Back in 2018 I bought an Ender 3 and over the years after a lot of tinkering and upgrading I got really sick of having to work on it, so I shelved it permanently a few years ago. I didn’t have very much I wanted to print by then anyway, and another print failure that resulted in a giant ball of plastic covering the hotend for the umpteenth time tipped me over the edge. I could only disassemble it for service so many times before I started wanting to give it the Office Space treatment.
But now I would like to start printing again, only this time I want to actually just print things and not feel like an unpaid 3D printer mechanic. I don’t need anything fancy, I’m still only going to print ~95% PLA with the occasional PETG or ASA maybe. Really all I want is the equivalent of an Ender 3 only reliable, quiet, and with auto bed levelling (also having an actually flat bed to start with would be nice). Any kind of mandatory (or pseudo-mandatory via arbitrary feature-lock) cloud connectivity is a hard no from me. I will use Octoprint to manage it.
Are there any cheap printers that fill that role these days? I’m well and truly OOTL
If you want to print in ASA, you’re going to want an enclosed model. I recently bought a Qidi Q2 after going through the same frustration with my old Ender 3. My main selling points on it were that it was capable of handling stuff like ABS and ASA, and most importantly, gave me full control of the device. Unlike Bambu, I have the root password to the controller board (which runs Klipper), and the (admittedly mediocre) AI spaghetti detection runs fully locally. It also has a carbon filter built in, which is a must if you intend to put the printer anywhere indoors and print in something other than PLA or PETG.