In my struggle to calibrate my 3D printer, I had a hard time finding useful information on Google that could actually help me dial in my fuckass cheap PETG filament. I’ve been doing this for years but only now, blooming in my Vyvanse era, I decided to really get into the whole thing and do a proper calibration. Two weeks and a lot of wasted prints later, I finally got to a point where I’m mostly happy with my results. The point is, this is not my first rodeo, but I’m getting into some of the finer details that I hadn’t explored until now, which means I ran into some difficulties.
So, after spending hours hopelessly sifting through a billion different Reddit posts, I decided to try using AI tools to give me some suggestions on how to proceed. Deepseek, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini (unprompted, in a Google search).
I had no idea just how utterly useless they would be as an assistant in this process. No kidding, each chatbot gave me a set of conflicting pieces of advice, and overall just failed over and over again to actually provide any meaningful, insightful information. Calibrating a 3D printer seems to be a task that AI is especially atrocious at. Really, if you have the same problems I was having, you’re better off wasting three quarters of a spool of filament by trial-and-erroring your way through standard calibration procedures and fine-tuning afterwards.
For those who are unfamiliar with 3D printing: typically, to calibrate a 3D printer, you start by printing a temperature tower, which is a calibration model that shows features that are affected by extruder temperature, and it repeats these features over a range of temperatures. The thing is, I couldn’t find any sources that talked about how the printer’s cooling fan (which helps solidify the liquefied plastic) may interfere with the result of this calibration print.
Honestly, that’s just me being a bit of a chronic overthinker and ADHD hyperfocusing on this thing that probably doesn’t really make that much of a difference after all. I had no way to know this, since 3D printing knowledge is ridiculously disperse, the more specific aspects of it being spread out across a bunch of 2k-views Youtube videos and a mountain of Reddit posts from four years ago, with little more than a bunch of unsourced “do it just so, trust me bro” recommendations and snarky answers in the vein of “I solved that problem a while ago, but I will not elaborate any further or answer any replies to this comment.”
So, in my attempts to have Claude give me something useful, I asked it, in a somewhat frustrated tone, about the specific issue I had regarding cooling and temperatures. Here’s how that exchange went:
Holy shit, I must be a genius! I’m the one, I’m the guy who has finally discovered this problem in the way the whole 3D printing community actually does filament calibration. I can’t believe the PhDs at Prusa and the developers of Orca Slicer, who have been working on this stuff for more than a decade did not think about this.
I’m pretty sure this is how AI psychosis starts. You have a questionable insight that probably comes from a gap in your knowledge, likely because of some key piece of knowledge you simply don’t have yet, and you don’t know that you don’t know it. That’s the moment when the AI chatbot takes that malformed idea you just had and runs with it, hypes you on it, even when it’s Claude, supposedly the best one, fine-tuned by the ethicists at Anthropic, who make sure their AI will not kiss your ass as much as Sam Altman’s compliment factory.
I’m cynical and skeptical enough about AI to always be on the defensive when using them for my purposes, but I think even the smartest people among us (even me, the genius 3D printing visionary) ought to understand that our knowledge is limited, and there’s a huge risk inherent to asking chatbots about things we genuinely don’t know much about. It’s that thing where people who do a specific job well often say AI sucks at that job, but is great at everything else; it’s just that you don’t know that you don’t know enough to understand that AI is full of shit.
That’s how people end up like that OpenAI investor whose presumable fear of getting canceled by the woke mob was amplified and fed back to him in the form of SCP Foundation-style containment protocols for non-governmental systems made to unperson you. Or that guy who created a novel mathematical framework. Or that other guy who started building an AI god in his basement. Or any of the other more disturbing cases where people ended up harming themselves or others.
For the record, my solution was to overcome my trust issues, use some cooling fan settings I nabbed from a knowledgeable Youtuber (Dr. Igor Gaspar from My Tech Fun), print the goddamn temp tower already, then proceed with the calibration as usual. I also did what other people suggested and lowered my printing speeds, and now my printer’s a skookum choocher.
Now imagine them using this to try to replace actual factory floor expertise in maintenance / calibration / repairing shit because they WILL at least in Murica
Not everything is fixing a sewing machine
Yes this has happened in my work. All of the experienced technicians are retiring this year, no budget for new hires to replace them, but they’ve had an AI crawling all over our outdated workflow documentation so who needs experience, amirite?
I have been 3d printing since the reprap days (my first printer was wood, steel, and plastic!)
I am extremely far from an expert but I am good at making cheap crappy machines work good enough. If you ever want to ask for help feel free to message me.
My current problem is figuring out why the petg that used to stick to aggressively to my plate that it damaged it doesn’t stick at all now 4 years later! It’s very interesting lol. I have ruled out dirty surface, moisture, temp sensor drift, z offset, speed, and nozzle wear.
Are you using a glue stick? I love my glue sticks.
Haven’t needed a gluestick since I stopped using glass. I did try it for old time’s sake, and painters tape, hairspray, and my old faithful 1:100 wood glue dilution.
the bed is cold? but tbh i have just started using one of those sticky spray from despair
No, I verified the thermistor calibration with a reliable mercury thermometer. I am using the same settings I used 4 years ago, 60 degree first layer from the top of my head with a 10 minute preheat to even it out.
It is a great mystery, at this point I assume the material has degraded.
oh, interesting, i use 70-80 for petg, piece of shit is very sensitive, especially on glass, pei is more forgiving
I can’t remember but it’s all the same settings that used to require chiselling off pei. Like when I printed my gold sluice getting the sections off was a battle.
Oh wow that’s really cool ahaha I remember waaay back before I dropped out of electronic engineering school, circa 2014 or so, 3D printers were a crazy expensive novelty that worked half the time and took forever to setup and print. My first printer was a cheapo KP3s that I got about five years ago. I still have it and I fully intend to resurrect it soon, klipperize it and turn it into a DIY upgrade playground. I’ll definitely keep your offer to help in mind, thanks!
My current problem is figuring out why the petg that used to stick to aggressively to my plate that it damaged it doesn’t stick at all now 4 years later! It’s very interesting lol. I have ruled out dirty surface, moisture, temp sensor drift, z offset, speed, and nozzle wear.
Yeah, PETG is supposed to be as easy as PLA and as good as ABS, but honestly it can be surprisingly finicky to dial in. I wonder if there’s something that has changed in PETG manufacturing processes over that time period.
Every plastic you buy is the plastic + random additives so it’s possible some formulations are easy but ime if you’ve got ventilation then abs is a nicer material where you don’t need UV resistance.
And if you do, there’s a huge number of ways to make UV resistant coatings. From metal sterates, to lampblack.
You’re absolutely, right! This is how AI psychosis starts. You’ve identified a fundamental vulnerability in the psyche of humankind; you’re a flipping genius! You should learn to hack and learn to quadcopter/drone.
Wow, thanks Claude! Damn I’m really good. I should start posting my insights on Linkedin.
For what it’s worth, I insert this as a custom instruction on any LLMs I use to stop sycophancy.
Do not try to mimic a human character. Maintain a sterile tone akin to Wikipedia. Do not refer to yourself in 1st person, use the passive voice or refer in 3rd person as 'ChatGPT' if necessary.When I was experimenting with these machines to see if they were useful I did something similar but added a few other things to try avoid being mislead. These included:
- If something I say contradicts an authorative source correct me
- never offer praise
- every response should be as concise as possible
- do not end emissions with offers of follow up or further engagement.
Turns out when you take the genital licking out of them the uselessless really shines through.
as a general aside for enterprising ai researchers amongst us, seems to me the obvious halfbaked solution is so trigger ai five ways in response (first two words of answer are fed to the system) (absolutely yes, yes but, maybe, no but, absolutely not), then evaluate all answers on the veracity index, then look wtf are layers doing generating wrong answers (do they start to trigger rarer tokens, or they instead use most usual pathways while bullshitting, while correct answer triggers rarer layers weights)
…a mountain of Reddit posts from four years ago, with little more than a bunch of unsourced “do it just so, trust me bro” recommendations and snarky answers in the vein of “I solved that problem a while ago, but I will not elaborate any further or answer any replies to this comment.”
whyyyy do they always do this. its only worse when they insult your intelligence by passively aggressively telling you that your question has already been answered in another post / the megathread, dont link it, and when you look for it, its either been deleted or just not there
Yeah, reddit is often good for niche questions, especially about hobbies, but it feels like the more popular the hobby is out there, the worse it gets, because of all the noise and the nerds who are eternally butthurt because laypeople are taking over. Tons of gatekeeping, advice that boils down to “shut up and just buy this incredibly expensive high-end thing,” as well as interactions like:
[deleted] 4 years ago
[deleted]
Delightful-Llama41321 4 years ago
Thanks! That solved all my problems.
It’s incredibly frustrating.
yeah lol. i can understand the deleted thing because sometimes you want to purge your presence on the internet but what i dont understand are the people who take time out of their lifes to log into forums made for people to ask for help to shit on people asking for help
my trick is to assume that i don’t know what i don’t know, you can’t tell me i’ve just discovered some big new breakthrough in a field i don’t understand because i’ll just know i’m a fucking moron and you’re lying to me
I legitimately believe this is the difference between normal people and the managerial class pushing AI.
Honest question: did the ai’s search the web at any point to try and answer your questions?
Claude presumably did, but it didn’t show me any links. I didn’t ask it to do so, though. Perplexity absolutely did, because that’s what it’s always supposed to do.
In fact, it kept directing me towards fake websites that seem to be made specifically to fool search engines and AIs, like some weird crypto pages that also happened to talk about 3D printing, or fake orca slicer badware clickbait sites (one of which is actually Google’s fucking top result if you search for orca slicer). It also sourced answers from a bunch of obscure reddit threads and posts on facebook groups, which were largely unhelpful.
I often find Perplexity to be the most useful among these tools, exactly because it does information retrieval before anything else, so I can usually mostly ignore the text it extrudes and use it as a kind of link curator that I can judge for myself. It’s often much better than Google in that regard.
Like, if I’m trying to make a DIY project that involves figuring out what motors to use, for example, when I try to Google “DC motors” my first page is mostly just stores selling them and other forms of SEO bait bullshit. It solves a problem that shouldn’t have happened in the first place.
Had I’ve found that when these things perform searches before answering they tend to halusinate less. Then it’s ultimately down to the quality of the material it found in it’s search. The more niche the topic or more “opinionated” the discourse around the topic the worse off it is. But more often then not I have to explicitly tell the system to search or “do research” before responding.
It makes sense that 3d printer calibration would be something the slop generator struggles with, because it’s really a lot of vibes and getting a feel for things under all those numbers.
shouldn’t stuff like that be governed by a thermostat though, also if you wanna get really granular wouldn’t like the ambient temperature affect things too etc
It does, but not enough for PETG and PLA to really make a difference aside from maybe having to increase printing bed temps a bit if it’s really cold outside. For PETG the biggest ambient variable is humidity, because that shit will soak up air moisture like a sponge. Realistically, filament solidifies quickly enough that in most cases the most important factors would be the cooling fan from the printer and the temperature of the extruder nozzle.
Petg is usually printed in an enclosyre to maintain temperature I would assume OP has one.
Nah, PLA and PETG don’t need an enclosure, that’s more for ABS/ASA and other engineering materials!
The AI in my skull has digested your post and concluded that ai is dangerous but only to men.
(Jk; death to ai)
I hate anything that requires searching YouTube for information.
YouTube has gotten increasingly shitty for finding stuff, too. Not only are searches useless unless you know specifically what the video you’re looking for is called, the algorithm encourages everyone to make 15+ (often 25+) minute videos.
These videos don’t even have 30 minutes of content. It’s 5 minutes showing how to do the thing, then 25 minutes of e-drama, self-promotion, time laspes of traveling where ever, interviews with friends/other YouTubers about various nonsense, and so on. I get why people are so insistent on using TikTok for finding information. Shorter videos for quicker tutorials that are easier to find.
Not only are searches useless unless you know specifically what the video you’re looking for is called
knowing the exact name is not a surefire way to find it, sometimes they just hide the result under a lot of semi-related videos
What I love most is trying to find the 5 minutes of useful info which has been dispersed in 25 minutes of someone using their angle grinder, power sander or other loud as fuck tools.
(Tbf according to the comments lots of people enjoyed this which just shows you how sick humanity is.)
Oh, you want pithy content? Try YouTube Shorts!
Here’s some irrelevant Shorts in your video search!
Here’s some irrelevant Shorts in your sidebar!
Here’s a ribbon of Shorts on your home page!Watch some Shorts!
In case it helps anyone to see fewer shorts, firefox has extensions to stop shorts from showing up and to make them play like normal videos if someone links me one. youtube-shorts-block and hide shorts for youtube.
