This morning I stopped by a local school where some of the kids had crowdfunded a 3D printer (a printrbot Play) to see if I could help them get it working. I seem to have become the town expert, which is a frightening thought.

The machine had never worked for them. One of the axes apparently jammed somehow either during shipping or initial setup (the kid who was mostly in charge of it described multiple episodes of that rattling noise that comes with a skipping stepper motor and his immediate response of pulling the power plug). And when I got to it, it wasn’t responding at all.

So we reinstalled drivers, swapped in a known-good USB cable, reinstalled Cura, tried Cura on my linux laptop. Nothing. The furthest we got was “Opening serial port …. Closing serial port.” And on the laptop, “lsusb” reported no change when the machine was plugged in. Eep. A blown board didn’t seem that likely, and yet.

So as a last resort we turned the Play on its side and I held the ground shield of a spare USB dongle against the firmware-update pins (we didn’t have a jumper handy) while the kid plugged in power and pressed the reset button. This time “lsusb” reported an Atmel DFU device, which means the printrboard is probably OK, it’s just that the stepper blowback or the constant unplugging and replugging borked its firmware. So tomorrow I drop off a jumper, and the kid finds the instructions for downloading and reflashing. All in a morning’s work.

Except that before we ran through all that diagnosis, these folks were pretty much convinced they’d flushed $400 (plus shipping and filament) down the toilet. When you make a machine that Just Works and can be operated by people with little to no expertise — which Cura also helps enable — it’s really great.

But when anything goes wrong, it’s like throwing a toddler into the deep end.  All the simplifications and pre-built configurations that make a combination like the Play and Cura suitable for schools mean that you’re not going to run into the usual teething problems of getting a printer going. Only the unusual ones, which may even be hard for a relative veteran to diagnose and fix. And that’s a recipe for trouble.

Not that I have any good solutions. Either newbies still have to learn a lot more, or mass-market printers have to become orders of magnitude more bullet- and fo0l-proof (which means more expensive and/or much slower to arrive). Or veteran volunteers need to be thicker on the ground.