In 2012, during the beginning of my senior year in college, I was also working in an Engineering group for the U.S. Air Force. In our Engineering group, the need for a rapid prototyping capability was high, but at the time, there were no affordable solutions that fit the requirements of our group. I spoke with my engineering director, and presented the idea of designing an FDM 3D printer for my engineering senior project, to fit our needs for the office, with our office funding much of the project. My director approved of the idea, so I proposed this project to my college, which was also approved. That was the beginning of how “ProtoPrintr” was born.

Remote G-Code upload and printing is available now. It was a little later than we promised. But we launched other features such as print job notifications (email, Telegram, and PushBullet) a lot earlier than scheduled. Guess we can give ourself a B+ on our score card? 😉

This is a short and easy-to-consume tutorial on how you can use this feature. Please give us feedback by commenting at the bottom.

We screwed up. Quite badly. We did the math wrong when we tried to calculate the cost of hosting TSD servers, and we underestimated the cost to serve webcam streaming by 50%.

The price we set for Pro plan was way too low to even cover the cost of servers and network bandwidth. Throwing in other miscellaneous items such as the cost to send emails and text, we were unfortunately not on a healthy path to keeping the lights on for everyone who loves TSD but doesn't want the hassle to run a private server.

Therefore, as much as we want to make TSD affordable for everyone, we had to make a tough decision to raise our price for Pro plan. The good news is that significantly more users than we expected subscribed to the Pro and Shop plans. As the result, we only need to raise the prices by about 25% to fill the gap.

The new pricing will take effect on December 16th, 2019.

The Spaghetti Detective has come out of beta! With improved AI accuracy, and shiny new user experience such as the sleek 25-frames-per-second webcam streaming, we are open to all 3D printing enthusiasts now!

We get it. Even if you have The Detective on the watch for you, you won't have a complete peace of mind until you see the webcam feed with your own eyes. That's why we just built the video feed and it's now in alpha testing. You can earn DG credits by enrolling in the alpha testing and reporting bugs to us!

OctoPrint is one of the best tool you can get for your 3D printer. It provides you with a convenient way to send G-Code to the printer, kick off the print, monitor the print via webcam, and pause/cancel the print all in a beautifully structured user interface.

Once you have indulged yourself in all the great benefits brought forward by OctoPrint, however, you will likely experience a panicking moment when all of the sudden you have lost access to OctoPrint.

That’s right! You can’t access OctoPrint when you are commuting, at work, shopping grocery, or anywhere outside your home wifi network.

In the past several months The Detective team has done a lot of experiments to figure out how we can improve the accuracy of the detection algorithm. We have tried tens of different ways. Most of which didn't work - just like any other Deep Learning projects. But more importantly, we learned through those failed experiments why they didn't work, and applied those learnings to the experiments that did work! The end result of those several months of work was 2.5x improvement on the accuracy.

In this article we will give you a behind-the-scenes glimpse on how those crazy Deep Learning technologies are used to catch 3D printing failures.

Readers be aware: very geeky content ahead.

A hands-on guide to show how to use the paper-method to level the bed for your Ender 3 printer, as well as the tips for the possible problems you may run into.

For any 3D printer that doesn't have auto bed leveling, such as Ender 3, CR-10, CR-10s, Anet A8, precise bed leveling is something that every successful print needs to nail in order to get it right. Bed leveling is literally the foundation (or making sure that the foundation is set up correctly, at least) of a good print. Without a level bed (or software compensation to account for the unlevel bed) your print is often destined for the trash bin, wasting time and money. How much time and money is up to you, because The Spaghetti Detective has got your back!

3D printer users have a long history of fighting bed adhesion problems. That's why we have all these creative solutions: glue stick, glass bed, blue tape, you name it. For starters, we want to give you an overview on what factors play a role in bed adhesion, and how to get them right. We will drill down to each of them in details in the blogs to follow.

Hey – We here at The Spaghetti Detective are on a mission to make sure that whenever you press that print button, The Spaghetti Detective has your back. There’s nothing more frustrating than starting a print, walking away or getting distracted, and you come back to what you thought was going to be the latest flexible dinosaur or benchy, and its nothing but separate strands of filament, all scattered on your build plate.