It seems Makerbot’s benefit from the deal is immunity from prosecution, and Stratasys’s well practiced legal department is suing competitors for them. It’s kinda like how organized crime operates a protection racket.
Wow, that’s a lot of slop!
@bob_cousins harsh but pretty factual… 
If you are running your printer in an air-conditioned office, the chamber can help. Even PLA will want to shrink some; and the enclosure will help to also enclose the noise, too. So, no, it’s not like you critically need it for PLA, but it’s not totally pointless, either. I know a lot of folks around here print PLA with a warm bed and like it that way. Though, there’s plenty of folks that don’t bother, too.
I love my 5th gen. Don’t know what the fuss is about. So far, I haven’t had any issues that couldn’t happen on any 3D printer.
@Casual_Concepts_LLC the crazy high cost is my fuss.A $3000-$5000 printer should not have these issues.It is like if you had an iPhone with buzz and and limited memory. It isn’t that it doesn’t work, it is that it costs 2-3 times more then something that works better. It boils down to value for money.
I don’t care about the personal biases that allot of people have against large corporations (many of these are incredibly hypocritical, ie the MS bias vs Apple, both have similar issues), Also i am not against closed source projects.
(We have 2 of these at the office, and, I’m obviously biased)
On inspection we found more problems then shown here in the movie. We didn’t get great prints from them. And there clearly went a lot of engineering in some parts. But some really basic mistakes are made.
It also takes about 2 minutes to boot up. The one that booted that is. The other has been send back for a replacement, as it did not boot at all.
@Camerin_hahn I understand you. I feel like everything has its problems and unless you make it yourself, it’s probably over-priced. So far, I’ve been enjoying mine.
@Casual_Concepts_LLC I am happy with my kit, but and payed much less. I really think that dollar for dollar you get more out of printrbot than makerbot, maybe not in looks, but in quality.
@Daid_Braam I am glad that you do have MKI printers at the office, so you can keep fair comparisons (and I trust you)… Don’t take this as a reason to “only stay slightly above them” regarding reliability & quality (of the results) 
BTW, why 2 minutes? Slow heated bed / underpowered heater cartridges?
@Jeremie_Francois He said boot up, not heat up. It’s because they run on ARM processors running a version of linux, rather than a more suitable microcontroller-based architecture.
@Whosa_whatsis I could not make my mind without the distinction. Well, the ARM gives more power, is slower to boot, and probably trickier as a stepper controller indeed. Thanks for the info! Now, 2 minute boot (still, really that long?!) ought to be no annoying compared to hour-long prints… but I understand it certainly would itch anyway! – Hey does MKI provide the source code of what’s taken from OSS? 
I suspect they’re using some completely proprietary software layer on top of an open source kernel, interfacing with and depending on open source software but not modifying it in ways that would trigger a share-alike clause.
@Whosa_whatsis indeed, would have liked to know if + what kind of real time kernel they use (would they tell? I did not try to get the info)
According to http://gnurds.com/index.php/2012/09/14/stratasys-dimension-sst-768-hacking/comment-page-1/, the Dimension SST 768 uses “RHEL 8”. My guess is that this part of the development used a lot of people and resources that Stratasys provided, so it’s probably a similar architecture to those machines. Why reinvent the wheel if it’s already in your patent portfolio?
@Whosa_whatsis so is RHEL using a RTOS (like that of linuxCNC)? I though default kernels should not be trusted to properly time stepper commands. Interesting blogs btw
Apparently so? I don’t claim to be an expert on Stratasys machines, all I’m trying to say is that everything I’ve heard about the 5th Gen MBI electronics/software smells a lot like what I do know about the Stratasys machines.
I didn’t know Dimension machines were running Linux, interesting. For anyone who doesn’t know, RHEL stands for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Red Hat is a 1.3 billion$ company… Almost triple of Stratasys. And they say there’s no money in open source. 