Here at The Spaghetti Detective we are in the unique position where we have watched a lot of 3D prints on a wide variety of different 3D printers. A question we get asked frequently is “what is the best 3D printer?” While generally we try to stay agnostic to the type of printer, and catch print failures on any setup, for this series we wanted to try to provide an unbiased, data driven 3D printer review.

By publishing these statistics we hope to give everyone a better insight into the current state of the 3D printing industry and a look at some statistics of the best 3D printers at scale. The statistics generated below are aggregated from a sample size of over 1,000 unique 3D printers, over 100,000 unique print attempts, and over 10,000,000 hours of 3D print monitoring. If there are other metrics you’d like to see computed on some of the best 3D printers let us know in the comments below and we’ll try to include them in future 3D printer reviews.

Best 3D Printer Criteria #1: Popularity​

So you went to sleep with your 3D printer running. Excitedly, you wake up and run to go take a look at your beautiful new creation. To your dismay, something has gone horribly wrong. You’ve had a failed 3D print. It didn’t just create a fresh plate of filament spaghetti, but it has fully encased the hot end of your extruder in a PLA / PETG blob.

We’ve been there -- the racing heart, the panic, the fear your 3D printer will never run again. While it is possible you’ve damaged the 3D printer, it’s more likely you can get everything back to normal working order by following these steps. The most important part in 3D print clean up is to stay cool and don’t rush. Damage is more often caused by frustration and impatience when trying to pull off the cold hardened PLA / PETG blob with force than by the print failure itself.

TSD users have been active in helping the world fight COVID-19 by printing crazy amount of PPEs. Their heroic effort is also supported by TSD's offer that gives each of them 2 months of Pro account for FREE!

By popular demands, this offer is now being extended to people without a pre-existing TSD account, as long as you are a member of a group dedicated to printing PPEs.

In just a couple of days, the number of hours that The Detective has watched will cross the 10-Million mark.

This incredible milestone, first and foremost, is a clear demonstration of the heroic actions taken by the makers around the world to fight against COVID-19. In the past two months, TSD users have been printing Personal Protection Equipments (PPEs) days and nights. The daily print hours on TSD has more than doubled.

This milestone is also the direct result of TSD's contribution to this collective fight against COVID-19. Yes it costs us significant amount to serve those hours, but as a member of the 3D printing community, we want to help out since we are lucky enough to be doing just fine during the time of this pandemic.

To celebrate this incredible milestone, as well as to give our users some dopamine while we are all stuck home, we will give away some goodies and prizes.

Reddit user MidnightLink took the time to write and post an awesome guide on Reddit. Re-posting it here with his permission. Thank you MidnightLink!

Hey all! The other day I decided I wanted to run a dedicated TSD server at my home as I have 4 printers that I want to monitor, and no real want to send out a bunch of info to an unknown server. Looking into the options, and not wanting to have my PC on 24/7, I picked up a Jetson Nano and started working on getting it ready.

The instructions on the official GitHub for doing this are very lacking, and a lot of the commands don't work properly. (docker-compose for example is a MASSIVE pain as it's not native to ARM64, and there are a decent amount of missing dependencies) so here is the complete guide on how to set up your own Spaghetti Detective server on a Jetson Nano!

This is a guest post by Steve Wynveen. Steve Wynveen is a mechanical engineer that is a technician at heart.

Background​

As you are probably well aware, there is a shortage of PPE for hospital and other medical field staff. Froedert & Medical College of Wisconsin have posted plans for people to sew 100% cotton face masks. Several other patterns for sewists exist as well.

The Froedert ask for public help:

https://www.froedtert.com/stories/new-unused-personal-protective-equipment-other-supplies-gratefully-accepted

The Froedert mask plan:

https://www.froedtert.com/sites/default/files/files/2020-03/MaskInstructions_V2.pdf

3D printing hobbyists in The Spaghetti Detective community banded together to print PPEs for healthcare workers in their local community to help them fight COVID-19.

3D printing and virus are two things that usually don't intersect. But now when the world is upended by the coronavirus crisis, they do - in a way that not many people would expect.

The Spaghetti Detective is a 3D printing platform with tens of thousands of active 3D printing hobbyists.

When the coronavirus is attacking, they act together to save the world.

How? By designing and 3D printing thousands and thousands of face shields and masks and donate them to hospitals and healthcare workers who are in separate need of protective equipments; or by 3D printing things like door opener for touchless operation; or by simply showing gratitude to people who are fighting on the front lines.

Update on 04/05/2020: Since the start of the pandemic, TSD users have more than doubled the hours they print every day. This graph tells it all:

If you have a 3D printer, put it to good use by joining tens of thousands of us in the fight against coronavirus. If everyone one of us prints 10 face shields or masks a day, we will have an unmatched capacity of producing millions of protective gears in a very short amount of time.

Join us in this banded effort!

Effective March 10th, 2020, the Unlimited Detective Hour Pack will no longer be available to Pro subscribers. It'll be replaced by a 2000 Detective Hours / month Pack at the same price.

The Pro subscribers who have subscribed to the Unlimited Detective Hour Pack on or before that day will not be impacted. You will still get to enjoy unlimited Detective Hours no matter how many hours you print each month. This is our way to say "Thank You" to anyone who supported us in our early days!

Shop subscribers can still subscribe to the Unlimited Detective Hour Pack. Please contact us if you are interested.

February 19th, 2020 is a special day for The Spaghetti Detective. It is the day when The Detective watched her 5,000,000th print hour.

I clearly remember when I put The Spaghetti Detective beta online about the same time last year. I opened the server log to wait (patiently) for the 1st user to sign up. It took hours (thank god it was not days).

I clearly remember the dopamine run when I saw in the server log The Detective was called upon duty to check the very first webcam image for failure.

And I clearly remember when we reached 1000 print hours. It was a little more than 1 months after the beta launch. I went home and opened a bottle of champagne. But with or without the alcohol, my brain didn't have the capacity to just imagine what 5,000,000 print hours would look like.

And now, a little less than 1 year after the beta launch, 5,000,000th print hour is here. That doesn't even include the print hours watched on the private servers. This is a clear indication for the level of enthusiasm our fellow 3D printing hobbyists have toward The Spaghetti Detective.

Thank you everyone for being part of this amazing ride, for helping each other in the discord forum, for reporting bugs and helping us fix it, for bearing with the imperfection of our AI model, and for writing to us to simply cheer on the team.

The Detective wouldn't be where she is today without you, our lovely users!

Cheers,

Kenneth Jiang, Founder @ TSD

TSD's first The Spaghettilapse Contest is here. Everyone can participate. Winners will get free Pro accounts + DH packs, and get mentioned in our next newsletter (and backlink to your own home page if you'd like)!

What is The Spaghettilapse Contest?​

It is as simple as 1-2-3:

1. You upload Time-lapse videos to The Spaghettilapse Contest Facebook Group.
2. You get as many likes as you can, optionally by sharing your posts with friends or other Facebook groups.
3. The 3 time-lapses that get most likes will win. Winners get free TSD Pro account + free DHs.