OK, I usually never post anything about a kickstarter. I choose to participate or not, nothing more. But this caught my attention.
Worried About Your 3D Printer Malfunctioning While You’re Away?
Sorry. But 15.222€ as funding for a thing that everyone can create at home with development costs of 200$ ???
Iam sorry but just use octoprint, an IP cam or something else. You can cut power with a 10$ IP-Remote-Plug…
I’d love to not have to f*ck with a Pi for these features. But I don’t do crowdfunding, because crowdfunding.
@VolksTrieb There’s a lot to product development that you seem to be oblivious about. A finished product is more than just cobbling together off the shelf parts and calling it good. Good for a proof of concept but there’s more stages and a lot more costs to making a tidy product. Then there’s molds, custom boards, custom firmware, custom software, on top of mundane expenses of operating a business, support, etc.
@Jeff_DeMaagd yeah like what? Iam into electronics. Are you? Whats the meaning of a product that already exists in a low price range to spend money on developing? And also. Whats f*cking around with a pi mean? Its simple. Its preinstalled (octopi for example) and you can use it directly.
Price discussions aside - cutting power doesn’t help you if the wiring has already caught flame due to a over current or a similar incident. So unless you have a proper smoke detector circuit set up (ideally including a sprinkler system), don’t leave your printer unattended if you don’t trust it! And probably not even then. Fun fact: I wrote OctoPrint, and I STILL don’t leave my printers run unattended, I just have them in a different room.
And what that thing provides indeed can be solved with a simple relay + ESP8266 (or a Pi + OctoPrint or some home automation software) and if you want to be extra fancy you can also have it automatically monitor if there’s still data going over the serial line and cut power if not (firmware crashed, potentially with heaters on). That has the added benefit that it will still work when the cloud services of that startup are shut down and also costs you less than what they want just for a cloud controlled outlet with webcam.
When you decide to use stuff like that to attach something physical in your home to the internet, always research the security concept of the services you are interacting with too. IoT devices don’t have the best track record when it comes to the companies behind them making a good effort of protecting your hardware from unauthorized access. Case in point: https://www.amazon.com/gp/review/R2JVRCO8T1ON0R
@VolksTrieb don’t know where you get 200$, as 49 aud equals 49 canadian which equals to 30% less usd.
But yeah, with a rpi and few electronics, you can do that, its even mentioned in the listing itself. At that price for something already made, thing i cannot make myself because i am 0 in electronics, 49$ aud is not that bad at all.
@foosel agreed on the fire, that thing is not 100% fool proof, but i was thinking using it more on my shapeoko 3 than my 3D printer 
@Jean-Francois_Talbot Contrary to gut feeling the thing most likely to actually cause a fire in a 3D printer is not the hotend that’s actually supposed to get hot, but rather the wiring or the electronics due to currents too high for the used terminals or wires (or due the wiring having gone bad - constant movements can be bad for wires), and that risk exists regardless of whether the gantry controlled by those electronics is used to add or remove material.
But actually the thing making me most go “keep your hands off” here is the cloud aspect (and if you want to allow remote control from anywhere in the world with zero install there must be some cloud component in play here) which they don’t go into any detail on at all, and that doesn’t bode too well due to the aforementioned reasons. I’d not trust my devices to be attached to something that possibly anyone might be able to turn on and off through the internet, they might have some glaring issues in the implementation of their server platform or communication protocol and they haven’t stated anything at all (e.g. in their Risks section) on how to address and ensure proper quality there. And then the question is if the whole solution even works without going through their servers at all (if it does, nice, then you could at least disable the “call home” and still use the stuff on your LAN and VPN). Convenient? Yes. Safe? No.
But of course that’s just my two cents.
@foosel 100% agreed. I would not operate my 3D printer nor my CNC while not being home.
So thing’s remote feature, for me, would always stay within my secondary non internet connected wifi network.
I totally agree that no matter how careful you craft software, even if you get to run a decent pen test on it, that does not guarantees there are no holes in it, and it would be a problem.
But for a local network it might not be too bad, depending how its integrated.
And btw, thank you for your efforts on octoprint.
Why does nobody ever mention how improbable it is that you’ll actually see and stop a fire in time via remote monitoring? It takes under a minute for a fire to start and spread beyond the printer. By the time smoke or flames are visible enough on camera to get your attention, it’s probably too late. When that guy with the Solidoodle had his house burn down, he said by the time he smelled smoke IN THE NEXT ROOM it was too late to stop the fire. Unless you’re right next to the printer or literally watching it every minute via the remote monitoring app, you’re not going to respond in time.
The only proper solution here is the printer engineering solution. Thermal fuses, over-current fuses, firmware watchdogs, flex-rated wiring, adequate wire gauge, adequate connectors, and good PCB design and quality.
@Ryan_Carlyle there is still the miss steps and occasional slicing error where you forgot the bridge setup or whatever.
At any rate we can all agree it is not a safety feature, as much as it is connivence feature.
I’ve been running with an OctoPi + camera + z-wave dongle + zwave outlet switch + OpenVPN on a home router + OpenVPN client on my phone for like a year now.
It’s more of a convenience thing than a safety thing.
As indicated, the exceptionally, exceptionally shoddy electrical predilections of the 3d printing community should really be fixed first.
It’s amazing that it’s gone on this long.
They say the best thing about unsustainable situations is that they are unsustainable.
But something in the community must be sustaining this.
@Richard_Kranium “The world’s cheapest 3D printer!!1!” everything goes and buys it
“I bought this cheap hotend/RAMPS/whatnot clone from China because it was only 10 bucks!”
^-- there’s what’s sustaining it
@foosel So how do we fix that?
Or would it be easier to simply fix the underlying design?
The problem with, say, poor wiring, isn’t a sheepish consumer.
The problem with poor wiring is poor wiring. Fix the wiring.
@Richard_Kranium There are such things as hardware certifications, but they cost the manufacturer money. And they get faked, so even if what you buy claims to be certified, that’s not 100% fool proof.
That aside, IMHO the problem with poor wiring is also with the consumers who buy a product from a company who skimped on quality wiring because they don’t think about why that product they bough was at the price point, all they see is “SO CHEAP MUCH DEAL!”. And that problem is a general one, sadly even when I look left and right in my own social circles… Lots of people jump on a bargain without thinking about why that bargain can even exist. If product A costs 50% less than product B even though on the first look it’s the same, there must be a reason for that to even be financially viable. Two possibilities being product B was sold at too high a markup or someone cut corners in product A. Lots of further possibilities.
Buying at a bargain doesn’t imply you are getting garbage, but there will be a reason why it was cheaper than equal products, and you should figure out why that could be and what consequences that has for you BEFORE buying. Considering that spending money gives you a certain amount of economical power, you have a responsibility as a consumer too.
And sorry, but I don’t have a better idea on how to fix that besides trying to educate people and talking them into being responsible buyers. It’s too widespread an issue that goes way beyond 3D printing and the like.
I have little faith in educating the consumer. It’s a noble cause, but I see little evidence of its effectiveness.
Even ignoring that, it seems like trying to fix the problem of bad design by trying to raise the collective IQ of an entire consumer base seems like the longest possible path to solving that problem.
I think it’s the production end that needs the “education”.
@Richard_Kranium There are hybrid approaches. For example, the “responsible” manufacturers (or crowdfunding or whatever) could come up with a safety-in-design certification that consumers would be able to recognize. It’s relatively easy to educate consumers to “only buy printers with the 3DSafe logo” or whatever.
Not foolproof, but an improvement, and then if an uncertified printer burns a house down, the fact that there is a responsible industry already promoting safety standards will help head off a lot of knee-jerk regulation. Shows that the problem is shoddy imports rather than 3D printers in general.
You do probably need some money and possibly licensing fees to make this work. The consortium or whatever would have to be willing to pursue legal action when the Chinese copy the logo without complying.
Just imagining a bit… consider a two-tier approach. A paid-license including one-time design review for a Tier 1 level, that gets your printer listed on the central list of safe printers. And a free / open-source Tier 2 level that can be self-applied to products much like the OSHW logo.
@Nathan_Walkner you can’t stop direct sales via AliExpress or whatever, but when there are established US distributors and resalers involved (say FlashForge, Wanhao, Afinia, etc) I think you can go after the importers. (You can with patents anyway – I’m less sure about copyrights.)