I just realized now similar this thumbnail is to the thumbnail for the Makerbot video. You could seriously get confused about which is which just by looking at them. But hey, if this video gets the sort of view numbers that the Makerbot one is, I’m okay with it.
I am so in love with the Voxel that an affiliate link is now featured in my store. The first time I used this machine I realized that this is the 3D printing experience I’d been longing for. It’s not that it prints better or is more capable. It’s only about the ease of use this machine has over every other one I’ve ever used.
Every time I do a video about a closed source machine, there are the open source apologists who flock with long winded comments that boil down to “My printer is better than that printer because it’s open source and it’s open source, so it’s better. So open source your open source or I’m gonna open source open source open source. Idiot.” And I get it. Open source is awesome. Skilled philanthropy in action. Yes. I like open source. I support open source. But I can’t recommend open source.
Open source suffers from a problem I like to call “good enough”. Take, for instance, my raspberry Pi powered teleprompter. While not, technically, and open source project, it too suffers from “good enough”. I recently modified it to center the text, which means my eyes no longer drift to the left for no good reason when recording a video. The text is in the center, closer to the camera. How did I accomplish this? Well, after learning just enough about what ‘awk’ does, I added two new bash scripts so I could easily just type “show ./script/thescriptiwant.txt” and it parses the file, centers the text, and displays it with ‘less’ (with a ‘skip the hidden characters’ flag because that became necessary for some reason) so that I can advance the script as I want it. Dose it work? Sure. Is it the sort of system I would hand to a total stranger and let them use? Heck no. But I’m not making a system to share with others, so it’s “good enough”, meaning development on it stops.
“Good enough” is damning. Literally. It’s like a dam that stops progress. No matter how much time and money you pour into your Ender 3 or CR-10, you will never have the user experience of the Voxel/Adventure 3 or even the Weedo F192. Open source doesn’t provide that at any cost yet. Maybe one day they will, and there’s always someone who’s “working on it right now”, but a bird in the hand is worth a thousand that you’re working on. It’s why the Glowforge can charge $3000 and raised $40 million in startup capital, when there are tons of open source laser cutters out there for a fraction of the cost. Because it’s not the output alone that matters. The journey to get there is important too.
I will continue to support open source until it becomes as mature and buttery smooth as anything you can buy commercially. But I will continue to recommend the best user experience I can, and for now, that’s the Voxel/Adventure 3.
