Sovol SV06

I've had a very good experience with the Sovol SV06. It was around CA$300 when I bought it a year ago. I'm considering getting a second one.

I’ve also had a good experience with my SV06, though if I were buying a new printer to replace it now I’d probably pick a Bambu. It does require some tinkering and few minor upgrades (nylock mod for bed levelling, oldham couplers for Z-wobble) to get good results as well as plenty of profile tuning, though now I’m there it’s been rock-solid.

Could you elaborate on the SV06's shortcomings? I bought one after selling my Ender 3 (the shittiest machine ever made) and it has everything you want from a home 3D printer. Auto-calibration, no manual bed leveling, an excellent extruder, powder-coated PEI sheet (can print PETG straight on the bed without damaging it) and it's really sturdy. Oh, and it works out of the box (after some quick assembly). It's basically a Prusa without the signature orange and exorbitant pricing. (nothing against Prusa, I love their products, they're just really expensive for the average tinkerer.)

Interesting, I am in the same boat with the author. Recently have started to dabble more in embedded devices. I am building a well water level sensor. First I tried to use an NRF based board, but I got bogged down with the SDK ecosystem, it's really meant for experienced embedded engineers of companies. Then I fell back to much simpler ESP32-C3/S3 boards, which are great, widely supported, easy to set up and pretty reliable. I hook it up to the distance sensor (HC-SR04) and make the distance calculations work. You also have to add a voltage converter if you want to run from batteries, because the sensor requires 5V - easy enough after some reading and failing. Then you have a mess of boards and cables, you need to solder it to a board which requires tools and a bit playing around. Now I was missing an enclosure, tried a few store bought junction boxes, none were perfect, and I decide to buy my own 3D printer (the future is now, print your own things, learn modelling, etc). Those are actually pretty easy compared to everything else, I printed my first models <1h after receiving the printer. Modelling in programmatic OpenSCAD or my currently preferred tool CadQuery - easy to pick up in a few hours of playing around. So yeah, I have had my printer for exactly a week, and I have printed almost a dozen successful prints, and designed a couple of usable and functional parts. Don't be afraid of 3d printers, oh and also you can get good printers for much less than 500 USD, I bought a…

In 2023: not a ton. Maybe some better repeatability. You're likely to have fewer out-of-the-box problems; they spend a lot on quality control. If you're just interested in the hobby, the Elegoo Neptune 3 Pro is, for my money, a fantastic entrypoint that you can get for under $250. (I own the larger version, the Plus, which has a bigger bed and turns the fans off when not printing; it's sub-$350.) There's also the Sovol SV06 (and its larger Plus variant) in the same ballpark, though they're having some significant QC problems these days. It's also in the $200-$250 range. I have one of these too and it's pretty nice, but I have a first-run one before the QC problems started to rear up. The Prusa stuff is absolutely better made than the Sovol stuff--though the Elegoo stuff is remarkably high-quality, especially for the price--but frankly it is emphatically not four times better. The delta shrinks further if (and in this crowd, maybe when ) you install the Klipper firmware to replace the stock Marlin stuff; Prusa's custom Marlin builds are better than the competition, but Klipper beats it all hollow, and the performance benefits of Klipper on the SV06 and the Neptune 3 Pro/Plus are huge when it comes to faster acceleration and thus faster printing.

CoreXY printers absolutely do have more stable kinematics for better acceleration, but modern open printer firmware--mostly Klipper, though you can do it with Marlin in an unsatisfying way--implements resonance compensation, aka input shaping, in a way that really improves acceleration (which matters way more than top speed for most prints). My Sovol SV06 can make a 3DBenchy in 37 minutes after doing my input shaping samples. That's not as fast as an X1 Carbon, but it cost a quarter as much, and I tend to think that when it comes to 3D printers that bandwidth is more valuable than latency.

> Now when people ask for FDM printer recommendations, I tell them that this hobby has two main paths: One path regards the printer as a tool to create things for other projects; the other path has the printer as the project itself. This is undeniably true at the youtube content level. But at the printer level I think consumers will crash into this far less if buying the latest. Creality’s three new Ender 3 V3 models are all low-tinkering models, even the cheapest. So are the Anycubics. Sovol’s latest machines like the SV06 Ace manage to be both fully open source and also highly tuned out of the box. As much as I admire the build quality of (most of) the Bambu Lab machines, in real terms what they have actually achieved is making the closed source, closed build, hard to upgrade and repair, RFID-chipped-consumables printer acceptable to the market. They even almost succeeded in making printing dependent on the cloud, until their little distributed industrial accident happened.

> You can’t beat Prusa: the printers come out of the box working perfectly At the cost of being old and slow. I wouldn't be throwing roses to Prusa after they effectively ceded the market to everyone else. For $200, you can get a Sovol SV06 that's a smarter iteration on the MK3/MK3S (while also being open-source both in hardware and software); for $500 you can get a Bambu P1P that's much faster and has better vertical integration through the slicer (and for $100 more than that you can get a P1S, which is high-temp ready while also doing all the same things as the P1P).

So...the thing is, the real competitors to the Prusa i3 printers are open-source. Like, actually. The Sovol SV06 is a Chinese printer very clearly based on the Prusa i3 heritage. It's an excellent alternative to the MK3S+ and the firmware source and CAD designs are on GitHub. There are definitely budget-range 3D printers with an i3 heritage (probably not derived tightly from the Prusa design, a lot of them seem like the product of one engineer and a disassembled Ender 3), but the SV06 is for my money the one to get , and it's a quarter of the price of an MK3S+, without the bizarre-in-2023 "preassembled" option that's table stakes for everybody else. The bigger problem seems to be that the i3 printers are table stakes now , while Prusa engine seized up and forward progress went to pot. The Prusa XL is not vaporware but it's close and preposterously expensive , while the MK4 released without input shaping in their extremely customized port of Marlin. Those "Chinese knockoffs" are shipping Klipper-based printers, with SBCs, where you get that for free. And then you have the Bambu printers, which are OSS-compliant where required (their slicer is a derivative of PrusaSlicer) but built an in-house OS (not actually that shocking, and almost certainly not pirated; 3D printers just aren't that hard) that has given them a printer that's conservatively 18-24 months ahead of everybody except maybe Prusa with the XL. I really don't like Bambu's patent saber-rattling, that sucks, but…

> since nearly every other mk4/mk3s clone that has been out there really really sucks except the ones from Prusa The Sovol SV06 has been selling like gangbusters for the last six months or so, and it's excellent. And it's sub-$250. If you move a little further away from the i3 clones (and the SV06 absolutely is clone-y), that's where Elegoo--or Anycubic if you buy judiciously, or even Creality if you get it on sale--still make the argument quite difficult.