I’ve had a lot of fun with #D printing, and as with many things that I do, I went in boots and all. Originally I started because my wife was doing it, and to help her I got started as well. We made all the usual useless stuff like dragons and lizards, lots of sheep and dogs for the grandkids, even a nice vase or six.
We’ve got a couple of Ender 3 Neos, and a Voxelab Aquila (A Creality 3 clone).
We also have a Creality Sonic Pad, which was quite handy, because it meant that designs could be sent to the printer over wifi, and monitored from my desktop. It was, and still is, an interest that we could enjoy together and create stuff. The problem is that when things go wrong, they can go really wrong. I’m not just talking about stupid stuff like models sticking to the plate and prints that failed due to error
I get upset when there are software errors or machine failures, and you have to go looking for spare parts, and you discover that rather than updating the Ender as new improvements were made, they released whole new versions. Picking through those conversions to find the parts that you need is a proper pain, especially if the part that you buy isn’t the right one.
Then there’s the Sonic Pad itself! Released in September of 2022, it received updates until January 2024, and here we are in 2026 with nothing since. And when the Sonic Pad goes wrong, you have to go searching for answers to the problem, which makes matters worse.
I recently spent most of Sunday night diagnosing problems with the thing when it started spitting out error codes. It meant a crash course in SSH (Secure Shell) for Windows to find the problem. Then, after I’d been through the wringer a couple of times, I worked out that the Sonic Pad/printer USB system wasn’t communicating. So I changed USB cords, did a thousand restarts of both units, and still no joy. The last thing I did was plug the USB cord into my computer, and bingo, the PC picked it up.
Now if I wrecked something by getting the filament stuck in the extruder, which I have done, and which I’ve learned to repair myself, even to the point of buying an extra one just in case, it’s my problem, not Creality’s.
I had been looking at upgrading to the Creality K2 Plus, but I’ve decided to look elsewhere, given the maker’s history of similar models that don’t sit well together, and that aren’t supported after a year or two. As I said in the title, I’m a writer, not a tinkerer. It’s fine if people want to tinker, and I do enjoy fixing things, but when the fixing becomes the point of the hobby, rather than creating stuff? I don’t think so Creality!