Meanwhile, there is an
uproar on Thingiverse started by the guy who made a simplified version of the sells mendel, Prusa.
Is Makerbot not an option amongst the DIY crowed?
I say good riddance. It was always about loud marketing and culture hailing from the worst calvinistic culture in north america. It has never been about usability, advance tech, making it more accessible for the common man, betterment of society,
darwinian marxism or anything. Just$ and in its trail a brainwashed bunch of groupies that don't really create stuff and ironically is the consumer that their purchased product were to alleviate. Come on, look at the
makerbot tag that number (3925) is not upgrades for the product. Even though some claim it is needed but thats another story.
Remember that these printers, even those with "just" a 100x100x100mm print volume can replicate them self. Btw, that volume is really enough and you have to some experience to know how a material like abs will react when you print certain objects and so forth.
Also, it's quite hard to make a printer that one can train a monkey to print perfect stuff, especially with the FDM type of machines.
You always has to check the first layer and yadda yadda blah blah. If one want a semi-professional printer, well SLS, otherwise one has to take experience as a factor, beyond what one needs either way of course.
PLA is really easy to print, just have a fan blowing on it, blue tape for smaller objects that you dont want any corners lifted if not use ~60c heated glass. I very much doubt there is any real value in those "changes" on this second machine and I agree with prusa that there is so much bullshit around this whole area and in any case, mostly everything builds upon the reprap community. That's the "sad" truth.
I mean, you want something professional? Look at makergears M2.
You want something truly Free opensource and somewhat innovative? Look at tantillus.
You want something that prints crazy fast and materials that others "cant" print with? Well.. build it yourself of aluminium extrusions and use a watercooled hotend so that your teflon tubing serving the hotends filamentspath doesnt go anywhere.
Want you know... even crazier accuracy go SLS, want to print stuff that is solid metal? Fund and/or help research
MetalicaRap.
Regarding the files which is supported or not, use something like
FreeCAD to convert stuff into .stl and run the file through
slic3r, thats it basically. There are loads on info on this on youtube, the reprap wiki, search for richrap as well as he has written some nice tuts.