
Monoprice drops the price of a dual extrusion 3D printer to $700 - prostoalex
http://www.monoprice.com/Product?p_id=11614
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hansjorg
Planet Money on NPR did an interesting piece on Monoprice last November. How
stuff gets cheaper:

[http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/11/28/366793693/episode-...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/11/28/366793693/episode-586-how-
stuff-gets-cheaper)

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Gifford
I though monoprice just sells out - of - tolerance factory seconds, and covers
the high failure rate which a free-replacement. The MicroUSB cables I got from
them were junk.

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kw71
While I'm leery of buying anything that requires a lot of "engineering" or
"design" from them, I've been quite happy with the cables and simple
accessories like memory card readers I've gotten from them. I've been studying
cables and connectors for a long time, and have had loads of my own custom
cables and connectors manufactured in China. While I haven't done an analysis
on the connectors they use, I recognize that their cables are made from high
quality cable stock - usually from Copartner, which I regard very highly and
believe to be the top shelf of the cable stock that you can get from China.
Their mains power cables are very nice too, and they stock enough variants
that my spec is usually met from their stock (for instance, 14 or 16AWG, right
angles, 10 feet) without having to special order.

I even have Monoprice supply some of the commodity accessory cables that I
include in various bits of kit that I sell, such as plain serial cables. I
thought it would reflect badly on me when they started molding their name into
the cable ends, but so far it seems that nobody's been unhappy.

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ChuckMcM
Wow that is tempting, the electronics are crap of course and the MK8 extruders
are known to be subject to heat creep but the frame and case and basics are
there.

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kw_banks
Is there an upgrade path for electronics & extruders that you would recommend?

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ChuckMcM
Currently I'm loving the bondtech extruder and the E3D V6 hot end combination.
Lots of control an very reliable in a wide variety of filament / control
issues. Building that as a 'direct drive dual extruder' on this platform might
be challenging given the available space but you could probably get it to work
in a bowden configuration with the hot ends on the print head and the
extruders attached to the back of the case next to the spools.

For electronics there is currently a big debate over the
Replicape/Smoothieboard type tradeoffs. All serious folks have dumped the
AVR/Arduino stuff in favor of either ARM Cortex-M stuff or the Beaglebone
Black (like a RasPi but with more I/O). Most folks prefer the higher power
8825 stepper motor drivers over the older 4498 versions. There is a challenge
there however, that if you're trying to run your motors that hot you are
probably over driving your printer. I've currently got a CRAMPS board with a
Beaglebone Black as a controller in my 'new' build, and I continue to print
parts as needed on my Replicator Dual (which was the last fully opensource
printer Makerbot made).

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brandonlipman
This looks a lot like a Makerbot printer. I have heard that the dual extruder
printers often get "jammed" more often. I like that they offer to replace any
defective printer. For $700 this is a great deal.

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dankohn1
Not strictly related, but I love this design of a next-generation 3D printing
technology.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3TgmvV2ElQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3TgmvV2ElQ)

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hunnypot
" _Black Metal_ Housing"

