I finally made the plunge, well not so deep with this printer :)…
About 1/2 through the default ‘cat’ and it’s freaking amazing! Working perfect, if a bit slow.
Amazing to be honest, couldn’t have asked for much more! Using Hatchbox PLA as it had great reviews and seems to be working great with this printer!
FUN FUN FUN…
Now need to figure out what SW to use to ‘design’ stuff… 
FreeCAD
Openscad
Where did you purchase this?
I got mine on Newegg, around 150 if I remember right, works amazing
I got it off Amazon for 205, as MonoPrice was on back
order, figured 5 more plus free shipping was worth it. Well the cat finished and I have to say I am completely blown away, it’s dam near perfect.
@Ross_Hendrickson Thanks, playing with TinkerCad right now. Pretty neat.
I got mine last week and like it. Yes, it is a bit slow, but it hit the right price. I can get the cat that was included on the SD card to print fine, but anything else that I have tried to print just fails to adhere to the base and all the filament wraps around the nozzle and collects there. I would love to know other peoples secrets to make reliable prints.
I bought two of these for my kids’ school makerspace. Fantastic value for the money. There’s also a decent wiki and forum that are quite helpful http://mpselectmini.com/
A sheet of glass on the print bed plus aqua net hair spray, and the height adjusted correctly and it sticks like crazy.
That works with PLA. Don’t know about any other filament.
It will print PETG on blue tape on the aluminum bed but you need to get the bed temperature up to print PETG on glass. A second heating element plus insulation under the aluminum should work. Going to help the kids at the school work on that as a project.
@Gerard_Hickey it sounds like your bed is too low. The cat has a big raft with a high and over extruded first layer. That makes it somewhat immune from poor leveling or having the table a little too close/too far from the nozzle at Z=0.
For regular raft-free prints, replace the tape it came with with blue painters tape and get the leveling correct (home the printer and you should be able to just barely slide a piece of 20# paper around between the nozzle and the tape at all four corners). Also, in case it isn’t clear, just grab the X carriage and table to move things around. My daughter, who was helping me was trying to use the controls to move the nozzle to each corner and that was taking her forever. When she saw me grab them and just push them over, she had such a big sigh.
It took about 10 minutes to get each printer set up right (once you go for the quicker “push to move XY”). Since then, those things are reliable as clockwork.
I recommend onshape, it’s easy to use and has a ton of really comprehensive tutorials!
I have the same one, use some kapton tape on the bed, it seems to work better…
Also just figured out to use the CURA that came with the printer, I had previously downloaded CURA from the web and it didn’t like that much, my first part (test) is printing now just fine. Lesson learned…
What did you tweak in Cura? I’m new to it as well cause I’ve used makerbots previously.
@Anthony_Truss I just set it up per the manual and it works great. Temp is never more than 2-3 off as well so seems I might have got a ‘good one’. My test part came out great, amazing what 3d printing will/can do.
Blender is difficult to master, but very good for more organic or non-tech objects. See the YouTube videos by the printing professor.
Unfortunately, the CURA that comes with the printer is Windows. Not so helpful when one has OSX to work with. So yes, I downloaded CURA from the website and have been trying to tweak the initialization gcode. Several references that I have found indicate to base the Monoprice printer off of the M200 printer config, but the latest download no longer has a M200 config.
I have also looked at the gcode of the test print and found that several examples seem to be feeding filament faster than test print was doing. I have adjusted my initialization gcode and that really did not help much. Is there anything in CURA settings that adjusts the height of the first layer?
Meanwhile I will try to level the bed again. Each time I try to do this I work to get the head to not drag the paper back and forth as I move the head (by hand). Is that a good practice or is there another rule of thumb that would be better when leveling the bed?
I wiggle the paper back and forth and am looking for a feel of slight dragging resistance. The paper is touching both tape and hotend but is not in danger of being torn or creased.
One other thing, it can be a good idea to do the bed alignment with a warm hotend (120C or so). If there is some hardened plastic stuck to the nozzle, it can screw up the alignment. Dont get too hot. Printing temp (210C and up) can char the paper and create a risk.
On the slicer settings, both simplify3d and kisslicer allowed you to change the first layer height. I 99% use simplify3d and just changed the dimensions of the print volume and zero from my deltabots and the prints were fine. Never tried cura, sorry.
