well to the PLA, so you can just pop it right off. From what I have seen, the supported underside of those PLA prints is almost as clean as if they were printed right on the bed. How awesome is that?!
I don’t print all that much using ABS filament. ABS is one of the more durable filaments, doesn’t require extreme temperatures to print, and it doesn’t wreck brass nozzles. It is also one of the few filaments that will survive when sitting on the sunny dashboard of my car here in Texas.
NOTE: I usually print these in ABS, but I bought my first spool of PETG, and I figured they would be a good test print. I just picked a PETG filament profile, made sure the flow rate limit was up around 20 cubic mm/s, and hit the yolo button at 28-minute Benchy speeds on the Sovol SV06. I thought they came out all right for zero tuning for PETG!
ABS filament isn’t supported on the A1 Mini, but I want to try it anyway. The A1 Mini’s bed can reach 80C, and I used to print ABS on my original printer at 90C, so maybe I can get away with that. Most of the parts that I print in ABS are rather small, so I am expecting it will work out all right.
The A1 Mini’s hot end can reach 300C. That is way more than you need for ABS. That is hot enough to print nylon.
The short answer is some combination of timing, cost, print volume, and the fact that I just can’t buy every 3D printer I would like to own. The P1S combo for $940 was released several months after I bought the Sovol SV06. I also have friends running Bambu P1P and Bambu X1C printers. I have watched them print. I have no worries about recommending these printers to people.
I can’t find any actual timing numbers, but everyone seems to be saying that the new AMS Lite can change filament significantly faster than the original Bambu AMS. If you are printing with all four colors, this can be a HUGE deal. It takes the original AMS more than 30 seconds to swap filament.
If you run a print job that has to change colors four times for every layer, and that print is 200 layers tall, then the original AMS would spend more than 6 hours on just filament changes. Trimming just ten seconds off each filament change would shave two hours off the print time.
I like the idea of spending half as much for faster multicolor prints.
I could write so much more. I am way too excited about my Bambu A1 Mini order, and I can hardly wait for it to ship. I figure I should probably stop speculating on my future here, because I don’t have any data or photos to back myself up, right?!
This isn’t really a conclusion. I haven’t even started yet. My Bambu A1 Mini won’t even ship for another four weeks. This isn’t the blog about how awesome the A1 Mini 3D printer is or isn’t. This is the blog about why I made this choice, and what I expect to come of it.
What do you think? Will I keep using my Sovol SV06, since it might be 10% faster than the Bambu A1 Mini? Or will I only fire it up to print things that don’t fit on the A1 Mini, since the first layer of the Bambu ought to be more reliable? Are you upgrading from a Sovol SV06 or Prusa MK3 to a smaller Bambu A1 Mini like me, or have you already done so? Are you happy with your A1 Mini? Or should I have paid more for a P1S? Let me know in the comments, or stop by the Butter, What?! Discord server to chat with me about it!
]]>I have some complaints. I have run into some disappointments. Even so, I have gotten way more than my money’s worth of an upgrade out of this free firmware upgrade for my Sovol SV06. Let’s start with the good stuff.
If you already have practice flashing Marlin on a 3D printer, then setting up input shaping on your Sovol SV06 will be a piece of cake. The benefits of enabling input shaping are absolutely worth the effort. You can just turn on input shaping, skip the step where you tune the input shaping, dial up your speed and acceleration settings in PrusaSlicer, and you will have no trouble printing a Benchy in under 30 minutes.
NOTE: These parts were printed with no slowdowns for overhangs and no minimum layer time. The only difference is whether or not that 45-degree overhang was facing the coolest side of the part-cooling duct or the warmest. The part’s default orientation faces it in the worst direction.
At least, it was easy for me to print a Benchy that with a 0.6 mm nozzle. We will touch on that more later.
I can’t upgrade my Prusa MK3S, so I have almost completely stopped using it. My Prusa has printed exactly two parts for me since cranking up the speeds on my Sovol. One time it happened to have the correct color already loaded. The other time I had forgotten to load one part of a project onto the Sovol’s build plate, and it was already printing, so I ran off the missing part in parallel on the Prusa.
I keep thinking that I have dialed in my speeds pretty well, but I am constantly finding edge cases where I run into my machine’s limits.
I can print a nice 21-minute Benchy from the SD card, but Octoprint can’t keep up with the curved hull at that speed, so I dial that back to around 24 minutes. This week I noticed that my cooling is significantly worse on the front, but especially to the left of the front, and I can’t print a clean 20-mm cube. I set the minimum layer time to 3 seconds, and I now have a nearly perfect cube, and that also cleaned up a lot of other small problems with other prints.
I don’t really want to have to think about this stuff. I am excited that I was able to hit a reasonably fast speed with my Sovol SV06, but I would like to be able to just hit print and not worry about it. Bambu has already run into the problem I had, and they have tuned their printer hardware and slicer profiles to avoid these sorts of issues. My free upgrade has cost me a lot of time.
It has mostly been fun, though, and being able to say that my $169 printer can crank out a Benchy in 21 minutes is neat!
I have been on the right track this entire time, but I didn’t quite make it to the destination I was expecting.
The faster you lay down plastic, the more cooling you need. To put down more plastic, you have to send more g-code to Marlin in a shorter amount of time. Octoprint can only send g-code to Marlin at 115,200 baud. I could try rebuilding the firmware to allow for 250,000 or 500,000 baud, but that is more effort than I want to invest. Especially knowing that it might not work well at all!
Moving up to a 0.6-mm CHT-style nozzle means you can extrude roughly twice as much plastic for every line of g-code. That helps avoid the communication speed issue with Marlin, and that is awesome.
What I didn’t realize is just how much more difficult it is to cool that thick line of filament. PrusaSlicer’s default 0.15-mm profile for a 0.4-mm nozzle has an extrusion width of about 0.45 mm, while my own 0.24-mm profile has an extrusion width of 0.7 mm.
I am extruding nearly three times more plastic. This is like spaghetti compared to linguine. How much harder is it to cool the center of that 220-degree linguine? It is a lot harder!
I was correct up to a point. I don’t have to push the speeds an acceleration nearly as high with a 0.6-mm nozzle to print as fast as the hot end can melt the plastic, and sending half as much g-code does indeed help Octoprint keep up. What I didn’t anticipate was just how much more difficult it is to cool the parts!
I think it was a good deal! At first, I was on a mission to quiet some of the ridiculously loud fans on my Sovol SV06. Bigger fans are quieter, so I upgraded the part-cooling fan from a 4010 to a 5015, and I printed one of the popular ducts from Printables.
NOTE: The $4 fan duct doesn’t cool nearly as well towards the front left for me, but it definitely feels like it moves a lot more air than the free ducts on Printables. I had to add a 2-second minimum layer time to clean up that corner on my test cubes.
That was fine. I was able to run the part-cooling fan at about 30% instead of 100%, and it was a lot quieter. Then I started printing fast, and running the 5015 fan at 100% wasn’t cutting it. I almost printed one of the dual-5015 fan ducts, but Reddit suggested that the $4 from Cults3D was much better, since it was designed using air flow analysis software.
I assume they are correct, because this sucker feels like it moves a lot of air.
Printing a single small object is challenging. You need quite a bit of cooling to quickly print that narrow little smoke stack on top of the Benchy. Most prints aren’t as demanding.
In the olden times when most of us were still using wood-framed 3D printers, we had a pretty standard piece of advice that we would give out when a small part was printing poorly; print two of them instead! If you smoke stack doesn’t have enough time to solidify between layers, giving it more time to cool by printing a neighboring smoke stack will probably help a lot.
We aren’t always speed-boat racing. We are trying to print the parts that we need to print. You don’t literally need to print two identical parts, either. You can always add another thing that you need to the build plate. My go-to objects are Gridfinity bins.
While breaking the rules of the speed-boat race, I think I have managed to dial in a reasonably clean Benchy in around 28 minutes. I don’t need an external part-cooling fan for this like I would to get under 20 minutes. Most of the overhangs print well. This Benchy is definitely not pristine, but I feel that the quality is better than just acceptable.
There is one part of the Benchy that prints poorly because Octoprint can’t feed gcode fast enough at 115,200 baud. Everywhere that the hull extends high in the front of the boat has weird artifacts. These artifacts vanish when printing from the SD card.
NOTE: You can see the difference in the hull between my 24-minute and 28-minute Benchy via Octoprint. The rough back corner is facing the problematic corner of my cooling setup!
The lower parts of the hull print well, because those long straight lines that wrap the hull around the back of the ship only take a few lines of gcode to print several inches of filament. That leaves room in the serial port’s buffer for the more complicated shape up front.
I improved this issue by lowering the G-code resolution
from 0.0125 mm to 0.05 mm. That decreased the size of my gcode file for the Benchy from 3.2 megabytes to 2.3 megabytes. This didn’t completely eliminate the problem, but it helped tremendously!
I should start by saying that I kept the first layer speed extremely conservative. I don’t need high speeds keeping a part from sticking to the textured PEI sheet. I did widen the extrusion width for the first layer from the default of 0.65 mm to 0.9 mm. That speeds things up by nearly 50%, and the wider extrusion helps with adhesion if the z-offset is a hair to high.
I am currently running 5,000 mm/s2 acceleration for pretty much everything. I have infill set to 190 mm/s, perimeters set to 170 mm/s, and external perimeters set to 140 mm/s. Nothing seems to go past 160 mm/s with my usual 0.24 mm layer height, because I have flow rate restricted to 21 cubic mm/s.
How did I settle on 21 cubic mm/s? Thin walls had crummy layer adhesion with a 0.48 mm layer height at anything over 22 cubic mm/2 with my knock-off 0.6 mm CHT nozzle, so I scaled it back by one extra just to be safe.
Larger parts spend most of the time printing up at 160 mm/s. Parts like a Benchy vary from 15 mm/s to keep the smoke stack cool, 60 to 90 mm/s around the overhangs of the hull, to 140 mm/s or so just above the hull.
Bambu is really smacking us over the head with the amazing specs and price on that Bambu A1 Mini. It can crank out a nicer Benchy than mine using a 0.4 mm nozzle in 14 minutes right out of the box. The new printer from Bambu is a fast, advanced, and priced super competitively.
I think that makes Marlin’s input shaper more important than ever before. I already know what happens when you own a slow printer and buy a fast printer. I can’t easily add input shaping to my Prusa MK3S, so I stopped using it.
I know there are cheaper ways to add Klipper to a printer, but most people are buying $120 Klipper screens. Is it worth spending $120 to upgrade a printer to make it about half as fast as a Bambu A1 Mini? Dialing in Klipper for fast speeds is definitely time consuming. I would feel better putting that $120 towards the faster printer.
Marlin’s input shaper doesn’t cost any money, but is it worth the time and effort getting those speeds dialed in? I don’t know, but spending a couple of hours speeding up an old printer might keep it out of a landfill, and that seems like a win to me!
First of all, I am extremely uncertain that I have tuned my input shaping correctly. That said, it does seem to be working pretty well! I left the damping alone on both axes, and I am only right now wondering if that is something I should be tuning. I set the frequency on the X-axis to 45.8, and the Y-axis is at 36.7. That may very well be the most useful piece of information I have.
What about the slicer profiles? My profiles are a mess. Copies of copies of profiles with awful names. If I am going to export this for public consumption, I would need to clean it up. If I am going to clean it up, it really had better be of use to someone!
I am using a 0.6-mm nozzles with a 0.24-mm layer height. My suspicion is that none of you lovely people interested in Marlin’s input shaper on a Sovol SV06 are interested in using a bigger nozzle. Maybe I am wrong. If I am wrong, let me know in the comments. That would encourage me to get to work clicking on things in PrusaSlicer.
I am reorganizing my office. To tidy up my workbench, I printed a large Gridfinity organizer for my pliers. It took up most of the length and more than half the width of my Sovol SV06, and it is the biggest simple part that I have printed using my input-shaping PrusaSlicer profile.
Why does that matter? Long, straight lines let your printer really get up to speed, and they keep your extruder pumping out filament the entire time. I had one side come out quite clean, two sides come out a little icky, and one side of the box had so much underextrusion and poor layer adhesion. Printing 24 inch lines without a retraction, z-hop, or non-printing move just wasn’t giving the heater any breathing room to catch up!
Most of this part printed at the 22 cubic mm/s that I specified for my max flow rate in PrusaSlicer. I backed that off by one cubic mm/s, I bumped my print temperature up from 200 degrees to 210 degrees, and I bumped my retraction from 0.2 mm to 0.4 mm to compensate for the extra temperature.
Bambu has already done tests like this. They ship you an extremely fast slicer profile that doesn’t push beyond the limits. I didn’t find my Sovol’s limits with smaller prints, but my first big print like this found some flaws.
It would be nice to buy a Bambu A1 Mini or Bambu P1S and not have to think about this at all, but I am not grumpy about it. My large Gridfinity bin is most definitely a usable part. I won’t be wasting 200 grams of filament in an attempt to print a perfect bin. I just made some mental notes, some minor slicer tweaks, and I will see how it goes when I print something similar in a month.
That is another reason why I am not maintaining a slicer profile for the public. I am not excited about immediately printing a test part to see if I found a solution. Maybe I fixed it, maybe I didn’t. I will find out eventually!
This is getting longer than I anticipated. Maybe we should wrap things up!
It is a weird and exciting time to be shopping for a 3D printer. Bambu is really shaking up the market. I got an email yesterday saying that the Sovol SV06 is on sale for $199, and the Sovol SV06 Plus is on sale for $289. The latter seems to be strategically priced $10 less than the Bambu A1 Mini. Is that a low enough price for this particular set of compromises?
Has Bambu’s latest release managed to make them your first choice for your new 3D printer? And do you want to print with four colors? Or do you need a big, honkin’ printer like the Sovol SV06 Plus? If you are moving up to a Bambu A1 Mini or Bambu P1S, will you be trying out Marlin’s input shaper on your old printer to extend its useful lifespan? Let me know in the comments, or stop by the Butter, What?! Discord server to chat with me about it!
I knew Bambu was going to be releasing something a few days ago. I had no idea it would pack so many features and so much performance into $300. Bambu has very nearly made almost every single budget 3D printer obsolete.
It is a bit early to be shouting about how amazing the Bambu A1 Mini might be, because so far it is only in the hands of reviewers. How the unboxing experience goes for normal people will be much more important, and how they hold up in the long run isn’t a foregone conclusion.
Bambu has a commendable track record thus far. If I were Sovol, Creality, or Prusa Research, I would most definitely be planning for the A1 Mini to be a huge success.
The Bambu A1 Mini is an astonishingly well-equipped 3D printer for $299, and the A1 Mini with the optional AMS unit that lets you print objects in four colors is an amazing value at only $469. Bambu has managed to include every important next-generation feature that makes the Bambu X1C and the Prusa MK4 such amazing machines.
The Bambu A1 Mini can print a Benchy in 14 minutes. It has strain sensor bed leveling for a perfect first layer just like the Prusa MK4 and Bambu X1C. Unlike the Prusa MK4, the Bambu A1 Mini has fast enough WiFi to upload your gcode in a reasonable amount of time. The Bambu also has automatic flow rate compensation.
If you poke around r/FixMyPrint, you will notice that there are two common problems that make up the vast majority of posts. So many people don’t know how to calibrate their z-offset. The Bambu A1 Mini’s load sensor does this for you. Almost as many people don’t know how to tell if they are over extruding, and the Bambu’s flow rate compensation ought to solve that problem, too.
Should your first printer be a Sovol SV06 for $259? Or is it worth spending $40 more to let the printer solve these two common problems for you? There is absolutely no question in my mind that these two features alone are worth way more than $40, and the 14-minute Benchy is just icing on the cake. Extremely delicious icing.
When you are shopping for a 3D printer, you likely have particular objects in mind that you want to be able to print. Some subset of you that are reading this want to print large things: a NAS computer case, a cosplay helmet, or huge Gridfinity bins. Size might be the single most important specification of your 3D printer.
I bet you can fit 99% of the objects hosted on Printables on a Bambu A1 Mini. I can count on one hand the number of times in the last three or four years that I wanted to print something that wouldn’t fit on my Prusa MK3S. I could definitely get by with a smaller printer.
I will always be looking to print the biggest Gridfinity base plates that I can fit on my printer no matter how big my printer is. Whether I am limited to the Bambu A1 Mini’s 180 mms, or I am limited to a Sovol SV06 Plus’s 300 mms, I will still be gluing base plates together.
The advanced features that Bambu has managed to cram into $299 are fantastic. I would think long and hard before choosing a bigger printer over a Bambu A1 Mini.
I love my refurbished Sovol SV06. I paid $169 for it. I set up Marlin’s input shaping to make it able to crank out a clean Benchy in 21 minutes. It is a well engineered, sturdy machine. It is unfortunate that Sovol uses cheap electronics and loud fans, but it was an amazing printer for the price.
If you follow r/Sovol you will see that quite a few people receive broken printers. My suspicion is that the percentage of people unboxing duds is quite minimal, but we have no way to know the actual numbers. What is more important to note is how many of those people complain about Sovol’s customer service.
If you are one of the lucky ones who got a good Sovol SV06, then you ought to be in good shape. You might be one of the unlucky few with a bad stepper motor or a control board that fries itself almost immediately. It seems like it may take you several weeks or even a couple of months to get a replacement. Once you get things squared away, though, you should be good for a long time.
This was a reasonable risk and trade off when your options might be a Sovol SV06 for $259, a Bambu P1P for $599, or a fully assembled Prusa MK4 for $1,150. Why bother taking this risk when you can get a better printer from a company that has a well-staffed customer service department?
It depends. Since tuning the input shaper on my Sovol SV06, I have rarely used my Prusa MK3S. The Sovol is at least three times faster. Why wait when you don’t have to? This is a bit disingenuous to say, because if I didn’t have a faster printer, I would definitely be using the MK3S!
When you are printing small parts once every few days, the speed really doesn’t matter. When you are iterating on a design, the speed is a game changer! A handful of design and printing iterations that may have taken all afternoon before can be done in not much more than an hour now.
Speed is awesome when you need to run long print jobs. A 24-hour print is awful. You’d prefer not to have any power blips. It is better to be nearby to keep an eye on the print, because you certainly don’t want a catastrophe to happen while you are asleep. Cutting that down to less than 8 hours is much more reasonable.
I already talked about this, but I feel like it is worth repeating. Not having to calibrate my z-offset would save me dozens of minutes every time I set up a new printer, swap a nozzle, or change my build plate. If you have never done this before, Bambu’s bed leveling system will save you hours.
The active flow rate compensation will save you from having problems that you might not even know how to diagnose, and it will save you before you even encounter the problem.
Neither of these features are the game changers that the original automatic bed leveling was, but they are nonetheless huge. I have been printing for nearly a decade, and these features would save me a lot of time and effort. If you are buying your first printer, these features will save you so much headache!
When the Sovol SV06 was released, it was almost too good to believe. The printer cost $259. The printer was nine screws away from being assembled when you open the box. The SV06 is mechanically and electronically comparable to the $750 Prusa MK3S+ kit while being nearly as ready to go as the $1,150 fully assembled Prusa MK3S+.
I was recommending it to friends almost immediately, but I didn’t like that I was recommending something I hadn’t used myself. I ordered a refurbished unit for $169, and I have been using it every few days ever since.
The Sovol SV06, the Prusa MK3S+, and even the Prusa MK4 only have three major items on their spec sheets that the Bambu A1 Mini can’t meet. The SV06, MK3S+, and MK4 are all open source, they all have bigger print surfaces, and they can print more exotic filaments.
The Bambu A1 Mini meets pretty much every other specification, except the A1 Mini is faster and ships with a webcam.
It is easy to recommend rolling the dice on Sovol’s customer service and quality control when the roughly equivalent Prusa MK3S+ costs three or four times as much. It is much harder to make that same recommendation against the $299 Bambu A1 Mini.
It sure looked like Sovol was attempting to make the best set of compromises possible to put a fast, reliable 3D printed in your hands for less than the price of a Bambu P1P. You can nearly buy a pair of Sovol SV07 printers that can crank out a 24-minute Benchy for the price of a Bambu P1P or Bambu P1S. The Sovol SV07 made pretty reasonable compromises to save you $300 here.
It is impossible for me to suggest that you buy a Sovol SV07 for $40 more than a Bambu A1 Mini.
I think it is possible for Sovol to engineer something to compete with the Bambu A1 Mini on price. Prusa has shown that you can print a 17-minute Benchy using linear rods on the Prusa Mini+. If Prusa can sell the Prusa Mini+ for $459, then I bet Sovol can sell something comparable for under $200.
I will be surprised if they can fit a Klipper screen into the budget. If they do, I would expect the price will get too close to that of the Bambu A1 Mini. Why buy a $270 printer from Sovol when you can pay $20 more for a Bambu? I think they would do well if they shipped a Prusa Mini+ shaped printer running Marlin’s input shaper.
Multi-color printing is going to make it even harder for Sovol to compete. You only have to pay $170 extra to print in four colors on the Bambu A1 Mini.
If there is even a possibility that I will want to print with multiple colors, why would I ever spend more than $200 on a Sovol printer that will likely never have a multicolor add-on? Wouldn’t it be better to hedge my bets, buy a Bambu A1 Mini, and assume they will sell me the AMS Lite separately at a later date?
A functioning filament changer on a $469 printer than can also crank out a Benchy in 14 minutes is an amazing value.
The last two years have been exciting for 3D printing. There’s new competition. New features are showing up pretty regularly. Prices have been dropping so fast! I felt like my Prusa MK3S was a fantastic deal three years ago at $1,111.31. Six months ago, I felt like my refurbished Sovol SV06 for $169 was nearly equivalent to my Prusa MK3S. I know that the refurbished price feels a bit like cheating.
This week, Bambu has managed to pack a heck of a lot of value into both the $299 and the $469 Bambu A1 Mini packages, and they haven’t left much room to for the competition. I am excited to see who Sovol, Creality, and Elegoo respond with in the coming months. I hope they manage to stay competitive!
What do you think? Is Prusa Research in trouble? What about Sovol and Elegoo? Are you happy with your Sovol or Prusa printer? Do you wish you waited a couple of months for a Bambu A1 Mini? Let me know in the comments, or stop by the *Butter, What?! Discord server to chat with me about it!
If you are looking for an article to tell you exactly how to leverage things like large language models to make your work easier, then this probably won’t be the blog post for you. I am only starting down this road. It has been bumpy, and I don’t know if I am doing a good job.
I have already had some success, so I figure this is a good time to talk about what I have done so far, and to tell you where I hope this journey takes me!
I have been using Stable Diffusion to generate images akin to stock photos for my blog for most of 2023. I don’t know that I can say that it has been a game changer, but it has been a huge help!
Blog posts look better when there are images to break up the wall of words, and nice photos make things feel more inviting. The images help to anchor your eyes. When you decided to scroll back to reread something important, you are more likely to find the words quickly if you remember them being near a particular photo.
On occasion, I find that I just haven’t taken enough photos. There are also a lot of times when I am writing about a topic that doesn’t actually exist in the real world, so there is no tangible subject matter available to take a photo of. It is amazing to be able to give Stable Diffusion a prompt like nefarious hacker stealing a laptop
. I can ask for 400 images, and they’ll be ready by the time I finish making my latte. I can flip through A.I. images for five minutes to find one to spruce up a blog about [running Octoprint through a networked serial port]nsp].
Initially, I was using Stable Diffusion on other people’s computers via the Stable Horde open-source project to generate images. Images took quite a while to generate, and I could only ask for a few at a time. I have since followed Automatic1111’s guide to get Stable Diffusion running locally, so now I can use my Radeon 6700 XT to easily generate 400 images in less than ten minutes.
I also got some tips from watching our friend Novaspirit Tech’s videos. I have downloaded other models besides just Stable Diffusion 1.5, and I am able to generate cartoon images now. Those are a lot of fun!
I am not trying to fool anyone. I don’t work hard to generate images that look real or correct. I embrace the absurdity. Does the guy have three thumbs? Is there a misspelled approximation of a company logo on the NVMe the cartoon character is holding up? Then it is a fantastic image!
There are Stable Diffusion images sprinkled all over this post. I didn’t generate them to go along with the words. I am just picking some of my favorites that I didn’t wind up using in other blogs.
I wrote a new blog last week and I pasted every single paragraph into the free ChatGPT web interface. I tried telling it to rephrase this to make it more interesting
, but that made for some extremely pretentious writing. I know I tried a few other adjectives besides interesting
, but I wound up settling on just prefacing every paragraph with rephrase this
.
I purposely overdid things. I did my best to replace at least one sentence in every paragraph with something straight out of ChatGPT. This was tough, because ChatGPT’s output doesn’t usually feel like my style.
Manually copying and pasting every paragraph into the ChatGPT web interface was tedious. I don’t time myself, but that definitely felt like the slowest blog I have ever written, and I was hoping that using ChatGPT might speed things up a bit!
I should give you an example. This paragraph has been rephrased by ChatGPT 3.5 Turbo. There we be a copy of the original paragraph quoted below this one. Does this sound more pretentious than the rest of the blog? Would anyone actually want to read 2,000 words written in this style?
May I provide an example? Below is the rephrased version of this paragraph, generated by ChatGPT 3.5 Turbo. Do you think this excerpt sounds more pretentious compared to the rest of the blog? Would anyone have any interest in reading such a lengthy piece written in this manner?
When I write, I try to imagine that I am speaking to you. We might not be having a conversation, but maybe I am up in front of a classroom. I don’t want to sound like a textbook, and I definitely don’t want to sound like a fancy novel.
What if we ask ChatGPT to rephrase that paragraph in the style of Douglas Adams?
Allow me to present an illustration. See, this very passage has been tweaked by ChatGPT 3.5 Turbo. Right after it, you’ll find a replica of the original paragraph. Now, does this sound excessively pompous in contrast to the rest of the blog? Dare I say, would anyone possess the inclination to peruse a hefty 2,000-word composition crafted in this fashion?
That would never fit well on my blog, but it is awesome, isn’t it?!
I signed up for an OpenAI account, and I installed the chatgpt-arcana
modules for Emacs. Then I wired up a key binding that would send any selected text to ChatGPT while automatically adding rephrase this
to the prompt.
The chatgpt-arcana
plugin isn’t quite what I want, and it is a little buggy for me. I can usually hit my key bind over and over with the results showing up in the same window. Every once in a while something changes, and it wants to split windows again, and I wind up having two ChatGPT windows side-by-side. When it works, it is way nicer than the context switch of manually pasting things into a web browser!
So far, it does the opposite. I am spending so much more time shipping paragraphs over to ChatGPT, reading through the results, and cherry picking phrases or sentences to swap out.
Asking ChatGPT to take a blog title and give me back ten related titles might be saving me some time. Instead of massaging the words myself, ChatGPT will reorder the words, pick out some synonyms, and definitely give me options I wouldn’t have considered on my own. This is definitely faster than the usually stewing I do over a title.
I am confident that there are ways one can use ChatGPT to save time while writing, but I have yet to discover them.
While writing that first blog with the aid of ChatGPT, I really wanted to see what it would suggest for each and every paragraph that I wrote. That proved to be quite time-consuming. Now, I only send paragraphs over when something just doesn’t feel right.
Sometimes I am repetitive on purpose. Sometimes I write short sentences with the same simple structure. Sometimes it fits well. That felt really forced, but I imagine you get the picture.
Other times repetition is accidental. I might overuse a particular adjective or verb. I usually look for that on my own, but now I can just send the paragraph to ChatGPT just to see what she does with it.
I was curious about how much this would all cost. It turns out that chatgpt-3.5-turbo
may as well be free. I went through a blog that was nearly complete, and I sent every paragraph through ChatGPT at least one. Between that 2,000 word post and all my various testing to tune in my Emacs plugin, I have accrued $0.03 in charges, and I can tell by the graph that they had to round up to get me to that third penny.
They have yet to let me try GPT-4. I am excited about trying it out. It only costs about four times as much as GPT-3.5 Turbo. Four times very nearly free is still nearly free! I hear it is a good bit slower, and that might be a big disappointment. I am getting decent responses back today in just a couple of seconds. Would I be willing to wait longer? Would I use ChatGPT less often if it took two or three times as long to get a response?
I did some very basic research into running a large language model locally. The consensus seems to be that Llama 2 70b is more or less comparable to chatgpt-3.5-turbo
. My understanding is that 70b is too big for a single 24 GB GPU.
That isn’t the end of the world; you can easily find a pair of older server-grade Nvidia GPUs for just over $400. That’s not too bad, right?!
Later, I found out that Llama 2 70B might only run at around 30 or 40 tokens per second on a pair of Nvidia 4090 cards. It isn’t going to run anywhere near that fast on a couple of $200 Tesla P40 cards from eBay, and 40 tokens per second is already molasses compared to using OpenAI’s API.
Llama 2 and ChatGPT are moving targets. The stack for running Llama 2 locally keeps getting faster, but ChatGPT is also being optimized.
There are definitely privacy concerns when sending all your words up to a cloud service, but they aren’t relevant for my use case. Everything I send up to ChatGPT is going to be published on my blog a couple weeks later anyway.
For the last ten years, Brian Moses and I have been paying an actual human being to proofread everything that we write. Our fantastic editor has been worth every penny, and she will continue to be an important part of our writing processes for as long as she allows us to keep paying for her services!
Our editor has definitely improved my writing. I made a lot of the same exact grammar mistakes for years. Every time I read her corrections, I wind up thinking about them, and I am ever so slightly less likely to make the same mistakes next time. Once enough time goes by, I almost stop making those mistakes altogether. I know for certain that there are a lot fewer red marks on my posts today than there were five or ten years ago.
I can already see that ChatGPT is going to have a similar impact on my writing. ChatGPT will replace words and phrases with alternatives. Sometimes I hate the replacements, but every so often I like them quite a lot. When I like what ChatGPT tells me, it is going to make an impression on me, and I expect that I will start making small changes to my writing without even thinking about it.
A decade of experience tells me that everyone should have a human editor. I suspect having a robot assisting me for the next decade will be nice, but I definitely don’t want to live without the human editor. She is worth every penny, even though she costs more than ChatGPT!
I think this will be a fascinating question to learn the answer to! I am content, at least for the moment, to just do what I have been doing, but hopefully do it more efficiently. Asking ChatGPT to rephrase every paragraph I write is time consuming. Learned when to ask will streamline things quite a lot.
I am aware that ChatGPT could do a better job if I gave it more context. Even gpt-3.5-turbo
can hold 4,000 tokens. That is enough space to feed it an entire blog post when asking it to rephrase just one paragraph. If I have blogs that don’t fit, I could pay a bit more for a model with a higher token limit. This seems like an interesting next step, but I am not in a hurry to figure out how to get chatgpt-arcana
to do that automatically for me. Sending an entire post for context will probably slow down by queries, but maybe I can set things up so I only take that hit on the first query of each session.
What do you think? Am I only just barely scratching the surface, or have I already dived deeper into Stable Diffusion and ChatGPT waters than I realize? Are you using machine learning to generate stock photos for your articles or using a large language model to help you with your writing? Should I be doing something completely different? Let me know in the comments, or stop by the Butter, What?! Discord server to chat with me about it!
chatgpt-arcana.el on GitHub”
]]>I thought about that some more, and I decided that never is too strong a word. It got me thinking about 3D printers, CNC routers, network gear, and home server stuff. These are all topics we get deep into on the *Butter, What?! Discord server. When we buy stuff for our hobbies, we are always making compromises.
If an Elegoo printer got me thinking about this, then why does the title mention the Sovol SV07? It is because I think the Sovol SV07 is an interesting printer at an interesting price point, and Sovol has made interesting compromises to get it there. Interesting.
The V-wheels are rubbery, imprecise things that sometimes need to be readjusted as they slowly wear down. I don’t have either of these printers on hand to measure, but it looks like the V-wheels for both the x- and y-axis are riding on 20-mm extrusions.
The steel rods of the Sovol SV06’s x-axis are two inches apart, and the steel rods on the y-axis are six inches apart. That is significantly more stable than the cheaper configuration on the Sovol SV07 or the Ender 3.
NOTE: Look at that wide stance! Like a Sumo wrestler!
I have put more than a dozen spools of filament through my Prusa MK3S over the years, and its linear bearings are as smooth as the day I bought the printer. They say that V-wheels wear down, and they say they will run down much faster at 24-minute Benchy speeds, but I have no idea how true this is.
Here’s the important question: Does any of this matter?!
My Shapeoko 3 XXL is over four years old now. It was one of the best values in CNC routers at its size when I bought it. It is sort of like the Ender 3 of CNC routers. All three axes ride on V-wheels, though they aren’t the rubber V-wheels found on 3D printers. Each axis is driven by belts, too, though they are wider than the belts on our printers.
The CNC community can be rather snobby. A lot of folks would tell you that my Shapeoko isn’t a proper CNC router because it doesn’t use linear rails and ball screws.
The current iteration of the Shapeoko replaced the V-wheels with linear rails, upgraded to wider belts, and ships with a few other minor upgrades that my machine lacked. This made much of the CNC community happy, but the current Shapeoko costs 50% more than what I paid.
The new machine doesn’t cut wood or carbon fiber any better than my ancient machine. The new Shapeoko will do a better job at cutting aluminum, but that isn’t something I am interested in. Why should I pay 50% more? My V-wheels work fine!
I suspect that shipping an Ender 3 clone with Klipper instead of a Prusa MK3 clone with Klipper was an extremely deliberate decision.
The Sovol SV06 costs you or me about $260. Buying our own Klipper screen for our Sovol SV06 would cost another $120 or so. That would be $380, yet the Sovol SV07 manages to be priced at $360, while also coming with a higher quality power supply, the beefier hot end from the SV06 Plus, that huge extra blower fan for fast printing, and a filament runout sensor.
I am guessing that if Sovol added all those upgrades to the SV06 along with Klipper, that they would have priced it somewhere around $450.
That isn’t bad, but Bambu just dropped the price of the Bambu P1P to $600. That gets you an even faster printer, a much nicer motion system, a larger print volume, and better quality control.
I definitely see the value in a $340 machine that can print a 24-minute Benchy, but if you get too close to the price of a Bambu P1P, it just tempts me to pay a little extra to not buy more advanced than an overclocked bed slinger.
I don’t know if I should be calling anyone out by name, but someone on our Discord server asked how we thought the Elegoo Neptune 3 Pro compared to the Sovol SV06. I took one look at the Elegoo, saw the V-wheels, and left the product page.
The prices of the Neptune and the SV06 are pretty close, especially at their sale prices. The Elegoo has a color touch screen and a filament runout sensor. The Sovol SV06 has the superior motion system. I am still on Sovol’s team here.
Especially if you can snag a refurbished Sovol SV06 for $169 shipped!
I may be willing to say that printers with V-wheels are just fine, especially if they are priced right, but you shouldn’t buy an i3-style printer with a single z-axis motor. That is just a Prusa MINI-style printer trying to disguise itself as a Prusa i3.
It would only cost the manufacturer $10 or $15 to add a second stepper motor and lead screw. It is common for the unpowered side of a single-motor z-axis to get stuck. Paying a bit extra for that second motor is a good value. It eliminates so much potential frustration, especially if you have no idea how to identify this as a problem.
Old-school bed-slinging 3D printers just don’t make sense if they cost $500 or more in a world where the Bambu P1P is priced at $600, unless you absolutely need a build plate bigger than 256 mm. A Sovol SV06 with all the Sovol SV07 performance and quality upgrades would just cost too much to be worth buying.
You don’t need Klipper or a Klipper screen to go fast. I am getting 24-minute Benchy prints out of my $169 refurbished Sovol SV06, and all I had to do was upgrade the firmware so I could enable Marlin’s input shaping. I’m not even at the limits of Marlin. I am at the limits of my cooling and of Octoprint.
I am quite pleased with my $169 refurbished Sovol SV06. I rarely even use my Prusa MK3S anymore. My Sovol SV06 with Marlin input shaping is three or four times faster. Why would I wait for the Prusa? The only time I send a job to the Prusa is when it happens to have the correct color already loaded!
If I were to add another Sovol printer to my tiny farm, it would almost definitely be the larger Sovol SV06 Plus. I have already put work in getting Marlin’s input shaper going, and I can print a Benchy on my SV06 in 24 minutes. It should be trivial at this point to get a 24-minute Benchy out of an SV06 Plus, and it would be nice to have the larger print surface available if I ever need it.
If I hadn’t already done all that work, the Sovol SV07 would be a terrific deal. I put way more than $100 of my time into getting fast prints out of the Sovol SV06. There is a lot of value in being able to open the box, power up the printer, and immediately see a 24-minute Benchy start printing.
I was worried about the 3D-printing ecosystem at the end of last year. I almost wrote a blog saying that it seemed like a terrible time to buy a printer, because so much cool stuff seemed to be just around the corner. We are most of the way around that corner today, and the selection of printers available are amazing!
You can have the Prusa MK3 experience with the Sovol SV06 at $259. You can have a cheap, fast printer running Klipper with the Sovol SV07 at $339. You can go twice as fast with the Bambu P1P at $599 or the Bambu P1S at $699, and Bambu even seems to have a QA department, which is definitely worth a few dollars.
This is the part that blows my mind. You can load four different colors into a Bambu P1S equipped with a filament changer for $949. That is a fully assembled printer with a working filament changer for less than the cost of a fully assembled Prusa MK4. Brian has been having good luck with the filament changer on his Bambu X1C. We are living in exciting times!
What do you think? Are 3D printers with V-wheels OK to buy? Have I been too hard on them all these years? Are you running a 3D printer with Klipper, or have you tried Marlin’s input shaper? Do you own a Sovol SV07 or SV07, or are you thinking about buying one? Tell me about it in the comments, or stop by the Butter, What?! Discord server to chat with me about it!
NOTE: Cooling was my biggest issue with the other ugly Benchy that I am leaving in for the rest of the photos. I ran the exact same gcode again with 2-year old blue Hatchbox filament, but this time I pointed a huge fan at the printer. The curling in the rear corner went away, and the overhangs on the hull printed really nicely this time!
I have done so many things wrong, and I am ignoring the SpeedBoatRace rules. My Sovol SV06 is running a 0.6 mm CHT-style nozzle. I am printing with a layer height of 0.24 mm with infill combined every second layer.
I am just absolutely amazed that I can ALMOST print a Benchy in 20 minutes on a nearly unmodified $169 3D printer. All it took was flashing some firmware, installing a $2 0.6 mm nozzle, and pointing a huge fan at the printer. The firmware and the fan are quite necessary, but I am not pushing the 0.6 mm nozzle very hard here. I bet the Benchy would print nearly as fast with the stock 0.4 mm and the same speed settings.
I would like to be able to tell you how to successfully get input shaping going, but I am not there yet. I don’t think I am doing a good job yet, but I do feel like I have to write down what I have done so far.
I made certain to set up the lights for the Benchy photos to be as harsh as possible to show off every layer line, every imperfection, and every problem. I don’t want to make you think these look better than they actually do, though I will say that they look much more acceptable in person when you are holding them!
I am not just ignoring the rules of the race. I am not participating in the race, and I don’t care about printing with 0.2 mm layers.
I did my best to print the input-shaping test part. You have to carefully adjust all sorts of slicer settings, and some custom layer-change gcode SHOULD slightly tweak the input shaping settings from layer to layer. I am quite certain that I did something wrong. My test print came out looking pretty much the same from top to bottom.
So I did what anyone who has no idea what they are doing might have done. I picked the height that kind of, sort of, maybe, possibly looked cleaner than the rest. I did the math, and I punched those numbers in for the input shaping frequency. Then I went on to run test prints.
My suspicion is that just enabling input shaping and setting the frequency to something that isn’t ridiculously incorrect makes a huge difference on its own. I know what a resonating printer sounds like. My old Makerfarm printer used to rock the table around when printing infill fast. I don’t hear anything from the Sovol SV06 that sounds remotely like I did on that old printer. It just sounds fast.
I cranked up acceleration and speed settings. I started at around 120 mm/s with 3,000 mm/s2 acceleration, but I wound up going as far as 160 mm/s with 5,000 mm/ss acceleration.
After some successful but ugly Benchy prints, I cranked out a few small Gridfinity bins with a 0.48 mm layer height. These don’t even come close to pushing the printer to its limits. I had 273 mm/s set as the maximum volumetric speed in PrusaSlicer, and that kept the print head moving quite slowly.
I also learned that my extruder can’t manage 273 mm/s. I backed that off to 213 mm/s, and I got much cleaner layers on the bin. I will probably try pushing that up a little higher, but 16-minute 1x1x3 Gridfinity bins seem pretty good to me.
I am not doing a good job keeping track of print times. When I printed a 24-minute Benchy last night, I noted that it took about 2 minutes for the printer to heat up and check the tramming of the bed, so I just subtracted 2 minutes from Octoprint’s numbers.
I sliced up a simple 18650 battery sleeve today. PrusaSlicer said the whole thing would be cooking at 140 mm/s, but I noticed that the print was really jittery. Sort of like it was pausing and restarting quite a few times on every curve.
I stopped the print to click the arc welder button in Octoprint. This converts dozens of small line segments into arc commands. This means fewer lines of gcode have to be pushed over the serial port to print the same part. This improved the print quite noticeably!
That is when it hit me. Were my problems with last night’s Benchy prints caused by the slow USB serial connection? I copied last night’s gcode to an SD card, and I printed it locally.
That brought my 24-minute Benchy down to 21:38 by the stopwatch. Not only that, but this is the cleanest Benchy I have printed in the last 24 hours.
There are definitely cooling issues. I am running the popular 5015 part-cooling fan upgrade. I only have the single fan, but I am running it at 100% speed.
The front corner of the hull comes out quite lumpy, even though PrusaSlicer is likely slowing that part down to 20 or 25 mm/s. Is my cooling inadequate? Are the wide layers from the 0.6 mm nozzle making this overhang a challenge? It is probably a little bit of both.
The rear of the Benchy facing the front of the printer was curling during the print. It is quite obvious in the photo. The opposite corner printed quite well.
Klipper is expensive. Maybe. You can add one of those Klipper screens that you can get for around $120 from Creality, but why would I want to add $120 in hardware to a printer that I bought for $169? Klipper would for sure let me squeeze every last drop of performance out of the Sovol SV06, but I don’t want to work hard. I want to grab an easy win.
Marlin’s input shaping was just a firmware upgrade away. I don’t have to squeeze all the toothpaste out of this tube. Doubling my print speed would be fine, and for the most part, it sure seems that I am going to run out of heat in the extruder before I get to the end of the road with Marlin’s input shaping.
NOTE: I print the agepbiz cube to check for ghosting. The print seems free of ghosting, but it has a defect on the layers where there are solid layers for the floor and ceiling of the articulated cube’s interior.
I was already pushing my Prusa MK3S and Sovol SV06 to 2,500 mm/s2 acceleration and speeds of 140 mm/s, but I only reach those numbers on infill. I have perimeters set slower, and I have external perimeters down at 70 mm/s with 1,500 mm/ss acceleration.
Here’s what I figured. If Marlin’s input shaping was capable of just letting me keep the faster speeds I was already running while improving the print quality to be more in line with Prusa’s stock profiles, then I would be quite happy. If I could get external perimeter speeds matching my infill speeds, that would be a huge win!
I am already doubling the acceleration, and doubling my old external perimeter speeds. I am running out of capacity to melt plastic, and I am already at the limits of my cooling. I don’t need to go faster, so I don’t need Klipper.
Having to print from the SD card is goofing up my plans, and it might really gum up my workflow. I rarely open Octoprint. I just hit the upload-and-print button in PrusaSlicer, and more often than not, everything just goes smoothly.
The SD card functionality in Octoprint was being stubborn. I enabled it, it didn’t want o see the SD card. I pulled the SD card out of the Sovol SV06 to sneakernet the Benchy gcode over to the printer, and then the next time I looked, the SD was available in Octoprint. Go figure.
It is almost not an exaggeration to say that it takes longer to upload gcode to the SD card than it takes to print the same object. The serial port can’t keep up during a print, but there are also two minutes of waiting around for the printer to heat up and run a bed probe before each print.
My Octoprint server has more than enough horsepower to run Klipper for a small fleet of 3D printers. Maybe Klipper would solve all my problems. Maybe. I feel like it will also create all sorts of fresh problems!
I was thinking about setting up input shaping on the Sovol SV06 from the minute I placed my order, but I have been putting it off.
I have been running the same PrusaSlicer settings for my Prusa MK3S and my Sovol SV06. I send most jobs to the Prusa, because it is so much quieter, but I sometimes choose the printer that happens to have the correct color filament loaded. I didn’t have to think about which printer needed which settings. They were the same.
Now they are not. I have to choose a profile with 5,000 mm/ss acceleration for the Sovol, and I have to choose a slower profile for the Prusa.
The gap between the printers is only going to get wider. I am sure I will figure out how to correctly print the input shaping tuner next week. It is only a matter of time before I don’t want to use the Prusa ever again.
You can run Marlin on the Prusa’s Einsy board, but it seems like a bit of a hack, and it throws away some of the things that make the Prusa MK3S a Prusa printer. I am considering the idea of selling the Prusa MK3S and maybe putting a Sovol SV06 Plus in its place.
I am absolutely amazed that Marlin’s input shaping works so well even though I more than likely just completely made up the frequencies to use for the X-axis and Y-axis. I am sure it isn’t living up to its full potential, but I haven’t heard any significant resonance out of the printer. Does input shaping make this big of a difference just being enabled, or did I luck out and choose an appropriate value?
I am not exactly sure what I will be doing next. Probably just using my Sovol SV06 to print things for now. I hate printing calibration objects over and over again. I would much rather print things I may actually use! I am tempted to just dial everything back by about 20% and roll with it.
What do you think? Have I made good progress in my dozen hours with Marlin’s input shaping, even though I slept through eight of them? Am I a fool for skipping Klipper? Is it OK that I haven’t caught up to Brian’s Bambu X1C? Are you using input shaping on your Sovol SV06? Why aren’t low-end printer manufacturers shipping with Marlin input shaping preconfigured? Let me know in the comments, or stop by the Butter, What?! Discord server to chat with me about it!
The best part is that it is by far the very best espresso distribution tool I have ever used. It seems to be a 3D-printed implementation of the $475 Moonraker espresso distribution tool!
I can’t decide if it is or not! I think it depends on how you look at it.
The 3D-printed Umikot tool is certainly not worth $475. There are other tools that may not do as good of a job, but they definitely attempt to do the same job. The fixed-needle DUOMO distribution tool is a little over $200.
You can also spend $2 on acupuncture needles in my Tindie store and print jkim_makes fantastic WDT tool. That is what I have been using for the last year, and it does a bang-up job.
Both the Moonraker and DUOMO are premium products with some real heft. The Umikot tool is an inexpensive piece of 3D-printed plastic, and it feels like an inexpensive 3D-printed piece of plastic. The Umikot tool gives me a cleaner bed of grounds in three or four seconds than I would get from twenty or thirty seconds with my old WDT tool, and the fancy tool is way more fun to use.
My print of the Umikot espresso tool may not be worth as much as the Moonraker, but is it worth as much as the $169 that I paid for my refurbished Sovol SV06?
I feel like it is.
I printed the grey parts on my Prusa MK3S while at the same time printing all the black parts on my Sovol SV06. Both printers are using knockoffs of the CHT 0.6 mm nozzle. Using two printers is faster than using just one. I chose to print the mechanical part on the Prusa, because it was going to take 2 hours longer than the rest of the parts combined, and my Prusa is much quieter than my Sovol.
I printed the Umikot tool with 0.22 mm layer height using PLA. The whole things takes about $5 or $6 in plastic. I already had a ton of acupuncture needles on hand, and I had plenty of the correct screws in one of my assortments from Amazon.
I used to do a good job with the WDT tool, but I recently upgraded to a Turin DF64P grinder. My old dosing funnel is too big for the new grinder, so I am using the narrow aluminum ring that came with the DF64P.
The Turin dosing ring is too narrow. I can’t see how good of a job I am doing with the manual WDT tool. There was a tendency for me to have a low side quite often, and almost every time that happens, even after attempting to correct the distribution, those shots wound up having at least some minor channeling.
I haven’t had a bad pull yet with the Umikot tool. It seems to give me a nice looking bed after only three or four turns, but it takes less time to just do ten turns than it did to make one trip around the basket with the WDT tool.
I could live without the Umikot tool, but I would rather not!
We are always on the hunt for those killer prints. The sort of prints that make owning a 3D printer worthwhile. This is easily one of those prints! The Umikot tool is such a delightful upgrade to my daily espresso routine, and it isn’t something I could easily acquire without a 3D printer.
You don’t have to find a killer print to justify the cost of your 3D printer. Printing is a fun hobby, but I am always excited when I find something this useful to print. What about you? Do you have a killer print that can justify the entire cost of your 3D printer in a single print job? Or are you just 3D printing for fun? Let me know in the comments, or stop by the Butter, What?! Discord server to chat with me about it!
I just couldn’t stomach paying so much for an upgrade, so I limped along for a few years longer than I should have. I decided prices have come down enough for an upgrade, so I wound up upgrading my monitor, GPU, and eventually my CPU. Why didn’t I spend more on a GPU? Did I really need the CPU upgrade? Let’s find out!
This seems important for me to touch on. I had to install OpenCL drivers from AMD’s Ubuntu repository, and it didn’t take much time after that before I decided I wanted to try bleeding-edge Mesa libraries to see how much ray tracing performance was improved.
I am running the latest Ubuntu LTS, and I installed Mesa libraries from the Oibaf PPA. My machine was locking up randomly at least every other day. Usually I would just find it dead when I woke up, but occasionally my Xserver would just crash and reload.
I have since switched to Ernst Sjostrand’s PPA. I haven’t had any weird crashes or freezes since.
Until this week, RDNA3 cards like the Radeon 7900 XT didn’t have support for ROCm or OpenCL on Linux. That took those cards right off the table. I need DaVinci Resolve to edit podcasts, and it won’t run at all without OpenCL or CUDA.
Everyone has been talking about how amazing AMD cards are on Linux now. AMD GPUs also offer significantly more performance and VRAM for your dollar compared to Nvidia GPUs. Both seemed like excellent reasons to try out an AMD GPU.
If I couldn’t buy one of the latest RDNA3 GPUs, then I also figured I shouldn’t buy the most outrageous RDNA2 GPU. I thought it would be best to only buy as much GPU as I need today, and we can see how far that carries me.
I am going to say that the 6700 XT has been enough of an upgrade. I can run a lot of nearly recent games, like Prey and Severed Steel, at 3440x1440 with settings cranked up to high or ultra and still manage to keep the frame rates up near 100 FPS. There are some newer games, like DEATHLOOP and Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, where I have to drop the resolution to something around 2700x1160 and let FidelityFX SuperResolution (FSR) scale that up to native resolution to maintain 100 FPS.
The only game making me wish I splurged on a 6800 XT is Control. I can max out the settings with ray tracing enabled at 1080p, and the game can nearly run at 60 FPS. I would enjoy playing through Control with RTX, and spending an extra $120 would have put me in a good position to do that.
I did get to play through Severed Steel at native resolution with RTX enabled, and that looked quite cool!
We have been talking about this a lot on our Discord server lately. Let’s start by talking about how things are going today.
Most of the games I am running never manage to use more than 8 GB of VRAM, and I have the texture settings dialed up to the limit. Control seems to sit at about 6 GB, Red Dead Redemption 2 also needs around 6 GB, and Borderlands 3 seems to top out at around 8 GB.
DEATHLOOP is a weird exception. No matter where I set the texture slider, it winds up using all available VRAM. I suspect it just never unloads unused textures or something. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that DEATHLOOP would run just fine with less total VRAM.
There are games that exist today that use more than 8 GB of VRAM, and it sure sounds like we will be seeing games fairly soon that won’t fit in my 12 GB of VRAM.
I don’t have solid advice, but I have some feelings. I don’t have a lot of faith that Intel will remain in the GPU market, and their drivers lack polish, but the Intel ARC A750 8GB was on sale today for $200. Who cares if it is future proof? It can play most current games at 1440p at 60 FPS with a bit of FSR. That is a fantastic value. I have similar feelings about the Radeon 7600 with 8 GB at $270.
I do not like the Nvidia 4060 Ti 8 GB at $400. This card is for sure going to be fast enough to play games that require 12 GB of VRAM, but it won’t have enough VRAM to load them. I think this is a terrible deal.
My 6700 XT has gone on sale for even lower prices since I bought mine two months ago, but I feel pretty good about it. I paid $380. My card has better raster performance than the $400 4060 Ti, and I have an extra 4 GB of VRAM. I think you can sometimes find my GPU for under $350 now.
This was definitely a worthwhile upgrade, but if you are following my lead, you should skip the Ryzen 5700X and just put a Ryzen 5600 in your old B350 motherboard. The 5700X is only 8% faster in extremely multithreaded workloads, and that isn’t something that will help with any games.
Most of the games I tested didn’t perform significantly better after the CPU upgrade. Borderlands 3 gained a few frames per second. Control didn’t perform any better with RTX enabled. Some games improved significantly.
DEATHLOOP was limited quite a lot by the slower CPU. There were parts of the game where it would drop down under 70 FPS, and when it did, the game just felt jittery. The CPU upgrade moved those low points up by about 20 FPS, and it smoothed out those jittery spots quite a lot.
I am sure there are other games that will benefit from the extra single-core performance of the Ryzen 5700X as much as DEATHLOOP.
You can ignore this if you have an Intel CPU or an older Ryzen CPU.
I am not a CPU and GPU benchmarking site. I don’t have lots of data. I don’t have tools to collect interesting information. I mostly only have the seat of my pants and Mangohud
.
I had trouble on a lot of maps in Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands. The frame rates stayed quite high, and the frame-time graphs looked smooth enough, but the game felt really jittery when I moved my mouse. This was really in Brighthoof, and it still feels ever so slightly unsmooth there, but it was a problem on other maps as well. Usually in places where your sight line wasn’t blocked by much of anything, and you could potentially see most of the map.
Even turning the settings down to the minimum and dropping the render resolution didn’t solve the problem.
Booting a version 6.3 Linux kernel with the new P-State EPP driver enabled almost completely fixed this problem.
I am pretty sure that it also fixed the times in DEATHLOOP where things were still slightly crunchy after the CPU upgrade.
I got Stable Diffusion up and running pretty quickly. There’s some really good documentation to get you going.
That was just about the only machine learning tool that was easy to get up and running with ROCm and OpenCL. Machine learning is dominated by Nvidia’s CUDA.
NOTE: What do you get when you use stable diffusion
as your Stable Diffusion prompt? Mostly horses.
Things seem to be getting better. It looks like OpenCL support is coming to LLaMa, and there’s some documentation on the Fauxpilot forums for getting Fauxpilot running on ROCm in a Docker container.
I haven’t tried either of these. I am interesting in messing around with Fauxpilot, but their models that fit in 12 GB of VRAM seem quite limited.
I almost wish I knew how well Resolve is running. My video-editing needs are usually quite simplistic. My old GPU wasn’t exactly slowing me down all that often before the upgrade.
My suspicion is that slow tasks like running a magic mask would be much faster with a similarly priced Nvidia GPU, but I have no way to test this. Running tools like magic mask took significant time on the old GPU, and they still take time on the new GPU.
I guess the important thing for me is that things are working, and I am pretty sure the slow jobs are less slow now.
It is a bummer that I have lost the ability to export h.264 video. It isn’t the end of the world, but it is disappointing.
Even though I couldn’t go bananas on a 7900 XT, for both the sake of my wallet and needing to run DaVinci Resolve, I have to say that I am quite pleased with where I landed with the Radeon 6700 XT. It is quite solidly a 2560x1440 60 FPS card, and I mostly only have to apply a little bit of FSR to stretch that up to 3440x1440 100 FPS.
That is quite reasonable for the $380 I paid two months ago. I keep seeing similar cards on sale for $350 now, and that is even more reasonable!
The Radeon 6700 XT has been a solid upgrade. It runs DaVinci Resolve more than adequately for my needs. It cranks out images from Stable Diffusion at a decent rate. I expect it to be enough GPU for my gaming needs for at least two or three years, and by then, I might be able to get something comparable to the 7900 XT for the same price!
]]>I figured I ought to write down how I feel about things, and document some of the things that I have learned, and probably talk about the mistakes that I have already had to correct.
If you only care about gaming, you should buy an AMD Radeon GPU. AMD’s pricing is so much better than Nvidia. You almost always get more VRAM from a comparable AMD Radeon. Everything related to gaming works great out of the box with an AMD GPU using open-source drivers on Linux.
If you need OpenCL to run DaVinci Resolve, you may currently be out of luck with a 7900 XT or 7900 XTX. At least for now. If you have an older AMD GPU, you should be able to get OpenCL installed, but it isn’t going to just work right out of the box.
If you’re interested in machine learning stuff, then you should probably be considering an Nvidia GPU. The situation here is improving, but it is improving slowly.
NOTE: I believe the recent ROCm 5.5 release has support for RDNA3 GPUs!
Everyone on Reddit says that the Linux experience with an AMD Radeon GPU is far better than with Nvidia GPUs. I can’t say that they are completely wrong, but they aren’t entirely correct.
I don’t know about every Linux distribution, but Ubuntu makes it really easy to get up and running with the proprietary Nvidia drivers. I am pretty sure Nvidia’s proprietary driver ships with the Ubuntu installer.
Absolutely everything works once the Nvidia drivers are installed. You will have accelerated video encoding. Your games will run fast. You will be able to run Stable Diffusion with CUDA, and OpenCL will function. DaVinci Resolve will work.
If I replaced my Nvidia GTX 970 with any newer Nvidia GPU up to the RTX 4090, I wouldn’t have had to do a thing. I would have already had the drivers installed, and everything would have just continued to work.
It definitely looked like I was in good shape immediately after swapping in my new 6700 XT. My machine booted up just fine. Steam fired up. Games were fast!
Then I noticed that DaVinci Resolve wouldn’t open. I didn’t have OpenCL libraries installed. The documentation about this is contradictory, so I am assuming something changed here fairly recently. I thought I had to install the AMDGPU-PRO driver instead of the open-source AMDGPU driver to get OpenCL to work. Don’t do that.
That is what I did at first, because I thought I had to, and it was horrible! The proprietary AMDGPU-PRO driver is much slower than the open-source AMDGPU driver. I quickly figured out that you can use AMD’s tooling to install their ROCm and OpenCL bits, and they will happily install and run alongside your AMDGPU driver.
At that point I was in pretty good shape. DaVinci Resolve worked. My games ran well. I believe I had working video encoder acceleration with VAAPI. I didn’t stop here, though, so my setup is currently a little quirky. When I upgraded Mesa, I lost hardware video encoding support.
I am pretty sure that if you have an RDNA3 card, like the 7900 XT or 7900 XTX, then you will not be able to have working ROCm or OpenCL at this time.
This isn’t specific to Linux. How much value and AMD GPU provides kind of depends on how you are looking at things.
If you choose a GPU from each vendor with similar performance in most games, the AMD GPU will benchmark much worse than the Nvidia GPU as soon as you turn ray tracing on. That makes the AMD card seem like it isn’t all that great.
Except that the AMD GPU is going to be quite a bit cheaper.
Things look so much better if you choose an AMD GPU and an Nvidia GPU with similar ray-tracing performance. The AMD GPU will probably still cost a few dollars less, have more VRAM, and it will outperform the Nvidia GPU by a huge margin when ray tracing isn’t involved.
One of the problems here is that the AMD RX 7900 XTX is the fastest AMDGPU available, and its performance in ray-tracing games falls pretty far behind Nvidia’s most expensive offerings. If you just have to have more gaming performance than the 7900 XTX has to offer, AMD doesn’t have anything available for you to buy.
As far as gaming is concerned, I am starting to think that the extra VRAM you get from AMD is going to be important.
I didn’t buy a top-of-the-line GPU, so I am not unhappy that my 6700 XT only has 12 GB of VRAM. It is looking like the 12 GB of VRAM on the Nvidia RTX 4070 is going to make the card obsolete long before its time, but the RTX 4070 also costs nearly twice as much as my 6700 XT.
AMD will sell you a GPU with 24 GB of VRAM for not all that much more than half the price of a 24 GB RTX 4090. This should be such an amazing GPU for running things like LLaMa!
AI is dominated by CUDA, and CUDA belongs to Nvidia. It is possible to get some models up and running with ROCm or OpenCL, but it will be challenging to make that happen. It was pretty easy to get Stable Diffusion going on my 6700 XT, but that seems to be just about the only ML system that is relatively easy to shoehorn onto an AMD GPU.
I have been keeping an eye on the Fauxpilot and Tabby bug trackers. Nobody is even asking for support on non-Nvidia GPUs.
UPDATE: There is now some information about getting Fauxpilot running on a Radeon GPU in the Fauxpilot forums!
If AI is your thing today, then you probably already know that you will just have to spend more money and buy an Nvidia card. I have a lot of hope for the future. As soon as LLaMa was leaked, Hacker News was going crazy with articles about porting it to work with Apple’s integrated GPU. I feel that this bodes well for all of us that can’t run CUDA!
Having Stable Diffusion running locally has been fantastic. I can give it a goofy prompt, ask it to generate 800 images for me, then walk away to make a latte. It will probably be finished by the time I get back, and I can shuffle through the images to see if there is a funny image I can stick in a blog post!
It is awesome that AMDGPU is open source, but it is also pretty tightly woven into your distribution. Everything runs better with a more recent kernel, and you may even need a newer kernel than your distro ships if you want to run an RDNA3 card. Maybe. I am not even sure that an RDNA3 card will run on Ubuntu 22.04 without updating Mesa using a PPA.
I have been running Xanmod kernels for years, so I was already ahead here already.
I wanted to try the latest Mesa libraries. At the time, I thought I needed them to enable ray tracing. I don’t think that was correct, but I am quite certain that ray tracing performance is better with the latest version compared to whatever ships with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.
First I ran the Mesa libraries in Oibaf’s PPA. I had random lockups or my X11 session would crash once every two or three days. I have since switch to Ernst Sjöstrand’s PPA, and things have been completely stable ever since.
Using either PPA broke VAAPI on my Ubuntu 22.04 LTS install. I don’t think any of the up-to-date Mesa PPAs ship an updated libva
for 22.04. They do ship an updated verion of libva
for more recent Ubuntu releases. I assume this is where my problem lies.
This is all feels less clean than just running the latest Nvidia driver.
I wound up installing OBS Studio and VLC using Flatpak. The Flatpak release of OBS Studio is a couple of versions ahead of what I was running, which is nice, and it is linked to some other Flatpak packages that contain VAAPI.
I mostly use OBS Studio to capture a safety recording of our podcast recordings on Riverside.fm. I record those at a rather low bitrate. I mostly use these recordings to help me make sure all the participant’s recordings are lined up on my timeline. I could get away with CPU encoding here.
I have recorded some 3440x1440 games at 1920x1080@60 with good quality, and it uses a pretty minor amount of GPU horsepower. I don’t quite know how to measure that correctly. There are a lot of different segments of GPU performance that radeontop
measures, and I don’t know which are most important while gaming!
I do know that VAAPI is not using the dedicated video encoding hardware. That is a bummer. It seems to be using shader cores.
I don’t consider that to be even close to a deal breaker. Sure, I am wasting some of my GPU gaming performance on video encoding, but if that were problematic I could have bought a 6800 instead of a 6700 XT, and I still would have gotten a better value than buying an Nvidia card.
I have lost some options with Resolve. I used to be able to export h.264 and h.265 video with my Nvidia GPU. Now I am stuck with only a rather generic MPEG4 option, and even at its highest quality is rather low bitrate.
YouTube will let me upload DNxHR, so this shouldn’t be a huge problem.
I have no way to benchmark anything related to DaVinci Resolve, and I don’t have several GPUs on hand even if I did. I do suspect that Nvidia GPUs perform significantly better than AMD GPUs when running Resolve. I don’t know by how much, but if video editing is your goal, then you might want to consider an Nvidia GPU.
The graph in CoreCtrl
for power is pretty much a flat line while I write this blog. The GPU is using 28 watts. That is kind of a lot, but that is less than my Nvidia GTX 970 was using.
The GTX 970 idled at around 60 watts, but it was driving two 2560x1440 monitors at 102 Hz. I hear the Nvidia driver doesn’t idle well with two monitors.
My RX 6700 XT is idling at 28 watts while driving a single 3440x1440 monitor at 144 Hz. That drops to 17 watts if I set the monitor to 60 Hz.
My Nvidia GTX 970 has been a bottleneck for a while. I did some pretty fuzzy and hand-wavy math. I wanted to roughly double my frame rates in the games that were just barely worth playing. That would take about twice as much GPU, and that would have gotten me up over my old monitor’s 102-Hz refresh rate.
I assumed I would be upgrading from a 2560x1440 monitor to a 38” 3840x1600 ultrwide. That would be 60% more pixels. Doubling performance again would help with the extra pixels and leave room for turning up the visual settings in most games.
My actual upgrade to a 34” 3440x1440 monitor only adds 34% more pixels, so I bought myself a little margin there. When I started doing my math to find my minimum viable GPU upgrade, there wasn’t much support for things like FidelityFX SuperResolution (FSR). Now that I can use this sort of fancy scaling technology in nearly every game, I am much less worried about having enough GPU to render in my monitor’s native resolution.
I was tempted to splurge and upgrade to a 7900 XT, but some of the things I already mentioned scared me off. There was no ROCm or OpenCL support from AMD yet, so DaVinci Resolve wouldn’t work, and I can’t edit podcast footage without Resolve. I also wasn’t sure how smooth things would go upgrading Mesa with a PPA.
I figured that if I wasn’t going to go with an RDNA3 card, then I really should stick with the minimum viable upgrade. The 6700 XT seemed to hit a sweet spot on price to performance ratio, and it was definitely more than enough GPU to keep me gaming for a while!
The 6700 XT is kind of comparable in performance to the RTX 3070, but the 6700 XT has an extra 4 GB of VRAM and costs about $150 less.
I am most definitely pleased with my choice. Most of my games are running at better than 100 frames per second with the settings cranked up to high or ultra. My only regret is that Control doesn’t quite hit 60 frames per second with ray tracing enabled. I never expected the 6700 XT to give me enough oomph for ray tracing, but I do believe a 6800 XT would have given me the juice for that.
I did get to play through Severed Steel with ray tracing enabled. It is a minor, but really cool update to the visuals in the game!
It would have been easy to talk myself into more GPU. The RX 6800, RX 6800 XT, and even the RX 6950 XT provide performance upgrades comparable to their increases in price. It would be easy to add $60 to $100 at a time three or four times and wind up buying a 7900 XT.
I didn’t want to do that, so I stayed at the lower end. Sometimes it is best to aim for the top. Sometimes it is better to settle for what you actually need. I don’t expect to wait eight years for my next GPU upgrade, so I think settling will work out better in the long run.
We may have gotten a little off track in the last section. You don’t really need to know how my choice of an upgrade went to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of AMD vs. Nvidia on Linux, except that I feel it highlights one of the advantages. I am glad I didn’t spend $20 more on a slower Nvidia RTX 3070 with only 8 GB of VRAM.
I think my conclusion just needs to call back to the tl;dr. If you only need your GPU for gaming on Linux, then I feel that an AMD GPU is a no-brainer. If you are focused on machine learning, then an Nvidia GPU is a no-brainer. If you are anywhere in between, then you are just going to have to weigh the advantages and disadvantages.
What do you think? Are you running an AMD GPU on Linux? Are you mostly gaming, or do you need GPU acceleration for video editing or machine learning? How is it working out for you? Let me know in the comments, or stop by the Butter, What?! Discord server to chat with me about it!
]]>There is a lot of advice over there. I am disappointed to see that a lot of the advice has gone from “it might be a good idea to…” to “you definitely better…” over the last few weeks.
It isn’t just about disassembling brand-new printers in order to pack the bearings with grease. There are people implying that you’re not going to be able to get a good first layer if you don’t do the silicone mod to your bed. There also seem to be a lot of people that think that you won’t get decent prints if your Z-axis motors aren’t absolutely perpendicular to the Y-axis.
Yes. It would be better if the bearings were greased, and it would be even better if they were greased from the factory. Yes. It would be better if the print bed was perfectly flat. Yes. It would be better if the printer was more square.
My bed isn’t flat. My bearings aren’t greased. My Z-axis is off by up to 1.5 degrees. My printer is printing just fine.
I am just taking a guess, but I suspect that this is your first 3D printer and that you are new to 3D printing. Please don’t take apart your Sovol SV06 until you get some good prints out of it.
When you take apart all three axes, load the bearings full of grease, then reassemble the printer you are introducing all sorts of new potential problems.
You have bought one of the most inexpensive Prusa MK3 imitations, and Sovol is for sure cutting corners and using the cheapest components they can acquire. I don’t know what the odds look like, but I wouldn’t that at least 5% of us have received a printer with at least one bad component.
Did you break something while taking the printer apart? Or did it come from the factory that way? You should wait to see how the machine works before taking it apart.
I am also not running my bearings completely dry. I saw a recommendation on r/sovol that suggested putting PTFE lube on the linear rods. I have a big bottle of PTFE lube for bike chains in the garage. It took me 20 seconds to squeeze a few drops onto all the rods while my oversized Mini 13 Bender was printing.
Linear rods and bearings are cheap, and even completely ungreased, there is a good chance that I will never run my Sovol SV06 for enough hours to put significant wear on the rods. I don’t want to put time into fixing something so inexpensive that probably won’t even wear out anyway.
The folks posting on r/prusa3d were making a big deal about Prusa not properly packing the bearings with grease on the preassembled Prusa MK3S right around the time I bought mine. It has been printing for almost three years. I have put somewhere between 15 and 20 kilograms of filament through my Prusa MK3S. All the rods feel brand new, and I have done absolutely nothing to lubricate them in any way.
My first 3D printed needed a perfectly flat piece of glass to print on, and that piece of glass had to be perfectly trammed. Then the Prusa MK3 came along, and I never had to worry about that again. Mesh bed leveling can correct for A LOT of imperfection in the bed and a pretty high degree of slop in rest of the printer.
The Sovol SV06 is a 3D printer. It isn’t a CNC mill. It isn’t even a CNC router. There’s quite a bit of error even just in the amount of plastic that may or may not be extruded as the tool is moving around. For most of us, a slightly out of alignment Z-axis isn’t going to make a difference that we are going to notice.
NOTE: I didn’t take any good photos of the ABS spool holder. I only have this quick snapshot that I took when I was surprised how cleanly the completely unsupported overhang managed to print.
I don’t think I have printed anything much taller than four or five inches on the Sovol so far. Bender’s torso is a bit over three inches, and it doesn’t appear out of whack. I printed a second spool holder in ABS that is a little over four inches tall. It looks fine.
We have no way to know for sure why the original owner returned his Sovol SV06, but I have a well educated guess!
I had a good bit of trouble getting the filament to load. By a good bit of trouble, I mean it took me about three tries and about two minutes. There was some white filament already in the extruder.
The previous owner couldn’t have cut the filament off deep inside the extruder like this. I would bet that something went wrong, and then they couldn’t load filament again. They couldn’t figure it out, so they shipped the printer back.
I don’t know how common this is today, but it used to be extremely common when I ran the 3D printing lab at our local makerspace. People would run into trouble, tell me that they spent 20 minutes trying to figure out why they couldn’t load filament in the printer, and they would ask for help.
More often than not, there was no problem. I was usually able to load filament without a problem.
I don’t want you to not maintain your printer. I just want you to think before you start unscrewing things.
So many problems that get posted in r/sovol are just people who haven’t learned to properly calibrate their z-offset for their first layer. Half of the time they explain all sorts of convoluted steps they have taken to correct the problem.
Ask for help. Make sure you try the easy fixes before you decide that your problem is one of the difficult ones. A good troubleshooter knows to eliminate problems that are easy to test for first. Ordering hose to do the silicone bed mod won’t help you if you problem is that you are printing 0.15 mm too far from the PEI sheet.
My 3D printers are here to support my other hobbies. I don’t want to assemble my own Prusa MK4 kit. I don’t want to take apart my printer to grease the bearings. I just want them to keep on working with as little effort invested as possible.
I know a lot of folks who feel differently about this. The 3D printer itself is their hobby, and maybe it is your hobby, too!
If it is, go ahead and grease those bearings. Square up your Z-axis. Print upgraded parts! Go have fun!
Please just make sure your brand new printer works before you take it apart. You’ll have a much better time talking to Sovol’s very limited customer service department if you don’t have to explain that you didn’t break anything while greasing the bearings.
Sort of. I paid $1,111.31 for my fully assembled Prusa MK3S after shipping and taxes. I paid $169 for my refurbished Sovol SV06. The Sovol wasn’t fully assembled, but it is in way fewer pieces than a Prusa MK3 kit, so I am going to stick to comparing the Sovol to the ready-to-go Prusa.
Sovol cuts a lot of corners to get the price this low. Sure, they are made in China, so the labor prices are lower, but many of the parts on the Prusa are also made in China. That only accounts for some of the difference.
Prusa responds to support requests in a timely manner. Reddit makes me think Sovol is bad at this. Prusa ships replacement parts quickly. Reddit makes me think Sovol is bad at this. Prusa uses power supplies that don’t immediately fail, and they ship control boards that don’t fry when you plug them into a USB port.
Those last two make me think Sovol does a pretty bad job at quality control. We are for sure taking a gamble when we buy from Sovol. We are doing better than flipping a coin, but it sure feels like we are rolling the dice. At least it seems like we are rolling a 20-sided die instead of a 6-sided die.
Just hope you don’t roll a one!
I like the Sovol SV06 a lot. The SV06 and SV06 Plus are my favorite printers under $750. I think you should buy one. They are both packed full of rather premium features at a more than reasonable price.
You just have to understand what you are buying, and who you are buying it from. Sovol has executed a lot of things well here. They have nice injection-molded parts and a rather impressive and inexpensive to replace extruder assembly, but many of the components are as cheap as they can get away with, and they have poor customer service.
Are you planning on buying a Sovol SV06, or do you already own one? How was your experience out of the box? Is your frame as out of alignment a mine? Are you still getting good prints anyway? I want to hear about your experiences in the comments, or stop by the Butter, What?! Discord server to chat about it!