Hello community, I’ll try to be brief. My 13 year old son got a 3d printer as a gift, and I’d like to learn alongside him. We have 0 experience. However, I am a data scientist, so lots of professional Python experience, if that helps. We’re a foss/Linux family so my questions are:
What tools are the best to learn for 3d printing for me? I am ready to learn CAD programming. Can you all recommend a tech stack and resources to learn it?
Before you go the octoprint or other hosted app route, I humbly suggest printing from the SD card while you learn the process engineering to get prints to come out decent. This reduces the number of things you have to learn at once, and the points of failure. The workflow is then simply: (1) acquire or design the model (STL file). (2) slice it (generate .gcode file) and copy to sd card. (3) use the touchscreen to run the gcode file.
You’ll spend most of your fiddling on step 2 since you need to learn what temperatures and speeds work well.
To expand on this, also wait to do any big modifications to the printer until you familiarize yourself with it and again, are able to get decent prints. Nothing is worse than starting out with something new and not knowing whether your issues are caused by a lack of experience or something you changed yourself.
Depending on the printer going for klipper directly might make it easier to use. Being able to have the abl probe and calculate what adjustments need to be made makes life so much easier.